British social anthropologist and ethnologist Julian Pitt-Rivers from the London School of Economics gave the Matthew Vassar lecture on "Genesis: Myth or History."  Pitt-Rivers’s seminal The People of the Sierra (1954) applied the techniques of “tribal” study to Andalusian villagers, tracing habits of class, ownership and subservience to an ancient Mediterranean code of honor and of shame.  Writing in The Sunday Independent at the time of Pitt-Rivers’s death in 2001, anthropologist Jonathan Benthall said that in his later work, The Fate of Schechem, or The Politics of Sex (1977), Pitt-Rivers “posited a long continuity in the region dating back to Genesis and the Odyssey and based on this code.”