Spicer contributed to all four fields of anthropology through his study of the American Indians, the Southwest, and the clash of cultures defined in his award-winning book, Cycles of Conquest.
They tended to the animals of the farm, including goats and rabbits, and helped the household out by hauling firewood for the house and water from the town pump.
His formal education continued in 1922 when his father moved the family to Louisville, Kentucky, after Robert took a job with the Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis.
Ned's first international travel brought him to post-war Germany where he visited Bremerhaven, Stettin and Hamburg[1] where he witnessed a different world.
In early 1925, Ned returned to the sea, first as a crewman on the banana boat, Metapan, that left New Orleans for Puerto Barrios, Guatemala.
He changed majors to literature and drama, which Ned's mother had encouraged her son to explore after he found the chemistry being taught at the university was not what he expected.
He contributed the paper, "Theory of Hours and Production" to a graduate level seminar based on his experience during the seamen's strike.
He developed an interest in astronomy and spent nights in August and November charting meteor showers and sending his observations to the National Observatory in Washington, DC.
[18] With help from his mother, he bought a bus ticket to Phoenix, where he found a number of jobs to support himself and a place to stay.
During the Great Depression the bank where he had placed his savings failed, and the job would be a lifesaver despite the crash postponing his plans for a year.
Dr. Dean Byron Cummings headed the Department of Archaeology at the university at the time and invited Ned to go with him on explorations for sites on weekends.
He collected pot shards on these trips and brought them home to be sorted, cataloged, and analyzed, skills that would lay the foundation for his master's degree.
The Great Depression caused many miners to be let go by the United Verde Copper Company, a major employer in Yavapai County.
To offset the resulting unemployment, Grace Sparkes, Chamber of Commerce secretary, envisioned excavation of ruins at Tuzigoot in Clarkdale, near Prescott, AZ.
Harold S. Colton and Lyndon Lane Hargrave analyzing artifacts from Pueblo I pithouses in the San Francisco Mountains.
In May 1933, Ned gave his first formal report on the pottery of the site at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Las Cruces, New Mexico (Watson Smith 1983: 76).
In the 1932–33 school year, Ned took courses that were taught by John Provinse, who joined the faculty at the University of Arizona to begin his first teaching job.
[24] Ned observed that "in the classroom [Provinse] radiated a deep conviction that the social sciences ought to be used practically, and at the same time, fostered skepticism and caution about facile claims for them."
When Ned was released from the hospital, Redfield, Cole, and Provinse provided financial support and arranged for him to return to Tucson and work at the Arizona State Museum analyzing Indian skeletal materials.
However, the study was cut short by the US joining World War II (WWII), as Mexico, declaring its neutrality, expelled all Americans from the country.
Ned became employed with the War Relocation Authority, charged with the removal and oversight of Japanese-American citizens and Immigrants from the U.S. West Coast.
Like many social scientists and anthropologists, teaching and research activity was curtailed or redirected in the United States to serve the war effort.
While in Washington, Spicer also joined the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) as a founding member while it was headed by John Provinse as its president.
Among these were organizing and editing a series of symposia on the issue related to training in the application of anthropology to field situations.
13) The key concept that Spicer learned at the University of Chicago was the importance of "acculturation" in the study of societies and cultures and applying a structural-functional point of view.
In "Perspectives in American Indian Culture Change," (1962), and "Ethnic Medicine in the Southwest", (1977) among other works, he led and edited seminars that explored this concept.
His community study "Pascua: A Yaqui Village in Southern Arizona" (1940) asked questions that called for a broader perspective, which led to his most successful project – Cycles of Conquest [35] which won the Southwestern Library Association's 1964 award for Best Book on the Southwest.
He identified three major issues that the profession faced: first, "the old and possibly insoluble"[citation needed] problem of the integration of anthropology; second, the problem of understanding anthropologists in relation to the society in which they operate, particularly on the subject of jobs and the Committee on Ethics; and third, a widening of anthropology presences by international meetings that signified the internationalization of the discipline.
The CAP discussed, among other matters, the recent proliferation of specializations in anthropology and the resulting loss of a sense of common direction among anthropologists.
In addition to the AAA, Ned occupied a number of roles within the Department of Anthropology, in the Tucson community (in particular the Fort Lowell neighborhood), the State of Arizona, and the national and international scene.