Edmund S. Carpenter (1922-2011) was an archaeologist, visual anthropologist, media theorist, filmmaker, teacher, author, and curator. On faculty with the University of Toronto, he conducted fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic in the early 1950s. He subsequently founded an anthropology and film program at California State University, Northridge, and studied the impact of modern media on tribes in Papua, New Guinea. Carpenter later spent a decade organizing the research archive of Carl Schuster, in Basel, Switzerland, publishing the twelve-volume Social Symbolism in Ancient & Tribal Art (1986-88).