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Spring 2006

Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.

Nearly 30 years ago anthropologist Bill Lipe and about 25 of his Washington State University students and colleagues moved into a set of abandoned villages in a remote corner of southern Colorado. They spent their summer days there on a mission to uncover the stories of some of America’s oldest ghost towns.

As co-investigators with the University of Colorado on a Bureau of Reclamation project, Lipe’s team had just a few years to salvage important portions of the historical record before nearly 4,500 acres along the Dolores River would be flooded by the McPhee Reservoir.

Ancient Anasazi communities once lived there and throughout the Four Corners region of the Southwest. Some have collapsed into piles of rubble. Others still stand as awesome fortresses tucked in the cliffs below Colorado’s high mesas. And still others, like those along the Dolores, have been lost forever to development, farming, mining, and dams.

The WSU team focused on an area that had seen its largest populations from A.D. 600 to 900. As the project started, the researchers realized they were on the verge of discovering a large and complex society, with more than 1,600 sites in the Dolores River basin.

There was so much to learn and so little time to look.

Fortunately, Lipe knew the territory. As a graduate student in the late 1950s he was a crew chief on the nearby Glen Canyon project in Utah, salvaging material in areas destined to be flooded by Lake Powell.

As a senior scientist on the Dolores project from 1978 to 1985, the lanky professor brought students, faculty, and WSU resources to the largest federally-funded project of its time. There Lipe and his University of Colorado colleagues oversaw excavations at more than 100 sites, doing the exciting work of exploring village sites, recovering pottery and household items, and bringing new information from a period that hadn’t really been explored since the 1930s.

Lipe did a bit of everything. He synthesized the findings to provide an overview of the project. He provided basic training on the use of shovel and trowel. He even performed the unpleasant task of stirring the camp latrine with a pole so it could be pumped out at the end of the summer.

The researchers took on many roles, since their mission was urgent: to move in and collect information fast enough to meet the timeline of the dam. Still, they left a rich legacy of material for future archaeologists and the groundwork for understanding the early Anasazi communities.

Because of Lipe and the Dolores project, WSU left its mark on the Southwest. Lipe had recruited his colleagues, tapping Tim Kohler, a junior professor who had limited experience in the region, but brought expertise in quantitative methods and ecology. Today, Kohler uses computers to track and predict how and why communities move. His major focus is now on the Southwest at the time of the Anasazi.

Lipe also drew in students who would eventually become influential archaeologists in the region, among them Ricky Lightfoot ’92, now president of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Sarah Schlanger ’85, who today works for the New Mexico Bureau of Land Management, and Eric Blinman ’88, assistant director of the Office of Archaeological Studies at the Museum of New Mexico.

“The project was such a major formative part of our early careers,” says Lightfoot. “Also, you couldn’t pick another spot in the United States where there is as much archaeology going on as there is in the Four Corners area.”

A few years later, Lipe helped develop the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, a private, nonprofit organization near Cortez, Colorado, that became not only a resource for scholars, but also a place for the public to learn Anasazi history and participate in field work. He served as the archaeological center’s director of research from 1985 until 1993, splitting his time between Colorado and Washington.

Lipe also built a legacy of conservation archaeology. Over his long career, he has encouraged researchers to approach their fieldwork with minimal disruption to a site. While the practice at the time of Dolores was to fully dig an area, Lipe argued that excavators should stop digging once they had enough of a sample to answer their research questions, thus leaving portions of the site untouched for future archaeologists.

The Dolores project was an exciting adventure, says Blinman, and the Mesa Verde region proved to be one of the best training grounds for future archaeologists, no matter where they ended up.

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