A.L. Kroeber
American cultural anthropologist (1876–1960), a founding figure of the discipline at UC Berkeley, best known for his 1917 American Anthropologist essay "The Superorganic." Matters to this vault as the earliest-documented node in its multiple-discovery genealogy: Ogburn and Thomas's 1922 compilation — the founding empirical study the whole Merton lineage builds on — names Kroeber directly as having "ably discussed" the theoretical significance of parallel invention five years before they wrote, citing "The Superorganic" by title. That citation is itself a documented case of transmission rather than independent convergence inside the very lineage the vault elsewhere treats as a chain of blind multiples.
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