Oral History Program Brooke Arkush Interviewed by Michael Thompson 23 June 2021 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Brooke Arkush Interviewed by Michael Thompson 23 June 2021 Copyright © 2021 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State University Oral History Project began conducting interviews with key Weber State University faculty, administrators, staff and students, in Fall 2007. The program focuses primarily on obtaining a historical record of the school along with important developments since the school gained university status in 1990. The interviews explore the process of achieving university status, as well as major issues including accreditation, diversity, faculty governance, changes in leadership, curricular developments, etc. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Arkush, Brooke, an oral history by Michael Thompson, 23 June 2021, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Dr. Brooke Arkush excavating at the Rock Creek site on the Curlew National Grassland, in Southern Idaho. June 2009 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dr. Brooke Arkush, conducted on June 23, 2021, in the Stewart Library, by Michael Thompson. In this interview, Brooke discusses his life, his experiences, and his time serving as a professor of Anthropology at Weber State University. MT: Today is June 23, 2021. This is Michael Thompson. I'm interviewing Dr. Brooke Arkush of the Anthropology Department about his time here at Weber. We are conducting the interview here on campus, in the Stewart Library. To start off, when and where were you born? BA: I was born in 1961 in San Francisco, California, and I'm a third-generation San Franciscan. MT: Do you want to talk a little bit about your early life? Some historical background? BA: Sure. The neighborhood in which I grew up, it's called Glen Park in the south part of San Francisco. And the neat thing about Glen Park is it's right next to a large city recreation area and an undeveloped canyon. It's about one-quarter of a mile long. And so it was a good place for kids to grow up. You've got organized sports and then plenty of free-roaming space. And there were a lot of boys in my neighborhood. And so, yeah, we were able to burn off a lot of energy, especially in back of the park/canyon. It was a good place to grow up. MT: That sounds like a lot of fun. BA: Especially in a fairly crowded urban area like San Francisco. So it's kind of a treasure, really...that canyon. MT: Were you encouraged as a child to pursue a college education? 2 BA: Oh, absolutely my father was a pharmacist and my mom had been in nursing school at the University of California, San Francisco. That's where they met, and she didn’t complete her nursing degree in order to raise a family. And then my father owned a pharmacy in the West Portal neighborhood, more towards the beach from Glen Park. MT: Okay. BA: Oh and let me just follow up on that. A lot of our family and friends were very pro higher education. For example, my godfather was a dentist, and he first worked at the University of Michigan and then was able to land a tenure track position at UCLA where he taught in the dental school for many years and also helped to run the low-cost clinic in south-central Los Angeles. UCLA had a presence there and offered free dental services to poor folks. And as a graduate student at UC Riverside, I'd go into Santa Monica to visit him. And I recall him filling various cavities at the free clinic on a Sunday, I think, when it was not open. So that was kind of funny. MT: What started your interest in anthropology and education? BA: I think I probably developed an early interest in California history and prehistory as a kid around 12 or 13 years old. We had family friends who were from the Fresno area in the San Joaquin Valley, and his parents collected artifacts for a hobby. They had framed chipped stone tools in their front room and when I would visit them, I would oftentimes just kind of get lost in thinking about the people who made those tools, how they were used, the kinds of lives they led in the San Joaquin Valley. MT: Where did you go for your bachelor's degree? 3 BA: I went to Humboldt State University in far northwestern California for my undergraduate education; at first, I declared a forestry major. And I didn't realize, number one, how a few jobs at the time there were in forestry. Because of that, the program at Humboldt State did not want to saturate the market with forestry graduates, so they made most of their required courses very challenging. After a few quarters of that, I determined it was not for me and I went to talk to an academic advisor. After running through a list of my interests and professional aspirations, she suggested I focus on anthropology/archeology or geology. And so I took a few geology courses, took a few anthropology courses, gravitated towards the archeology/anthropology side of things and stuck with it. MT: You mentioned you went to UC Riverside for graduate school. BA: I did. Back then it was a pretty small program; one of the smallest UC campuses in the mid to late 1980's. There may have been 10 full-time faculty within the anthropology