Richard Andrée
(also Andre, or Andree), German geographer and ethnographer,
studied in the natural sciences, particularly geology, at the University of
Leipzig. From 1859 to 1863 he worked as a foundryman in Bohemia (now part of the
Czech Republic). His first paper, "Die versteinerungen der
Steinkohlenformation von Stradonitz in Böhmen", was published in the Neues Jahrbuch für Mineralogie, Geologie und Paläontologie in 1864. Later he settled in Leipzig, where in 1873 he became
co-founder of Velhagen & Klasing, a publishing house which produced
geographical and ethnological books and atlasses. He managed the business from
its foundation to 1890, and was the editor of several of its publications. His
own books included the following: Handels-
und Verhehrsgeographie (Stuttgart, 1871); Etnographische parallelen und vergleiche (Stuttgart, 1878); Allgemeine handatlas... (Leipzig, 1881, with numerous later editions to 1930); Die Metalle bei der Naturvölkern, mit Berücksichtigung
prähistorischer Verhältnisse (Leipzig, 1884); and some popular travel books.
In 1882 Andrée published a paper on the archaeology of Africa, "Die Steinzeit Afrikas", in the journal Globus (Vol. 41, pp. 185-190). In this paper he provided an excellent review of contemporary knowledge of the prehistory of Africa as a whole, based on previously published work. One entire section was devoted to South Africa. He appears to have visited Natal at some earlier time, as he mentions finding stone age sites and bored stones from the coast to the Drakensberg and in Victoria County (the coastal region north of Durban).
In 1890 Andrée moved to Heidelberg, Germany. There he edited the journal Globus, which his firm published from 1891 to 1903. The next year (1904) he moved to München, where he spent his remaining years.
