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Mary left active fieldwork in 1983 and retired to a five-acre compound near Nairobi with her books and her Dalmatians. "Actually, given a chance, I'd rather be in a tent than in a house," she told a reporter this summer. In August the unflappable, cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking "grande dame of archaeology," as Virginia Morell called Leakey in her recent book Ancestral Passions, got one last glimpse of her beloved footprints just before they were buried under layers of protective fabric, earth and boulders to preserve them for future generations.
--By Frederic Golden. With reporting by Joseph Ngala/Nairobi