program at UCR at that time, and three of them were archeologists. And so I got to cut my teeth on the archaeological record of the local area, inland southern California archeology and the western Mojave Desert as well. Then little by little, I began to work in eastern California. In 1985, I was hired as a summer archeology technician on the Inyo National Forest and through that work, I began to become familiar with the archeological record of the area and stumbled upon my dissertation project. It really worked out quite well. Early in my career, I specialized in western Great Basin prehistory, but also the contact period and early Anglo settlement period. Also how the local 4 Mono Lake Paiute people adapted to a lot of their prime seasonal camp areas being taken over by white settlers by engaging in seasonal wage labor on ranches and farms and things like that. And then for the rest of the year, from August September, when the pine nut harvest would begin, local Paiute families would move out into the eastern part of the Mono Lake basin where there were no settlements and live a partial traditional way of life, of course, aided by horses and wagons and things like that. They could live independently for half the year out there. The main site I used for my dissertation database had both late prehistoric and early historic period occupations by local Paiute people, from approximately 1300 to 1800 and then from 1870 to 1920 in the form of a series of winter and fall camps. It was a really fun, interesting, and worthwhile project. MT: It sounds very interesting. I've been to that area so I can imagine what it would be like. BA: I really miss Mono Lake and the surrounding pinyon-juniper woodland. MT: It's gorgeous up there. BA: I haven't time to go back and visit the old stomping grounds, as it were. MT: What other degrees and certifications do you have? BA: I hold three degrees in anthropology; a B.A. from Humboldt State and then an M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology, with a focus on archeology, from UC Riverside. MT: What were some of the challenges you faced while obtaining your degrees? BA: As an undergraduate, I guess my main challenge was to find a major that I was really interested in and that had the potential for a stable career and not just hopping from job to job. Then as as a graduate student, my first year at 5 Riverside was challenging because I wasn't ready for the increased rigor of a graduate program and the academic expectations that go hand-in-hand with that. At a few points, I was pretty discouraged. My mom actually talked me into staying with the program and she said, "Well, what will you do if you drop out of graduate school?" I said, "I'll just come back home and maybe take a firefighter's exam to become a San Francisco firefighter." And she said, "Do you realize how dangerous urban firefighting can be?" And I thought about that for a few seconds. I said, "You've got a good point there. I guess I'll stick it out here and try harder." MT: After you had your degree, what were your career options? BA: It was either to teach at the community college/university level or to go to work for a state or federal agency like the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service or any agency that administers public land. I also could have gone into private environmental consulting. MT: Did you start teaching right away after grad school? BA: I did, and I was fortunate to have been able to land a few part-time jobs teaching at local colleges during graduate school. Riverside Community College: I taught about four courses there. And then the University of Redlands, north of Riverside, I taught two courses there as an adjunct faculty member. So I had a little bit of teaching under my belt and I was definitely a rookie. I did not feel comfortable in the classroom, mostly because I didn't know the material yet. MT: What mentors or resources did you have available to you in your program or career? 6 BA: At UC Riverside, there were several graduate students who had come back to graduate school after getting a master's degree elsewhere and having gone to work for the federal government. I had only planned on getting a master's degree and then getting a job with maybe the Forest Service or the National Park Service. One of my friends who was about 10 years older than I was, Mark Sutton, had worked for the California Bureau of Land Management, and he's very research-oriented. And in some sense, he was making his supervisors look bad because he would issue research permits to academic archeologists who wanted to do archeology on lands in that greater Barstow, California, area, the western Mojave Desert. So it led to friction with management and he decided to bag the federal career and come back to graduate school and complete his PhD. He went on for a long career at Cal State Bakersfield. Mark counseled me and said, "Look, Brooke, you might want to finish your PhD and just don't jump off the graduate school ship once you get your master's because you want to keep your options open, especially for possibly teaching." And he was right. I can follow up with my early years at Weber State in terms