Thomas Sheridan (anthropologist)

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Thomas E. Sheridan (born 5 September 1951) is an anthropologist of Sonora, Mexico and the history and culture of Arizona and the Southwest. He was selected a Distinguished Outreach Professor at the University of Arizona, and has been affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the Southwest Center since 2003.

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Background

Sheridan's family moved to Phoenix, Arizona at the age of 3. He left the South West after high school, attended Reed College (briefly) before returning and graduated from the first incarnation of Prescott College in Arizona in the 1970s. [1] He became interested in Northern Mexico and travelled there frequently for study, spending months in Bahía Kino in 1971. He completed a PhD on the Yaqui in 1983. He directed the Mexican Heritage Project at the Arizona Historical Society from 1982-1984, and was Curator of Ethnohistory and then Director of the Office of Ethnohistorical Research at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson from 1984 to 2003.

He lives on a ranch in the Alta Valley, west of Tucson, AZ.

Scholarship

Sheridan's initial scholarship was on the history and culture of the Yaqui in Sonora, north west Mexico, and native ranchers around the municipio of Cucurpe in Sonora. He combined studies of livelihoods, with the historical unfolding of Native and colonial interactions over the centuries. In the 1990s he wrote a widely read account of the history of Arizona, Arizona: a history, revised in 2012. [2]

In 2015 he published Moquis and Kastiilam with a number of Hopi and other scholars, telling the story of the encounters in northern Arizona between the Hopis and Spaniards from 1540 until the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. For the first time, Spanish archival material is supplemented with oral traditions recounted by Hopi elders. The book details Spanish abuses during efforts to missionize the Hopi, who thereafter were able to resist colonization.

Since the late 1990s Sheridan has also been involved in numerous coalitions and working groups to preserve the desert of southern Arizona, and promoting working ranches as a conservation mechanism, particularly to control urban sprawl. He describes this as merging the interests of scientists, environmentalists and land users, and as an effort to avoid "chewing up the West" through fragmentation and real estate development. [3] The approach is detailed in Charnley et.al., 2014. He is an advocate of "working landscapes" and served on the committee that developed the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. [4]

Publications

Awards

Related Research Articles

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Sonora State of Mexico

Sonora, officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Sonora, is one of the 31 states which, along with Mexico City, comprise the Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 72 municipalities; the capital city is Hermosillo. Sonora is bordered by the states of Chihuahua to the east, Baja California to the northwest and Sinaloa to the south. To the north, it shares the U.S.–Mexico border primarily with the state of Arizona with a small length with New Mexico, and on the west has a significant share of the coastline of the Gulf of California.

Southwestern United States Geographical region of the United States

The Southwestern United States, also known as the American Southwest or simply the Southwest, is a geographic and cultural region of the United States that generally includes Arizona, New Mexico, and adjacent portions of California, Colorado, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah. The largest cities by metropolitan area are Phoenix, Las Vegas, El Paso, Albuquerque, and Tucson. Prior to 1848, in the historical region of Santa Fe de Nuevo México as well as parts of Alta California and Coahuila y Tejas, settlement was almost non-existent outside of Nuevo México's Pueblos and Spanish or Mexican municipalities. Much of the area had been a part of New Spain and Mexico until the United States acquired the area through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the smaller Gadsden Purchase in 1854.

Yaqui Indigenous group in Mexico and the United States

The Yaqui, Hiaki, or Yoeme, are an Uto-Aztecan-speaking Indigenous people of Mexico in the valley of the Río Yaqui in the Mexican state of Sonora and the Southwestern United States. They also have communities in Chihuahua and Durango.

Pimería Alta Viceroyalty of New Spain area now called Pimeria Alta

The Pimería Alta was an area of the 18th century Sonora y Sinaloa Province in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, that encompassed parts of what are today southern Arizona in the United States and northern Sonora in Mexico.

Sonoran Desert Desert in northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States

The Sonoran Desert is a North American desert and ecoregion that covers large parts of the southwestern United States, as well as the northwestern Mexican states of Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur. It is the hottest desert in both Mexico and the United States. It has an area of 260,000 square kilometers (100,000 sq mi).

Uto-Aztecan languages Language family

Uto-Aztecan, Uto-Aztekan or (rarely) Uto-Nahuatl is a family of indigenous languages of the Americas, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The name of the language family was created to show that it includes both the Ute language of Utah and the Nahuan languages of Mexico.

Eusebio Kino Italian Jesuit missionary (1645–1711)

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Gary Paul Nabhan is an agricultural ecologist, Ethnobotanist, Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, and author whose work has focused primarily on the plants and cultures of the desert Southwest. He is considered a pioneer in the local food movement and the heirloom seed saving movement.

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The Mayo or Yoreme are an indigenous group in Mexico, living in the northern states of southern Sonora, northern Sinaloa and small settlements in Durango.

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Oasisamerica Pre-Columbian cultural region of North America

Oasisamerica is a term that was coined by Paul Kirchhoff and published in a 1954 article, and is used by some scholars, primarily Mexican anthropologists, for the broad cultural area defining pre-Columbian southwestern North America. It extends from modern-day Utah down to southern Chihuahua, and from the coast on the Gulf of California eastward to the Río Bravo river valley. Its name comes from its position in relationship with the similar regions of Mesoamerica and mostly nomadic Aridoamerica. The term Greater Southwest is often used to describe this region by American anthropologists.

The Yaqui longfin dace is a small fish of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, and considered a form of the longfin dace. It is often referred to as Agosia chrysogaster sp 1.

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La Pintada is an archaeological site located some 60 kilometers south of the city of Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, within the “La Pintada” canyon, part of the “Sierra Libre”, a small mountain massif of the coastal plains that extends throughout the Sonoran Desert.

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David Albert Yetman is an American academic expert on Sonora, Mexico and an Emmy award-winning media presenter on the world's deserts. He is a research social scientist at the University of Arizona.

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References

  1. "Angle on: Tom Sheridan". 5 August 2013.
  2. Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine : 2016 University Distinguished Outreach Faculty – Thomas Sheridan. YouTube .
  3. Sonoran Desert Voices: Thomas Sheridan, research anthropologist, University of Arizona. YouTube . Archived from the original on 2021-12-08.
  4. https://www.fws.gov/endangered/bulletin/2002/03-06/12-15.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]