The first academic cultural studies of southwestern Alaskan Indigenous people were developed only in the late 1940s. This was due in part to a dearth of English-language documentation, as well as competition in the field of other subject areas. American anthropologist Margaret Lantis (1906–2006) published "The Social Culture of the Nunivak Eskimo" in 1946; it was the first complete description of any Alaskan indigenous group. She began "Alaskan Eskimo Ceremonialism" (1947) as a broad study of Alaskan Indigenous people. James W. VanStone (1925–2001), an American cultural anthropologist, and Wendell H. Oswalt were among the earliest scholars to undertake significant archaeological research in the Yup'ik region. VanStone demonstrates the ethnographic approach to cultural history in "Eskimos of the Nushagak River: An Ethnographic History" (1967). Wendell Oswalt published a comprehensive ethnographic history of the Yukon–Kuskokwim delta region, the longest and most detailed work on Yup'ik history to date in "Bashful No Longer: An Alaskan Eskimo ethnohistory, 1778–1988" (1988). Ann Fienup-Riordan (born 1948) began writing extensively about the Yukon-Kuskokwim Indigenous people in the 1980s; she melded Yup'ik voices with traditional anthropology and history in an unprecedented fashion.