Saturday, October 1, 2005

A Busy Semester

Week five of the semester has come and gone, and it is finally taking its toll. I'm not behind yet, but I can feel it slipping away. Two classes at once may be biting off too much.

This weekend will probably tell me how the rest of the term will go: I have a 5-page paper due in my Indians of the Southwest course, and I still haven't begun to write. It's a good course. Dr. John Martin is an engaging and entertaining lecturer, as long as he's not reading from his notes. He's had so much first-hand experience with the cultures here is the Southwest that he has a great story on every subject.

I was lucky enough to visit Havasupai canyon in June, and was all the more interested in the Hualapai and Havasupai when we covered them in class. Dr. Martin knew quite a bit about them, and when I was reading about them in Volume 10 of the Handbook of North American Indians, I discovered why: John Martin lived with the Havasupai for a year and used them as the subject for his doctoral dissertation (he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1967).

I've really been enjoying my Physical Anthropology class! Learning about primate anatomy, elementary genetics, and human evolution has been a blast (although it is very easy at this level).

I'll post my paper as soon as I get it done.

Update: It's done. Here's the PDF version of my paper on the Tewa Origin Myth.