Researchers

Bunny Fontana retired from the University of Arizona in 1992 after a thirty-four year career in the Arizona State Museum and University of Arizona Library involving public service, research, writing, teaching, and field work. He completed work for his bachelor’s degree at the Uhiversity of California at Berkeley in 1953 and earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1960 with a major in ethnology and minor in archaeology. His field work and publications have been concerned with indigenous communities of northwestern Mexico and the American Southwest, especially the Tohono O’odham [see http://home.nps.gov/applications/tuma/bibliography/]. With his wife, Hazel McFeely Fontana, since deceased, they published the 1894 and 1895 field diaries of W J McGee’s journeys into Seri Indian country and onto Tiburon Island. Bunny carried out the first archaeological site survey of what in 1962 was the Cabeza Prieta Game Range, today’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. With William Robinson, he oversaw excavations at Mission San Xavier del Bac, and, with photographer Edward McCain, completed a catalog of the painted and sculptured art of the mission’s church [A Gift of Angels: The Art of Mission San Xavier del Bac, Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2010]. Fontana’s study of adpaptations made by distinctive groups of O’odham to their varying surrounds in the Sonoran Desert was perhaps the first to challenge the ethnographic and popular stereotype of these people as a monoculture [“Man in Arid Lands: the Piman Indians of the Sonoran Desert,” in Desert Biology, edited by George W. Brown, Jr., Vol. 2, pp. 489-528. New York: Academic Press, Inc.] He presently resides in an assisted living facility in Tucson.