Journal of the Southwest

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Those of us who have spent time with Dick (aka Rich) Pailes at Bahía de Kino, or Punta Chueca, Sonora, México, were privileged to experience a very special side of this man that was exhibited nowhere else. Being at the interface of two very different environments—the ocean and the desert—he exuded an aura of contentment that bordered on spiritual. Dick was, of course, happy in Norman, Oklahoma, with family, friends, colleagues, and students. And, he was happy while conducting field work. But on the Sonoran coast, he was special. He was in his proverbial element. He was in the two disparate worlds that he loved, one exclusively of water, the other devoid of it. Here, he wasn’t at home. He was home.

Dick’s early home life was not easy. He was born 11 August 1932 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, William Henry Pailes III, was a merchant seaman who was often away for extended periods, and his mother, Mildred Pedersen Pailes, died while he was young. As a result, he and his brother, William, lived in several boy’s homes. Life got easier when his father later married Joan Mattock and settled in Rhode Island, “The Ocean State.” There, he was joined by three more siblings, Jeanne, Pamela, and Arthur (AJ). Dick developed a life-long love of the sea in Rhode Island. He loved regaling friends about his experiences as a Marine on a ship patrolling the Mediterranean Sea in the 1950s, and his youthful money-making venture of digging quahogs. There are no quahogs at Kino Bay, but Dick did enjoy the local shrimp!

He attended the University of Rhode Island, majored in journalism, and wrote a column of political opinion for the student newspaper as well as contributing to the Providence Westerly Sun. Following graduation in 1956, he attended the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, and subsequently tried his hand at a number of trades in a variety of places. A fortuitous stop at a former professor’s home in Tempe, Arizona, sent him to his true calling, anthropology.

Dick holds the distinction of being one of the first anthropology graduate students at Arizona State University. There, while serving as a graduate student supervisor on the excavation of an archaeological site, he met Roberta Lynne Rouse. They married in 1963, and throughout his life he credited Robbie, an Arizona native, for instilling in him a love of the desert.

With a master’s degree in hand, he and his wife packed up their pickup truck and headed to Carbondale, Illinois where Dick studied under the tutelage of archaeologists J. Charles Kelly, and Walter W. Taylor, geographer Campbell W. Pennington, and ethnohistorian Carroll L. [End Page 420] Riley. Among his cohort were life-long friends Phil C. Weigand and Joseph B. Mountjoy. Some humorous anecdotes about a summer trip to Zacatecas, México, with Walt Taylor and others can be found in Mountjoy (2018), including one that crushed any hopes of Dick getting a dissertation out of sites excavated and artifacts collected in the Sierras. Instead, Taylor who had a house in Alamos, Sonora, convinced him to focus his research on the archaeology of southern Sonora and contacts between Mesoamerica and the American Southwest (Pailes 1973). He completed his doctorate and accepted a position at the University of Oklahoma where he spent his 30-year academic career.

At OU, Dick mastered the art of teaching formal and informal classes for undergraduates. His graduate seminars were always stimulating, and those from 7 to 10 pm often reconvened at a local watering hole until nearly closing time. Personally, these extended seminars are some of my fondest memories of graduate school. Myself and others learned a great deal in those seminars, including Dick’s approach to archaeology that can be best summarized as read, read, read. He was always concerned that his students, and later his son, track down seemingly obscure source materials and was adamant that archaeologists should read ALL the ethnographies for a region, all the ORIGINAL site report materials...