Masters of (Our) Education: Applied Anthropology in the Non-Applied Program

Abstract

The night pushes the sun down to the desert floor setting the horizon ablaze with washes or yellow, red, and orange. The smoke from our campfire stings our eyes while the flames make grotesque shadows of the cactus that circle our camp. Fifteen miles to the south we just barely make out the lights of the only tavern in the small town of Punkin Center in the Tonto National Forest, in central Arizona. Lee, a Navajo archaeologist and friend, passes me a bottle of Mad Dog in exchange for a cheap cigar left over from a friend's recent celebration of paternity. We sit in silence for several minutes before I finally ask Lee what he thought of a site we had "discovered" earlier in the day during a random transect of one of the United States Geographical Survey (USGS) sections of the Tonto National Forest quadrangle. The site, christened "Cerebral Pueblo" by one of the other archaeologists on our team who felt that the vein-like undulations of the vascular basalt used to construct the walls reminded him of the appearance of a human brain, was a small, fifty to seventy room community set atop a small hill, well away from nearby roads.