of mentors. Navigating the promotion and tenure process can be challenging. And you really want to put a lot of effort into it and, of course, get high evaluations from both your peers for teaching, but also, achieve pretty high student evaluations. The long-time department chair and matriarch of the anthropology program, was Rosemary Conover. She was here for about 40 years, I believe, and had a lot of practical experience. And so I learned a great deal from her, but I also learned a lot from older faculty members within the College of Social Behavioral Sciences. Richard Sadler, the former dean, was 7 always pretty upfront and straightforward with me about what I should focus on in order to be successfully promoted and eventually achieve tenure. Also, I recall Gordon Harrington, a longtime professor of history, providing some advice here and there, and we had a number of fun conversations with L.G.. Bingham. L.G. was a longtime criminal justice faculty member, and he would offer little bits of advice here and there as he saw the world. And I learned a lot from those folks I'm grateful for my interactions with them. MT: What resistance or battles did you face as you progressed in your career? BA: There were no major conflicts with individuals or institutions that really come to mind. A major challenge during my time here at Weber State was to locate data-rich archeological sites on public lands that I could use for long-term field school projects. And so it's really critical in my mind to find important sites that will provide you with data that can be published that will improve our overall understanding of prehistory. But also sites that will provide students with really great learning opportunities, keep them engaged. You don't want to work on a site for one month that really was lightly occupied by prehistoric folks. So there's not much in the way of processed animal remains and not a whole lot of artifacts there, and features like hearths and storage pits. It's tough to find a really productive sites, ones where you could spend three or four seasons working at. I was lucky in the respect that I was able to find several of those with the help of the Forest Service archeologists who knew the local record, for example, up in southeast and south-central Idaho. Through the Weber State University Archaeological Field School, I've completed a number of cooperative agreements with the Caribou-Targhee National Forest and the Sawtooth National Forest. And then in northeastern Nevada, our field school 8 was able to engage with the Elko field office of the Nevada BLM for three or four field seasons. MT: You mentioned that you taught at some community colleges during grad school, and then what positions did you have between grad school and coming to Weber? BA: I think my first semi-professional position within archeology was at Riverside when I finished my Ph.D. in 1989. For one year, I was hired within the anthropology department to be the acting principal investigator of what was called and is still called the archeological research unit, the ARU. We did various small-scale contracts within the inland Southern California area, especially Riverside County, as well as parts of San Bernardino County. And then after that, of course, I was hired here in 1990 as a tenure-track assistant professor within the anthropology/sociology department. Hand-in-hand with that came directorship of the archeological technician program. Back then, we didn't offer the bachelor's degree in anthropology; that option did not exist until 2000. During my first 10 years here, most students went through the anthropology program using it either as a minor or as a leg within the Bachelor of Integrated Studies program, the BIS program. So it wasn't until about 10 or 11 years after I arrived that we went through the vetting process statewide and were given permission by USHE [Utah System of Higher Education] to confer BS and BA degrees in anthropology. MT: What drew you to Weber State? BA: Well, first of all, I was qualified for the position and Weber State was one of only three academic jobs I applied for. And if I wasn't qualified, I was not going to stick my neck out there and go through the process. One day, I walked into 9 the department office at Riverside and Philip Wilke, one of the advisors on my dissertation committee, said, "Hey, Brooke, Weber State College in Ogden, Utah, is hiring a tenure track archaeologist, and they're looking for someone with experience in either the American Southwest or the Great Basin." And I was basically a Great Basinist at that point—I still am—along with California, my two major cultural areas of emphasis. I applied for the job, and went through the interview process in just one day. I flew out from Ontario Airport near Riverside and arrived here around 10 o'clock in the morning and didn't even stay overnight. The whole interview went over the course of a very long day. And I think I came back to Ontario Airport around 10 o'clock that night. It was a long day, but it worked out apparently. I had a great career here, Weber State is a really good place to work. I'm just so happy that I landed this position at Weber State and at