Dean Reed is an alum of the CHRM program, having received his master's degree in 2022. His thesis is titled Persistence of Form: A Material Ethnography through the Architecture of Anaheim’s 20th Century Landscape.
Thesis Abstract: During the mid-20th century, Anaheim was one of many small unincorporated communities within southern California that would undergo a transition from a rural agricultural community into an industrial and commercial suburban sprawl. Previous works in cultural heritage resource management and local historical research within the City have been primarily centered around their local historic districts or larger commercial areas. However, the areas within proximity to these culturally defining areas have been largely undocumented. Those that have been documented have been studied under the regulatory lens of the National Historic Preservation Act or the California Environmental Quality Act. As a result, they are interpreted as just a product general growth of the City in the post-World War II era and determined ineligible for treatment or protection as historic resources. However, properties of this type are often examined as material culture that is independent of its surroundings. They have not been thoroughly examined for their data potential outside of the regulatory lens, nor has their connection to each other and the greater Anaheim landscape been considered fully. The analysis of architecture is useful in helping us understand production and use of space within the built environment. A further analysis, with the application of theory based in social production, space and place, and landscape may elaborate further on the broader social structures, allow a fuller understanding of the past, and help unpack the notion of material culture as a product. An approximately one-mile segment of East Lincoln Avenue, located near the center of Anaheim, exhibits a variety of the City’s vernacular architecture. In what ways did the City’s development allow these buildings to persist, and what processes were at play in their reconfiguration? Material culture, as a social product, requires a broader theoretical lens, a need to understand cultural resources as a part of a landscape, and a more in depth look into the individual. As the mid-20th century landscape emerges in the historical record, the importance of understanding the social factors that were at play are relevant to their preservation, especially as each phase of construction becomes overshadowed by the next, even to this day.
Following below is an archived profile.
Dean Reed is a graduate student in the Cultural and Heritage Resource Management (CHRM) master's program. Mr. Reed received his B.A. in Anthropology with a minor in Linguistics at Indiana University (IU) in 2013. During his time at IU he worked in several labs, working with artifact collections primarily from middle to late woodland period sites of Southern Indiana, and maintained an archaeological focus. Since graduating, he has worked as a professional archaeologist in Cultural Resource Management, and has worked on several Phase I projects throughout the Midwest. Dean is now positioned full time as an associate archaeologist for Paleo Solutions,Inc., a Cultural/ Paleontological Resources consulting firm based in Southern California. Since 2015 he has received intermittent cross-qualification training as an Archaeological/Paleontological technician through his involvement in various monitoring projects for transportation and housing in the greater Los Angeles Area, and has performed excavations and lab work for the La Brea Tar Pits Museum. He is currently an acting field director for several cultural resource projects based around electrical utility and grid reliability, where he is responsible for conducting the bulk of the virtual and in-house records searches, leading small scale surveys, monitoring, report writing, and is assisting in coordination with various state and federal agencies across California.
