Editing Carleton S. Coon (section)

==Early life and education==
Carleton Stevens Coon was born in [[Wakefield, Massachusetts]] on June 23, 1904.<ref name="Howells1989">{{cite book|last=Howells|first=H. W.|url=http://books.nap.edu/html/biomems/ccoon.pdf|title=Carleton Stevens Coon 1904–1981: A Biographical Memoir|publisher=National Academy of Sciences|year=1989|location=Washington, D.C.}}</ref> His parents were John Lewis Coon, a [[cotton factor]], and Bessie Carleton.<ref name=":7" /> His family had [[Cornish Americans|Cornish American]] roots and two of his ancestors fought in the [[American Civil War]]. As a child, he listened to his grandfather's stories of the war and of traveling in the [[Middle East]], and accompanied his father on business trips to Egypt, inspiring an early interest in [[Egyptology]]. He initially attended [[Wakefield Memorial High School|Wakefield High School]], but was expelled after breaking a water pipe and flooding the school's basement, after which he went to [[Phillips Academy]]. Coon was a precocious student, learning to read [[Egyptian hieroglyphs]] at an early age and excelling at [[Ancient Greek]].<ref name="Howells1989" />

Wakefield was an affluent and almost exclusively [[White people|white]] town.{{Sfn|Goodman|Hammonds|2000|p=29}} Coon's biographer, [[William W. Howells]], noted that his "only apparent awareness of ethnicity" was in childhood fights with his [[Irish Americans|Irish American]] neighbours.<ref name="Howells1989" /> Coon himself claimed that "both anti-Semitism and racism were unknown to me before I left home at the age of fifteen, and zero to fifteen are formative years."{{Sfn|Coon|1981|p=6}}{{Sfn|Goodman|Hammonds|2000|p=29}}

Intending to study Egyptology, Coon enrolled at [[Harvard University]] and was able to obtain a place on a graduate course with [[George Andrew Reisner]] based on his knowledge of hieroglyphic. He also studied [[Arabic]] and English composition under [[Charles Townsend Copeland]]. However he changed his focus to  [[anthropology]] after taking a course with [[Earnest Hooton]], inspired by his lectures on the [[Berbers]] of the Moroccan [[Rif]]. Coon obtained his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1925 and immediately embarked on graduate studies in anthropology.<ref name="Howells1989" /> He conducted his dissertation fieldwork in the Rif in 1925, which was politically unsettled after a rebellion of the local populace against the Spanish, and was awarded his PhD in 1928.<ref>The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th Edition.  2005.</ref>

Coon was motivated to study the Rif by the puzzle of the "light-skinned" Riffians' presence in Africa. Throughout much of his fieldwork, he relied on his local informant Mohammed Limnibhy, and even arranged for Limnibhy to live with him in Cambridge from 1928 to 1929.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Harvard in the Rif, 1926–1928 {{!}} Peabody Museum|url=https://www.peabody.harvard.edu/node/2251|access-date=2020-10-29|website=www.peabody.harvard.edu}}</ref>