one point I did apply for a job at Humboldt State. It was a chance for me to go back home, so to speak. And I was actually offered the position. It was after I had been promoted to full professor here. I would have had to start over as an assistant professor at Humboldt State because that's what they were offering. And the dean there at the time was not going to give me a whole lot of credit for time served here. So it just wasn't worth the risk. I was truly happy here, but it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up to apply for a faculty position at my old undergraduate institution. MT: Had you ever heard of Weber State before? BA: I did, because a few guys I played football with in high school played football here, so I knew about Weber State a little bit. 10 MT: What was Weber State like when you started? You mentioned there wasn't a bachelor’s degree-granting anthropology program. BA: Yeah, well, it was less ethnically diverse, more conservative certainly than compared to now. But I really enjoyed moving to Ogden. I mean, I consider the Ogden area my home now, although my wife and I do plan to move to far western Idaho where her parents live within the next year or so. But I thoroughly enjoyed being a part of the Ogden community, the greater Weber State community. And it's a good place to live. MT: I know the social science building, now Lindquist Hall, was built, so is that where you first had your offices? BA: I was in the basement of the old social sciences building. And even though it didn't last that long as far as buildings go. I had a great office because I was the only faculty person in the basement. I was next to the old archeology laboratory and the lab in the old building was huge, about three thousand square feet and two big rooms; one large front processing and work area, and then the back was a curation and storage facility where we kept all of our field equipment. My office was on the back-side but outside of the lab. Then there was a small entry-type office in front of my office. I think my office area was designed originally for the anthropology department chair. And so the front office would have been occupied by an administrative assistant, and then the back inner sanctum, as it were, was a pretty big office. It was nice and quiet down there. I got a lot of work done. It was next to the old testing center, but by and large was still a pretty quiet area because I was off of a dead-end, short hallway. It was an interesting arrangement, and I would pop upstairs to 11 check my mail once in a while and fellow faculty would say, "Oh, there's Brooke." MT: Did you teach most of your classes in the social science building? BA: I did, right next door. Room 28 was where most of our smaller upper division courses would meet. And then once in a while I would go up to one of the big lecture halls upstairs on the first floor to teach introductory anthropology courses. MT: How else has the anthropology program changed over time, aside from being able to actually offer a bachelor’s degree? BA: So after we began to offer bachelor's degrees in anthropology, we began to attract more students. I think we usually had about one hundred anthropology majors and there were two tracks within the Anthro program: the general track and the archeology track. Usually about two-thirds of the students follow the general track, and about one-third complete the archeology emphasis. And in 2017, there was a competition in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences for programs who wanted to get a new tenure track faculty person. And so we threw our hat in the ring and submitted a proposal and we ended up winning that competition. We were able to hire a fifth tenure track anthropologist and opted to hire an archeologist. After a nationwide search, we hired David Yoder, who got his undergraduate degree here as a matter of fact. He was a double major in anthropology and history and then got his master's degree at BYU and is Ph.D. from UNLV. We wanted someone who could do South-Western Archeology, as well as the Great Basin archeology David fit the bill. He had a lot of experience doing contract archeology but was 12 still very engaged in doing research and publishing. Dave turned out to be a great fit for our program. MT: You mentioned you had a certain area like the Great Basin that you focused on. Are most of the professors in the anthropology department focused on regions out here in the West or do any focus on the East? BA: It's kind of all over the place. We have two cultural anthropologists, two archeologists, and then one biological anthropologist. The senior cultural person, Ron Holt, early on in his career, he was engaged in ethnohistory and did research amongst the Utah Paiute tribe in south-central Utah and then slowly gravitated towards kind of studying political economy and warfare and things like that. And then our second socio-cultural faculty person, Mark Stevenson, who completed his dissertation at Temple University, studied the unification of Germany when the wall came down in 1990 or 1989, and he also studies and plays traditional Irish folk music. So there's a lot of diversity there on the cultural side. Then our biological anthropology person, Joanna Gautney, I think this is her second year. She did her dissertation out of Tulane University based on studying ancient hominids, some of the earliest ancestral humans in southern and eastern Africa and aspects of that evolutionary process. We have a wide diversity of interests and geographic specialties within the five-person anthropology program. MT: What did a typical semester look like for you? BA: Usually, I taught two or three courses during the fall and spring terms, plus the month-long field school. When we went to semesters, I taught every semester and the month-long archeology field class counts for six semester credits. I was fortunate in that I could spread out my course teaching load every year. 13 That arrangement gave me more time to work on reports and publication efforts during the fall and spring. My teaching and fieldwork schedule formed a cycle of doing field schools, recovering data, then having the lab class in the fall. The students learned how to process information, clean and catalog artifacts, classify data, and write up a basic technical report on their data set that is assigned to them. And then typically, if the project had a lot of information, and content was truly important, I would then fine-tune that information and publish it as a journal article or in some cases as a book-length monograph. And then I would begin working at a new site and begin that process all over again. Besides teaching, of course, there's university service and department and college service requirements. So maybe I would work on two to four committees per year. I served on the Faculty Senate for my college for about eight years. And in terms of field schools, before David was hired, I was the one person teaching the field schools. I think I taught 17 consecutive archeological field classes. MT: Were those all focused here in Utah, or did you spread them throughout the west? BA: A few were in Utah during the early years, and then they branched out into northeastern Nevada, southeastern Idaho, and southcentral Idaho. Then for the past nine years, we worked up in far eastern Idaho, in Birch Creek Valley, right along the Montana-Idaho border. That's in the Caribou-Targhee National Forest we've had a really good relationship with that forest, and they've sponsored a lot of our work. I've been able to receive a number of what are called challenge cost-share grants through the Forest Service. They aren't huge, maybe 15 to 20 thousand dollars per year, but it's enough money to get 14 all the specialty analysis done, radiocarbon dating, geochemical analysis of obsidian so we can determine where it comes from, the analysis of botanical remains and also all the animal bone that gets recovered. All those things must be sent out to specialists and they don't analyze and report on it for free. But it worked out well in terms of having all the bases covered. MT: You mentioned that you served on the Faculty Senate for eight years. What other committees on campus were you involved with? BA: In terms of chairing committees, I chaired my college's ranking and tenure committee, and two or three times I also served as chair of the Faculty Senate’s Research Scholarship and Professional Growth Committee, which awards small grants to faculty. And that was a great learning experience. You got to see what other folks are doing around the campus research-wise. MT: What are some of your favorite topics that you've written on? BA: Early on in my career, I was somewhat focused on prehistoric communal pronghorn antelope hunting in the Great Basin. A lot of native groups who lived near large populations of pronghorn constructed wood pole and brush enclosures; they're winged traps that are shaped like an extended keyhole. So you have these V shaped drift fences and they end in a large ovate or circular corral. The fences themselves sometimes would run for over seven hundred yards. These are huge constructs. The corrals in which they would pen the animals might cover 30 acres of land. Sometimes they would incorporate live juniper and pinyon trees into the alignments, but typically they would choose areas of undulating terrain and run the animals towards that hidden corral. Usually the corral would occupy a low lying area, like in a creek drainage, for example. The animals wouldn't realize that they were being forced into a 15 corral until it was too late and they couldn't see they were entering this enclosure. Archeologically, the record of communal pronghorn hunting in the Intermountain West goes back at least three to four thousand years. Then, little by little, I transitioned into working at prehistoric cave and rock shelter occupation sites within the northern Great Basin. There were no prehistoric farmers as there were, for example, with the Fremont in central Utah and the Puebloan folks in the Four Corners areas. In the north, highly mobile forager populations occupied key locations on the landscape for no more than about a month. Compared to ancient farmers, prehistoric foragers were consistently on the move with the changing seasons, exploiting resources as they became available in different