Dean Saitta, archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Denver, earned his BA at Wake Forest University and his MA and PhD at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  Saitta’s studies revolve around public memory and material culture, focusing in part on monuments with which public memory interacts.  Saitta spent a significant portion of the past decade studying the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado of 1914, an event that began as a labor strike but that became a slaughter when Colorado National Guard troops fired on the strikers.  Saitta discussed the Ludlow monument following its disfigurement by unknown vandals from the perspective of public memory in a 2003 lecture, using it as an example of the “discourse of monumentality.”  That discourse, he asserts, links the present to the past in a tangible way.