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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.
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.
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]
Mission San Xavier del Bac is a historic Spanish Catholic mission located about 10 miles (16 km) south of downtown Tucson, Arizona, on the Tohono O'odham Nation San Xavier Indian Reservation. The mission was founded in 1692 by Padre Eusebio Kino in the center of a centuries-old settlement of the Sobaipuri O'odham, a branch of the Akimel or River O'odham located along the banks of the Santa Cruz River. The mission was named for Francis Xavier, a Christian missionary and co-founder of the Society of Jesus in Europe. The original church was built to the north of the present Franciscan church. This northern church or churches served the mission until it was razed during an Apache raid in 1770.
The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is a 98-acre zoo, aquarium, botanical garden, natural history museum, publisher, and art gallery founded in 1952. Located just west of Tucson, Arizona, it features two miles (3.2 km) of walking paths traversing 21 acres of desert landscape. It is one of the most visited attractions in Southern Arizona.
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. The state is divided into 72 municipalities; the capital city of which being Hermosillo, located in the center of the state. Other large cities include Ciudad Obregón, Nogales, San Luis Río Colorado, and Navojoa.
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 includes Arizona and New Mexico, along with 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. Before 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.
The Yaqui, Hiaki, or Yoeme, are an Indigenous people of Mexico and Native American tribe, who speak the Yaqui language, a Uto-Aztecan language.
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.
The Sonoran Desert is a hot desert and ecoregion in North America that covers the northwestern Mexican states of Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur, as well as part of the Southwestern United States. 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).
Eusebio Francisco Kino, SJ, often referred to as Father Kino, was an Italian Jesuit, missionary, geographer, explorer, cartographer, mathematician and astronomer born in the Bishopric of Trent, Holy Roman Empire.
The Oʼodham,Upper Oʼodham, or Upper Pima are a group of Native American peoples including the Akimel Oʼodham, the Tohono Oʼodham, and the Hia C-eḍ Oʼodham. Their historical territory is in the Sonoran Desert in southern and central Arizona and northern Sonora, and they are united by a common heritage language, the Oʼodham language. Today, many Oʼodham live in the Tohono Oʼodham Nation, the San Xavier Indian Reservation, the Gila River Indian Community, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, the Ak-Chin Indian Community or off-reservation in one of the cities or towns of Arizona.
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.
Aridoamerica is a cultural and ecological region spanning Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States, defined by the presence of the drought-resistant, culturally significant staple food, the tepary bean. Its dry, arid climate and geography stand in contrast to the verdant Mesoamerica of present-day central Mexico into Central America to the south and east, and the higher, milder "island" of Oasisamerica to the north. Aridoamerica overlaps with both.
Bavispe is a small town and a municipality in the northeast part of the Mexican state of Sonora.
The Awatovi Ruins, spelled Awat'ovi in recent literature, are an archaeological site on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona, United States. The site contains the ruins of a pueblo estimated to be 500 years old, as well as those of a 17th-century Spanish mission. It was visited in the 16th century by members of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado's exploratory expedition. In the 1930s, Hopi artist Fred Kabotie was commissioned by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University to reproduce the prehistoric murals found during the excavation of the Awatovi Ruins. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964.
El Camino del Diablo, also known as El Camino del Muerto, Sonora Trail, Sonoyta-Yuma Trail, Yuma-Caborca Trail, and Old Yuma Trail, is a historic 250-mile (400 km) road that passes through some of the most remote and inhospitable terrain of the Sonoran Desert in Pima County and Yuma County, Arizona. The name refers to the harsh, unforgiving conditions on the trail.
The Pima Bajo people are indigenous people of Mexico who reside in a mountainous region along the line between the states of Chihuahua and Sonora in northern Mexico. They are related to the Pima and Tohono O’odham of Arizona and northern Sonora, speaking a similar but distinct language.
The agricultural practices of the Native Americans inhabiting the American Southwest, which includes the states of Arizona and New Mexico plus portions of surrounding states and neighboring Mexico, are influenced by the low levels of precipitation in the region. Irrigation and several techniques of water harvesting and conservation were essential for successful agriculture. To take advantage of limited water, the southwestern Native Americans utilized irrigation canals, terraces (trincheras), rock mulches, and floodplain cultivation. Success in agriculture enabled some Native Americans to live in communities that numbered in the thousands as compared to their former lives as hunter-gatherers in which their bands numbered only a few dozen.
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.
The Indigenous peoples of the North American Southwest are those in the current states of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada in the western United States, and the states of Sonora and Chihuahua in northern Mexico. An often quoted statement from Erik Reed (1666) defined the Greater Southwest culture area as extending north to south from Durango, Mexico to Durango, Colorado and east to west from Las Vegas, Nevada to Las Vegas, New Mexico. Other names sometimes used to define the region include "American Southwest", "Northern Mexico", "Chichimeca", and "Oasisamerica/Aridoamerica". This region has long been occupied by hunter-gatherers and agricultural people.
Nicolás de Freitas was a Franciscan missionary to New Spain.
Gregorio Álvarez Tuñón y Quirós (1683–1728) was a presidio captain and alcalde mayor in New Spain. Historian John L. Kessell describes Tuñón y Quirós as a "provincial entrepreneur", while David Yetman says he was "widely known as the most corrupt official in the region".