elevation zones. Some rock shelters that served as maybe a spring or fall habitation site have records of ephemeral human occupation going back beyond ten thousand years. And some of them have very deep deposits, maybe over 10 feet of alternating cultural and natural layers. I found working at such sites to be very worthwhile and return to the same site for a number of seasons. MT: What recognition have you received for your accomplishments? BA: In 1995, I received the Dello Dayton Award. It's kind of an all-around award within the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences for teaching, research and service accomplishments. And then in 1996, I was named an endowed professor within my college. I believe that award lasts for about five years. And every year you get a fresh infusion of money, around $2,500, and you can spend it any way you want. One activity I enjoyed was to sponsor a speaker's series. We had a number of stipends and we'd invite regional scholars to come and talk about their current research efforts. For a long time, 16 we had a very active anthropology club, and of course the pandemic kiboshed our recent effort to reestablish that. We would have maybe 30 students involved in the Anthropology Club my first 20 years here. Along with Rosemary Conover, I was the co-advisor of the Anthropology Club. In 2006, I received the Glenn S. Williams Award of Excellence for Research, and that's through the Hemingway Family Trust. In 2011, I received the Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor Award, and that's far and away the one award I'm most proud of. Only two or three faculty members are named Brady Presidential Distinguished Professors each year, making it an elite award. Finally, this year I was asked to present the Last Lecture for the University which was certainly a high honor. MT: How have you become a mentor to others in your field? BA: Primarily through offering advice to junior faculty and helping them fine-tune and revise grant proposals that they're getting ready to submit. I've also acted as a journal referee, and so I've probably having refereed over 50 journal article manuscripts. You can choose to either identify yourself or not, and I would usually identify myself and encourage the authors to contact me if they desired to follow up on any of my suggestions. MT: What advice would you give to students currently in the program or are looking to start in that field? BA: I would urge them to read as much as possible. Become familiar with the classic literature in the area of archeology they want to go into. But certainly, stay up on the current developments in the region or on the topic they're most interested in and plan to pursue in graduate school. Get as much fieldwork and laboratory work as possible before leaving Weber State, find a faculty 17 mentor, and pursue small research grants through the Office of Undergraduate Research. They have a lot of opportunities there. Maybe try to complete one or two internships once they finish the summer field school and the laboratory methods course. At that point, they're a number of outside institutions. The Utah State Historic Preservation Office is one of them; also the US Forest Service and the Utah BLM. They've sponsored a number of our students as interns in the past. MT: What are some of your favorite memories of Weber State? BA: Some of my favorite memories are of conversations and lunch engagements with various faculty members my first five or six years here that helped me grow as an academic. I was just trying to learn the ropes, to understand the things I should put emphasis on in terms of striking a balance between teaching and research, for example. And they almost always said you need to establish a pretty solid service record. The first opportunity you get, you should try to become a chair of a department committee or a college committee as a junior faculty member before achieving tenure. One memorable aspect of the anthropology program back on the quarter system was that in May of every year all across the nation, most states have their Archeology Week or Archeology Month celebrations. Utah Archeology Week is always held in May and once we went and after we transitioned to semesters, we could no longer sponsor Archeology Week activities. When we were on the quarter system, a lot of the Anthropology Club officers were very engaged, very outdoors oriented, and devised a number of public programs. They were community wide and the word would go out not just on campus, but within the greater Ogden area. For example, 18 sponsored lithic technology workshops in which people could try their hand in flint knapping and make chipped stone tools. One year we used Aboriginal techniques to make pots using open pit firing. Another year, we used two by fours and carpet remnants to make a mammoth model, and used atlatls (spear throwers) to launch darts at the artificial mammoth. One year, the kids built a traditional Apache wickiup. It's a wooden pole and thatch-covered, dome shaped house. A few of the students even slept in it one night. So there were a lot of fun things that occurred back then. One of the classes I really enjoyed teaching