UA News

Henry "Hank" Dobyns has left his papers to the UA Libraries and a new endowment has been established in his memory.

Henry "Hank" Dobyns, an applied anthropologist and ethnohistorian, researched and published extensively on American Indians and Hispanic peoples in Latin and North America.

And endowment has been named in honor of Dobyns, who was a University of Arizona anthropologist and alumnus, to mark the bequest of his research materials to Special Collections. He passed on June 21, 2009.

The University of Arizona Libraries announced the creation of the Henry F. Dobyns Applied Anthropology Endowment Fund.

The fund was established by Rich Stoffle, a UA professor of applied cultural anthropology, and UA Dean of Libraries Carla Stoffle with an initial gift of $10,000. The endowment will support the purchase, processing, digitization and preservation of the Dobyns collection as well as future applied cultural anthropology collections.

Dobyns, a native Tucsonan, is most well-known for his watershed demographic research on the size of North American populations before Columbus' arrival in 1492. He also spent nearly three decades researching water rights for the Gila River Indian Community.

His complete donated collection is estimated to include about 10,000 books and 400 boxes of materials, such as letters, research notes and files, original manuscripts and photographs related to his life's work.

Throughout his career, Dobyns relied on the UA's extensive collection of Southwestern materials. Lawana Trout, trustee for his estate, said the UA was a logical destination for the Dobyns collection. 

"It seems to me the absolute best choice and natural choice for the collection to go to UA because he knew it would be available to young students and mature scholars alike," Trout said. 

The bulk of the collection reflects Dobyns' interests in the American Southwest, including his work on water rights for the Gila River Indian Community and various other American Indian issues.

Dobyns' research training and academic career began at the UA under the tutelage of Edward Spicer, a professor in the UA School of Anthropology.

The addition of the Dobyns collection strengthens the University Libraries' well-known holdings of Southwest and American Indian collections.

"The UA has a major collection of Southwestern materials and his materials will be a remarkable addition to what you already have," Trout said. 

Dobyns earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from the UA in 1949, then continued his studies toward a graduate degree, focusing on on researching prehistoric American Indian issues.

His master's thesis was a massive 702-page analysis of Pai ceramics titled "Prehistoric Indian Occupation Within the Eastern Area of the Yuman Complex: A Study in Applied Archaeology." Dobyns completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1960.

Dobyns taught and conducted research at various academic institutions in his career including the Arizona State Museum at the UA, Cornell University, the University of Florida at Gainesville, the University of Kentucky, Prescott College, the University of Wisconsin Parkside and the University of Oklahoma.

He also was a National Endowment for the Humanities research fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and a lifetime member of the Arizona Historical Society.

Dobyns also worked on several National Park Service projects, including the Old Spanish Trail study, an ethnohistoric and ethnographic assessment that dated from 1829 to 1849.

He was involved in the Anza Trail Project, a cultural analysis of members of the 18th century Anza Expedition in Sinoloa and Sonora prior to their 1,200 mile journey to California. The group would eventually settle San Francisco Bay in 1776.

Dobyns' many books include "Papagos in the Cotton Fields," "The Ghost Dance: Among the Pai Indians of Northwestern Arizona," "The Papago People," "Spanish Colonial Tucson," "Indians of the Southwest: A Critical Bibliography" and "From Fire to Flood: Historic Human Destruction of Sonoran Desert Riverine Oases." 

Dobyns' teaching and research was wide-ranging, and he remained connected to the UA throughout his career. In recent years, he worked as a senior researcher at the UA's Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology.