2/1/17 – Dr. Deni Seymour, Speaker
Following Father Kino’s Footsteps in the Sonoita Valley – Anthropologist Dr. Deni Seymour discussed the early Patagonia people (Sobaipuri-O’odham) circa 1690 – 1770 .
The Sonoita Valley has a rich past spanning the prehistoric era into the historic. The valley’s character has been shaped by human-environment interactions. This talk focuses on the early historic period from the time of Father Kino in the 1690s up through the late 1700s when the Europeans first encountered the Sobaipuri-O’odham and when this interaction had its greatest impact. The Sobaipuri-O’odham settlement of Sonoita played a key role in the area through time and were central in the area’s history.
Dr. Deni Seymour is an internationally recognized authority on protohistoric and historic Native American and Spanish colonial archaeology and ethnohistory. For 30 years she has studied the ancestral Apache, Sobaipuri-O’odham, and lesser-known mobile groups (Jano, Jocome, Manso, Suma, and Jumano) who were present at the same time. She has excavated two Spanish-period presidios (Santa Cruz de Terrenate and Tubac), numerous Kino-period mission sites, and several indigenous sites of the period. She works with indigenous groups in reconnecting with their heritage, tackles Coronado and Niza expedition archaeology, and is rewriting the history of the pre-Spanish and colonial period southern Southwest. She has published extensively on these groups and this period, with more than 80 publications in refereed journals, edited volumes, and popular venues, and has served as guest editor for journals. She has also authored six books.
She received her doctorate and MA degrees in Anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1990 and her BAs with honors in both Anthropology and Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1980. She has taught, was employed by a number of state and federal agencies, and has worked for a number of cultural resource management firms, including one she founded and directed. Now she is a full-time research archaeologist affiliated with two academic institutions and the nonprofit research group Jornada Research Institute and she serves on the boards of two non-profit organizations.