Diana Hadley

Diana recently retired from the University of Arizona, where she served as Associate Curator of Ethnohistory and director of the Arizona State Museum’s Office of Ethnohistorical Research, where she specialized in the translation and editing of Spanish historical documents.With degrees in archaeology and history from Washington University and the University of Arizona, her work continued to focus on the history of land use and ecological change in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.

A former rancher, she is currently writing a history of the cattle industry on the United States-Mexico border. She has co-authored several book-length ethnoecological land use histories for the Bureau of Land Management and the U. S. Forest Service, including studies of Aravaipa Canyon, the San Rafael Valley, the Bonita Creek area, the Arizona/New Mexico Borderlands area, and the upper San Pedro River watershed. She is co-editor of The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain, 1700-1765 (University of Arizona Press, 1997). She participated in the citizen planning teams for the Mission San Agustín Master Plan (1991) and the Tucson Origins Plan (2001) and, as part of the WLB Group design team, wrote the historical overview for the Tucson Origins Heritage Park Master Plan (2003).

She has served on the boards of the Center for Desert Archaeology, Native Seeds/SEARCH, the Research Ranch Foundation, the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, the Northern Jaguar Project, the Jewish History Museum, and as a commissioner on the Tucson Pima County Historical Commission. She has organized conferences on grassland restoration, Native American sacred sites, deforestation in the Sierra Madres, the ecology of the prairie dog, restoration of the Santa Cruz River, and chaired a conference on the Tucson Mission Garden (2006) which brought dozens of experts on Spanish Colonial agriculture and mission construction to Tucson.

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