By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

An anthropology professor with Farmington ties was gunned down while dining with friends at a restaurant in the Amazon rain forest Saturday.

James Petersen, 51, who founded the Archaeology Research Center at the University of Maine at Farmington, was shot once in the stomach as a trio of robbers was about to leave the eatery in the small town of Iranduba, Brazil. He died a short time later.

“They weren’t resisting,” Ellen Cowie said Sunday evening. She’s UMF’s director of archeology, a post she gained after working for Petersen earlier.

Professor Cowie said she had spoken earlier Sunday with another colleague who was dining with Petersen and others at the time of the robbery.

“They had emptied their pockets, given them everything they had, even their cell phones,” Cowie said she was told.

Brazilian radio later reported that three suspects in the shooting and robbery were taken into custody.

Cowie said it was typical of Petersen to be in a place such as the Amazon. He had lived for a couple of weeks with indigenous tribespeople in small Amazonian Indian village in the past, she noted.

Petersen, who joined the University of Vermont in 1997 after spending 14 years at UMF, was an expert in prehistory ceramics, Cowie said.

He was happiest while working at a research site.

“He always made time for his obsession, his passion,” she said. Vacations were typically spent in places such as the Amazon.

Cowie said Petersen was wise planning about his trips, researching locales and looking into safety issues. But she said he had confided in another friend once about the possibility of being caught up in random violence in a place such as the Amazon.

The town where he was shot, Iranduba, is in the rain forest near the Amazon River and about 1,650 miles northwest of Brazilian city of Sao Paulo.

John Bramley, the University of Vermont’s provost, said Petersen was taking part on a research field trip to Manaus, Brazil. He called the shooting “a tragic incident.”

Petersen was an associate professor at the university and chairman of its Department of Anthropology.

He had taught at UMF in Farmington earlier, from 1983 to 1997, and also served as a graduate school professor at the University of Maine in Orono.

He had graduated from the University of Vermont in in 1979, then went into doctoral studies at the University of Pittsburgh and developed an interest in the tropics.

Cowie said that interest then expanded to include New England and the Caribbean as well as places such as the Amazon.

Petersen and Cowie, along with Bruce Bourque, wrote a paper about findings at a research site in Norridgewock where native Indians traveling along the Kennebec River began trading with white settlers.

“It’s so very sad,” Cowie said of Petersen’s death.

Besides being “a talented, dynamic teacher,” she said, “Jim was a wonderful, friendly man. He would always make time to talk with you, whether you were the garbage man or the president of the university.”

Petersen leaves a wife, Jennifer Brenner, in Salisbury, Vt.

(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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