Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889-1975) was an American geographer and anthropologist with a strong interest in historical fieldwork and other forms of geographical research.

On December 24, 1889, Carl Sauer was born in Warrenton, Missouri. His father taught at the Central Wesleyan College, a German Methodist enterprise, since closed. His parents sent young Sauer to a school at Calur, Württemberg, and he gained his first degree from Central Western College before his nineteenth birthday. In 1915 he earned a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Chicago, and from 1915 to 1922 he served on the staff at the University of Michigan. In 1923 he went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained to his retirement in 1957.

Sauer's first paper was an "outline for fieldwork" in geography, published in 1915 and developed further in 1919 and 1921 in the Geographical Review and the Annals of American Geographers. Physical geographers in America already had a...