Ortman receives award for commitment to Crow Canyon

Scott Ortman, an assistant professor of anthropology at CU-Boulder, was recognized for his longtime commitment to the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center with an honor award presented at the center’s 2013 appreciation dinner. Crow Canyon is a nonprofit research and education organization in southwestern Colorado.

Ortman began work at Crow Canyon as a field research intern in 1993 before joining the center full time in 1997, first as a material culture specialist and then as laboratory director and database manager. After an educational leave in 2008 and 2009 to complete his Ph.D. dissertation, he returned to Crow Canyon as director of the research and education department.

Ortman was the winner of the 2011 Society for American Archaeology Dissertation Award for “Genes, Language, and Culture in Tewa Ethnogenesis, A.D. 1150–1400.” He was awarded the Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize for “Winds From the North: Tewa Origins and Historical Anthropology,” a book based on his dissertation.

Ortman also is a senior researcher with the Village Ecodynamics Project, a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary effort that studies the long-term interaction between the ancestral Pueblo Indians and their environment.

In 2011, he was named Crow Canyon’s first Lightfoot Fellow. Also in 2011, he began service as an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, a private, not-for-profit research institute in New Mexico. Ortman joined CU in 2013.