With the death of Lila Morris O'Neale on February 2, 1948, the University lost a distinguished student of prehistoric and primitive textile design and technology as well as a teacher both effectively clean-cut and stimulating. The department of Decorative Art lost a pilot who had guided its prospering fortunes for over a decade; and the Museum of Anthropology a constructive and vigorous Associate Curator.

Professor O'Neale was born November 2, 1886, at Buxton, North Dakota, of parents of North Irish ancestry, George Lester O'Neale [George is on this biography page and also on the civil war pages] and Carrie Higgins O'Neale, a teacher. The family moved to San Jose and here Lila took the State College diploma, followed by the A.B. in English at Stanford in 1910 and six years later by a supplementary B.S. from Columbia. For eight years she taught in Oakland public schools, at San Jose State, and at Stout Institute in Wisconsin. Then she spent seven years at Oregon State in Corvallis as Assistant and later Associate Professor of Household Art, as the decorative art aspects of Home Economics were then called. In 1926, aged forty, she gave up her Oregon position to come to Berkeley and begin her career over again, as a graduate student in Decorative Art. Her M.A. was earned with a thesis on Structural and Decorative Design of Ancient Peruvian Fabrics. The textiles themselves were in the Museum of Anthropology, and her analysis of them led to a long and fruitful coöperation. She became a straight student of Anthropology for three years, taking her Ph.D. in this field in 1930, at the unusual age of forty-four. Thereupon she returned to Decorative Art--or Household Art as it was then still called--successively as Lecturer, Associate Professor, Professor, and Chairman until her death. Her principle courses were in historic textiles, history of costume, textile design, research in textile analysis. In Anthropology she both taught occasional courses and served as Acting Curator of the Museum for various semesters, until she became permanent Associate Curator in 1936. During the war years she carried personally the responsibility for the Museum's "Specimen of the Week" exhibit in the University Library.

She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1931-1932, studying prehistoric textiles in Peru; Councilor of the American Anthropological Association from 1932 on; delegate of the University to the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences at London in 1934; and in 1936 she was associated with the Carnegie Institute of Washington's Division of Historical Sciences to make a textile survey among the living Mayan Indians of Guatemala. Her field work, in addition to the longer visits to Guatemala and Peru, included a face-to-face study of Yurok-Karok baskets with their north California Indian weavers.

Long before her death, Dr. O'Neale was acknowledged the foremost expert on prehistoric American textiles. In 1930 her Textile Periods in Ancient Peru set a new standard in its combination of complete technological accuracy with historic utilization of data on period and province. Herewith a foundation was laid for the documented stylistic history of one of the world's most advanced textile arts. O'Neale would describe no textile technique until she could reproduce it with her own hands. Part I of this series was done jointly with A. L. Kroeber; parts II and III, on Paracas and on Gauzes, in 1942 and 1948, were by her alone; a large monograph which might have become IV, on painted grave cloths from Central Peruvian sites, remains unfinished, though most of the illustrations are completed. In the same field and vein are her Chicago Museum Memoir of 1937, on Early Nazca textiles; the monograph on Chincha Plainweaves, posthumous in the University's Anthropological Records; her section of the forthcoming Columbia University publication by Willey and Corbett, analyzing the earliest discovered Peruvian fabrics, of primitive coastal Chavin times; and a series of articles announcing the discovery of hitherto unknown techniques, such as needle-knitting, single-element-warp-and-weft multicolor patchwork, and Mochica twills, in the American Anthropologist, Revista del Museo Nacional del Perú, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, and American Antiquity. As a result largely of this group of studies, the history of textile styles in aboriginal Peru for about two thousand years back is now known nearly as intensively as the history of ceramic styles there, and better than the sequence of developments in any other Peruvian art or cultural activity.

O'Neale's most monumental study was her Textiles of Highland Guatemala, issued by Carnegie Institution in 319 pages and with 130 plates in 1945, based on her systematic field studies among the Indian weavers nine years before. This she supplemented in the same series by the only study yet made on ancient fabrics of Chihuahua.

Her monograph on Yurok-Karok basket weavers is unique in analyzing a highly-channeled, specialized, but primitive art from the point of view of the attitudes, standards, and tastes of its craftsmen--a problem previously attempted by Boas and associates, but first successfully solved by O'Neale through her skillful eliciting of informants.

Analyses of the Central Asiatic silks and woolens in the Aurel Stein Central Asiatic collections are evidence that her interests were not confined by hemisphere any more than by period.

It is extraordinary that the voluminous, precise, and penetrating investigations which constitute O'Neal's monument of scholarship were all performed in the last two decades of her life. Their impact would have been yet greater had she been spared longer or had her talents found their channel earlier.

Searchingly exact in the content of all her work, O'Neale was felicitous and apt in expression, concise and pungent. Through all her writing there moved a quality of incisiveness, which enabled her to present bodies of intricate detail with organized clarity. No less marked were the qualities of a strong idiom of personality, a lack of pretension, and a drastic directness. In personal relations she showed the same traits. She was concentrated in the intensity of her work, definite and pointed in matters of business, skilled in administering affairs and in handling people, witty, gay, and charming in relaxation, lightning-like in riposte, commanding respect in all human relations.

Transcribed From 1948,University Of California: In-Memoriam by Mike Peterson.