on the quarter system was called the Prehistory of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. During that course, we would have a five day optional field trip. We would leave on a Wednesday and come back on a Sunday. Sometimes we traveled south to the Four Corners area and see a number of prehistoric sites and museums and camp out in local campgrounds, or we would go north up into Idaho or west into Nevada. There are a number of significant archeological sites on public lands and if you're a professional, you can obtain those site records and know exactly where they're located. We would also combine site visits with visiting small town museums or major museums. The Idaho Museum of Natural History up in Pocatello is always a great one when you go north up into southern Idaho; also the Herrett Museum at the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls, that's a great museum. We would go to Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico, sometimes to Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, and Hovenweep in southeastern Utah and hit all the major museums on the way down. Those were great, great classes. Students learn so much in a very 19 short time period when they visit the actual archeological sites that we're talking about in class. MT: When you switched to semesters, did you try and keep some sort of Archeology Month or Archeology Week? BA: We didn't. We just couldn't do it. No one's on campus by then. It is unfortunate, but just one of those things. MT: You mentioned that you started in 1990, and Weber State became a university in '91. Was there much fanfare with that or problems with people? BA: There was a little bit of fanfare, especially with the campus sign on Harrison Boulevard. I recall Al Simpkins, who was part of the administration back then, and he was one of the main guys to pull off the cloak. I think it was a cold day in January when they officially made the change. He revealed going from Weber State College to Weber State University. So that was kind of fun. MT: Did you have much interaction with the university president? You would have been here under Thompson, Millner, Wight, and Mortensen. Was Nadauld still here? BA: Paul Thompson was here when I first came to campus. I had a little bit of interaction with him, not a whole lot. I probably interacted with Ann Millner more than any president. A few times she visited the Archaeology Lab with the campus advisory board as well as members of the university’s board of trustees. During those half-hour sessions, I was able to talk to some of the trustees and other members of the community who are big supporters of Weber State; just talk about what the Archeology/Anthropology Program is up to and show them some of the artifacts we had recovered recently during field school. 20 MT: Did you ever serve as department chair? BA: I did not, but I did serve for five years as the anthropology program coordinator. Within our department, we have two programs: sociology and anthropology. And although I received hints from some of my faculty members that I should consider running or putting my name in the hat to serve as chair, with all the field responsibilities, it was just a little bit overwhelming. I just didn't want to tack on all these other administrative duties to a pretty full schedule. MT: What was your teaching load on average? BA: Five courses per year on the semester system in the fall, two in the spring, and then the one month-long field school. I received six hours of reassigned time to run the archeology program and direct the laboratory. I was very fortunate in that regard. I had a lighter teaching load than most of my college colleagues, but there were other things that I was engaged in and I put in full work days for the most part. MT: Is there anything else about Weber State or your career that you want to share? BA: I just want to say that it's been a wonderful career. Weber State is a great place to work and very supportive; good, solid people, you know, not much backbiting. And that's not true at many universities, especially at the big research institutions where there are a lot of big egos that need to be fed. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time here. And the good thing about beginning early, I began when I was 29—is that you can retire early if you want. I've got a good 10 or 15 years left in me for doing fieldwork and my wife, Denise, also does archeology. So we're going to move west at some point along the Snake River where she grew up and begin to connect with the local forests there and 21 maybe the Bureau of Land Management to see if they have any small scale projects. that we could conduct for them. We’d like to establish a small research consortium with some of our friends who are archeologists, and who also have recently retired and keep on plugging away, doing archeology and getting a few publications out there. MT: Sounds like fun. A good way to retire. BA: I think so, yeah. MT: You can pick a classroom and go explore. BA: And the workload is my choice. MT: Thank you for taking the opportunity to be interviewed. BA: Thanks for inviting me to sit down with you. I really appreciate it.