Field Man is the
captivating memoir of renowned southwestern archaeologist Julian Dodge
Hayden, a man who held no professional degree or faculty position but
who camped and argued with a who’s who of the discipline,
including Emil Haury, Malcolm Rogers, Paul Ezell, and Norman Tindale.
This is the personal story of a blue-collar scholar who bucked the
conventional thinking on the antiquity of man in the New World, who
brought a formidable pragmatism and “hand sense” to the
identification of stone tools, and who is remembered as the leading
authority on the prehistory of the Sierra Pinacate in northwestern
Mexico.
But Field Man
is also an evocative recollection of a bygone time and place, a time
when archaeological trips to the Southwest were
“expeditions,” when a man might run a Civilian Conservation
Corps crew by day and study the artifacts of ancient peoples by night,
when one could honeymoon by a still-full Gila River, and when a Model T
pickup needed extra transmissions to tackle the back roads of Arizona.
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Barry Goldwater and even
Frank Lloyd Wright turn up in this wide-ranging narrative of a
“desert
rat” who was at once a throwback and—as he only
half-jokingly
suggests—ahead of his time.
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Field Man is the
product of years of interviews with Hayden conducted by his colleagues
and friends Bill Broyles and Diane Boyer. It is introduced by noted
southwestern anthropologist J. Jefferson Reid, and contains an epilogue
by Steve Hayden, one of Julian’s sons.
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Field Man
Life as a Desert Archaeologist
by Julian D. Hayden
University
of Arizona Press,
2011
Order
a copy
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