ITHACA, N.Y. -- Curtis M. Hinsley, Regents Professor of Arts and Sciences at Northern Arizona University, will deliver a public lecture and slide presentation titled "Reading the Ruins: Archaeology and the Interpretation of Landscape in the American Southwest, 1850-1900," on Monday, April 3, at 4:30 p.m. in the Guerlac Room of the A.D. White House. This University Lecture is free and open to the public.

For the past seven years, Hinsley has been working with the Museum of Northern Arizona on a multi-volume study of the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition, which was funded by Mary Tileston Hemenway, a wealthy Boston widow. Led by Frank Hamilton Cushing from 1886 to 1889, it was the first major archaeological expedition to the American Southwest. The expedition was deemed a failure because Cushing was fired and never published his findings. However, Hinsley has discovered quantities of valuable archival material, including Cushing's 350-page "Itinerary" of the first months of the Hemenway expedition.

"His work laid the foundation for what we today call Hohokam archaeology and (we) have discovered field notes, diaries, plans, drawings, watercolors of scenes and artifacts, photographs and nearly 500 pages of correspondence," said Hinsley. "We are creating from all of this a seven-volume documentary history. The Hemenway project, then, is a study in American cultural history, and as such is consonant with my larger project of integrating the history of anthropology/archaeology into our understanding of American cultural changes."

A former chair of the history department at Colgate University, Hinsley received his B.A. from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has a special interest in the uses of photography in anthropological study and is the author of numerous articles, reviews and books, including From Site to Sight: Photography, Anthropology and the Power of Imagery (with Melissa Banta, 1986 Peabody Museum Press), the result of a 1985 National Endowment for the Humanities grant. He also received a National Science Foundation grant in 1980 for history of science curriculum development. Hinsley has worked at the Smithsonian and Peabody museums as a visiting scholar.