Hyland, Sabine P. 1964-

PERSONAL:

Born August 26, 1964, in Cumberland, MD; daughter of Joseph (a professor of agricultural engineering) and Sigrid (a homemaker) Campbell; married William Hyland (a professor of humanities), June 24, 1989; children: Margaret Agathe, Eleanor Agnes. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Cornell University, A.B., 1986; Yale University, M.Phil., 1991, Ph.D., 1994. Religion: Roman Catholic.

ADDRESSES:

Home—De Pere, WI. Office—Department of Anthropology, St. Norbert College, De Pere, WI 54115. E-mail—sabine.hyland@snc.edu.

CAREER:

Columbus State University, Columbus, GA, assistant professor of anthropology, 1997-99; St. Norbert College, De Pere, WI, associate professor of anthropology, 1999—.

MEMBER:

American Anthropological Association, American Society for Ethnohistory.

WRITINGS:

The Jesuit and the Incas: The Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera, S.J., University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2003.

The Quito Manuscript: An Inca History Preserved by Fernando de Montesinos, Yale University (New Haven, CT), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Sabine P. Hyland told CA: "When I was sixteen, our family spent a year in Peru, and I fell in love with the country. My writing is motivated by a desire to explore the history of the Andes, particularly of the indigenous peoples of the region.

"Richard Burger and Michael Coe, who served on my dissertation committee at Yale, deeply influenced my work. As part of the Yale tradition of Andean studies begun by Hiram Bingham, Richard teaches his students always to search for new insights to old problems, even those considered insoluble. Mike has been one of the major figures behind the decipherment of the Mayan hieroglyphics; he inspired me with hope that we may one day decode the Inca writing system of knotted strings known as quipus.

"My first book tells the story of a radical Jesuit priest and writer in sixteenth-century Peru. He is alleged to have written mysterious documents found recently in the private collection of a Neapolitan noblewoman—texts which state that the Incas had a secret writing system among other astonishing claims. My second book examines a strange indigenous history recorded by the seventeenth-century Spanish priest Fernando de Montesinos, which describes thousands of years of pre-Inca history. The history is analyzed in light of Montesinos's other writings, most of which are still unpublished. Montesinos was an expert on the search for El Dorado in the jungles of South America; in the course of writing this book I was repeatedly contacted by treasure hunters hoping that Montesinos's unedited texts contain clues to the location of the legendary city of gold.

"I am currently researching the history of the Chanka kings with archaeologist Brian S. Bauer. We are studying the prehistory and history of this ethnic group in the central Andes. In the course of this research, I've encountered a great deal of material about a sadistic yet highly learned priest living in the rural Andes in the 1600s—he is eventually poisoned by an Indian family who he had cheated. I hope to write a true-crime story about this case, bringing to light what life was like in an Andean village in the seventeenth century."