Bill Lipe

Biography

      Bill Lipe (Yale Ph.D. 1966) is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Washington State University and a member of the Board of Directors at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado. Since the late 1950s, he has done archaeological research in Utah and Colorado, with emphasis on Ancestral Pueblo settlement patterns, demography, and community organization. From 1995 to 1997, Lipe was President of the Society for American Archaeology, and in 2000 received the Society’s Distinguished Service Award. In 2006, he was honored by the Archaeological Institute of America with its Conservation and Heritage Management Award, and by the Register of Professional Archaeologists with the McGimsey-Davis Distinguished Service Award.

      Recent publications include chapters in The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon (edited by Stephen Lekson, 2006) and The Mesa Verde World (edited by David Grant Noble, 2006). Lipe has also published extensively on issues of archaeological conservation and cultural resource management.

Abstract

Can Archaeology Track Migrations? The Mesa Verde Case

      Ben Rouse had a career-long interest in migration as an important process in culture history. His 1986 book "Migrations in Prehistory" helped revive the systematic, multi-disciplinary study of migrations, an enterprise that is flourishing today. My paper re-examines one of the classic questions in the archaeology of the American Southwest?where did migrants from the Mesa Verde region find new homes?

      Late in the 13th Century A.D., the cliff dwellings and large masonry pueblos of the Mesa Verde region of Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah fell silent as a population numbering in the thousands melted away within a generation. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that many of the Mesa Verde people migrated southeast 150 miles or more to the Rio Grande area, where they contributed to the ancestry of today's Eastern Pueblo Indians. Yet many standard elements of 13th century Mesa Verde material culture, architecture, and settlement patterning simply don't appear in the Rio Grande archaeological record. Were the migrations actually non-existent or much smaller than thought, or did the migrants rapidly change their culture to accommodate to the Pueblo communities already present in the Rio Grande area? These questions, and their more general implications for the archaeological study of migrations, are explored.

Bill Lipe
Professor Emeritus
Department of Anthropology
Washington State University
Pullman, WA