Nancy Parezo – Arizona’s and New Mexico’s Hidden Scholars: Husband and Wife Archaeological Teams

This lecture is free and open to the public but you must pre-register at:

https://bit.ly/2022NovParezoREG 

In 1983 I began a research project to document and honor the over 1600 women who have worked in the American Southwest between 1870 and 1940 and published articles about what they learned. We knew much about the most famous of the over 3,500 men who likewise worked in the region, especially men like Franz Boas, John Wesley Powell, and Emil Haury,  whose contributions had been analyzed and celebrated in histories of anthropology. But what about women like Lucy Wilson, Natalie Curtis Burlin, Matilda Coxe Stevenson, or Marion Mindeleff?  Over the last thirty years a group of dedicated scholars have tried to rectify these omissions by uncovering who worked in the American Southwest and producing summaries of work, biographies, analyses of their intellectual contributions and data collection activities, exhibits, and popular articles. We have even had women declared state treasures. Tonight I will focus on recent work by Don and Kay Fowler and myself on early husband and wife archaeological teams who worked in Arizona and New Mexico and how their efforts have gone unrecognized but whose efforts helped pave the way for future generations to have successful careers. We focus on the activities of Frank and Theresa Russell who surveyed Arizona between 1900 and 1903.

Nancy J. Parezo is professor emerita, American Indian Studies and anthropology, University of Arizona where she taught museology, professional skills and grant writing, contemporary Indian issues, theory and Navajo culture and history. In addition to teaching at the institution for 40 years, she served as Curator of Ethnology at the Arizona State Museum. She also participated for over ten years in the National Science Foundation’s groundbreaking methodology course held at the  Smithsonian Institution–the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology–for advanced MA and PhD students. A prolific writer with over 280 books, articles and reviews on Native American art, Navajo culture, the history of anthropology and museums, and women in science, her most recent work focuses on Henry Voth, Aby Warburg and collecting Pueblo artifacts for a current exhibit at Hamburg, Germany’s Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt. She is currently preparing a manuscript, “The British Ambassador’s Vacation: James Bryce, Geronimo, and the American Press.”