One of my favorite pastimes when I was young was looking for fossil shells in the stripped surfaces of new housing developments in northern New Jersey. I was fascinated that they had been brought there by glaciers from New York State and were over 200 million years old. Signing up for archaeology at the University of Colorado seemed like a natural progression with even more fascinating things to find out about the ancient tools and materials that people had used thousands or even millions of years ago.
The early films that I saw in classes of Australian Aboriginals and how they made stone tools lured me into trying to find out more about the people and cultures of the past, and I devoted much of my career–from a year at the Université de Bordeaux, to graduate school at the University of Toronto, to teaching at Simon Fraser University–documenting traditional cultures in order to better understand what life may have been like in the past. I’ve not only studied stone tool making but also feasting (far more important than you might think) and rituals. The quest to find out things about traditional cultures has taken me to Australia, Guatemala and Mexico, Southeast Asia, Polynesia, and the Interior of British Columbia. There have been many valuable insights that resulted from these studies and all have been very rich memorable experiences. I have written about these insights in numerous academic publications, but I’ve tried to put many of them together in a different way for young readers: an adventure story, The Eyes of the Leopard. It’s a story meant to intrigue readers and hold their attention, but it is also a story woven together with details of traditional hunting and gathering societies, 20,000 years ago in France. It has been a new adventure for me, and I hope it is for you, too.
Another reason that I wanted to study traditional societies is because I like making things with my hands, creating things, as well as traditional music, social rituals, and gardening. In addition to making stone tools I learned to carve wood. I also learned to play the fiddle from my grandfather and became involved in traditional contra dancing. I enjoy camping and world views that place a strong priority on nature as well as society, including ancestors. I like things that make connections to the natural world and provide a sense of meaning. I find that traditional cultures are rich in all these domains. In trying to understand how our society has become divorced from these aspects of life, it has been fascinating for me to document how a minority of people were able to manipulate others in order to acquire benefits for themselves.
If you are interested in any of the professional archaeological work that I have done, please consult my webpage at the Simon Fraser University, Archaeology Department website: https://www.sfu.ca/archaeology-old/dept/fac_bio/hayden/