Scott Ortman Awarded Lister Fellowship

by Mark Varien, Vice President of Programs
December 11, 2007

Scott Ortman, acting director of research at the Crow Canyon Archeological Center, was recently awarded the 2007–2008 Florence C. and Robert H. Lister Fellowship.

The fellowship was established in recognition of the lifelong achievements of Florence and the late Robert Lister, noted archaeologists, dedicated educators, and friends and supporters of the Center. First awarded in 1993, the fellowship assists the research of graduate students who are working to increase our knowledge of American Indian cultures of the Southwest. Fellows are selected from a pool of applicants by a committee of distinguished Southwestern archaeologists and are awarded a stipend to help support the final stages of their research and the writing of their Ph.D. dissertations.  

Scott is a Ph.D. candidate at Arizona State University (ASU). He received his B.A. in anthropology from Stanford University in 1994 and his M.A. in anthropology from ASU in 1998. Scott has been associated with Crow Canyon since 1993, when he was a field research intern at Castle Rock Pueblo. He worked as a seasonal field assistant from 1994 to 1996 before joining the full-time staff in 1997, first as material culture specialist, then as laboratory director and database manager, and today as acting director of research.

Through his many publications, Scott has already established himself as a respected archaeologist. He has authored or coauthored eight peer-reviewed journal articles, 11 chapters in edited volumes, and major sections of four archaeological site reports on Crow Canyon’s Web site.

In recognition of his work, Scott has received the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Research from Stanford, the Ruppe Student Prize from ASU, and the Student Paper Award from the Society for American Archaeology. Scott’s research interests range widely but focus on archaeological method and theory; Pueblo history, culture, and language; and the integration of the traditional subfields of anthropology: cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology.

Scott's dissertation research, which is also supported by the National Science Foundation, addresses one of the central questions of anthropology: the relationship between genes, language, and culture.

To learn how genes, language, and culture are affected by population movement, Scott examines the migration of Pueblo Indians from the Four Corners region to the Rio Grande valley during the thirteenth-century A.D. He is particularly interested in determining whether modern Tewa-speaking Pueblo people of northern New Mexico inherited their genes and language from thirteenth-century immigrants from the Mesa Verde region, that portion of the larger Four Corners region most commonly cited as the Tewa homeland. His research, which draws on biological, linguistic, archaeological, ethnographic, and historic data, explores the possibility that Mesa Verde immigrants joined existing Pueblo populations in New Mexico to create a new culture and society on the Rio Grande frontier 700 years ago. (For a more detailed discussion of Scott’s work, read his research abstract).

Congratulations, Scott, on a well-deserved honor. Your research will contribute enormously to our understanding of the links between ancient and modern Pueblo peoples, and we look forward to reading your final results!