2006
Rip Rapp Archaeological Geology Award

Peter J. Mehringer
Washington State University

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Presented to Peter J. Mehringer

 Citation by Gary Huckleberry and Vance Haynes

Studies in paleoecology have recently gained attention primarily due to concerns regarding climate change and its effects on ecosystems. To fully understand the nature of current global changes, we require a historical frame of reference that provides insight into the natural range and speed of ecological change. Whereas the relevance of paleoecology to modern society has only recently received publicity, its importance to the paleoanthropological and archaeological communities has long been recognized. To fully understand human evolution and behavior, one must consider the nature of past environmental changes. Thus it is no surprise that an important part of geoarchaeological research is environmental reconstruction, and one man who has contributed much to this endeavor is Peter J. Mehringer, winner of this year’s Rip Rapp Archaeological Geology Award.

Pete is the classic interdisciplinary scientist. His bachelors and masters degrees are in zoology and botany, respectively, from California State College, Los Angeles, where he became involved in public health research focusing on disease transmission by rodents and insects. Research whetted his appetite for further learning, and in the early 1960s Pete came to the University of Arizona to pursue a Ph.D., this time in the Department of Geosciences. Under the tutelage of paleoecologist Paul Martin, vertebrate paleontologist John Lance, geochronologist Ted Smiley, and geochemist Paul Damon, Pete turned his energies towards solving “deep mysteries of the past”. At Arizona, Pete specialized in pollen analysis of ancient deposits as a means of environmental reconstruction and worked in the Geochronology Laboratory where there was considerable interest in dating important archaeological sites. Thus, Pete soon began collaborating with archaeologists in trying to understand the environmental context of archaeological sites. Although pollen analysis was well established in archaeological research in northern Europe, it had been relatively uncommon in North America prior to the 1960s. However, it soon became clear that palynology had much to offer New World archaeologists, including the reconstruction of environment and human subsistence.

Many geologists and palynologists thought pollen records in alluvium of the Southwest were useless because of redeposition, but Paul Martin found he could get reproducible results. So Pete, with Vance Haynes, reopened the Lehner Clovis site in 1963 and produced a stratigraphically controlled pollen sequence through the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. This success led to work at other alluvial sites and eventually to Pete’s remarkable success at the Tule Springs site in southern Nevada. He showed if adequate pollen is preserved in a properly defined alluvial sequence, it can provide useful evidence of climate change for environmental reconstruction. When Pete and Vance discovered the Murray Springs Clovis site it was going to provide the “rosetta stone” for unraveling late Quaternary paleoclimate change in southern Arizona. Probably Pete’s greatest disappointment was the near total absence of pollen from all of the Murray Springs strata. Not giving up, Pete with David Adam and Paul Martin went on to produce a nearly complete paleoecological reconstruction for human occupation of the region.

After completing his Ph.D., Pete headed north and began his academic career in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah. This placed him on the margins of the Great Basin, an area where he had earlier worked as graduate student at Tule Springs in the Las Vegas Valley. Little did he know that the Great Basin would become the focus of his lifelong career in paleoecological and geoarchaeological research. Whereas some look at the Great Basin and see desolation and redundancy, Pete saw a big, varied landscape with abundant evidence of environmental change including glacial cirques, pluvial lake strandlines, and sand dunes. Pete became interested in understanding how and when these environmental changes occurred, and how they influenced past human settlement and behavior. Following in the footsteps of Henry P. Hansen, Ernst Antevs, and others, Pete searched nature’s archives extracting pollen, charcoal, and other macrobotanical remains from a variety of geological and archaeological contexts including dunes, spring mounds, caves, lakes, and marshes. In many of these ecological repositories were layers of volcanic ash that Pete recognized as important chronostratigraphic markers that could be used to help correlate archaeological sites and date environmental changes. Pete became involved in several archaeological projects including the Steens Mountain Prehistory Project and excavations at Hidden Cave. When it came time for the Great Basin volume in the Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians series to be written, Pete Mehringer would author the chapter on prehistoric environment.

In 1971 Pete moved to Pullman, Washington where he was hired as an Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at Washington State University (WSU). The Department had recently created a Quaternary Studies Option and assembled an interdisciplinary faculty where students could receive training in geoarchaeology, zooarchaeology, and palynology. Pete found a home in the Palouse and for decades was a guiding force for the department’s renowned environmental archaeology program. At WSU, Pete held a joint appointment with the Geology Department and taught a variety of classes ranging from palynology to the fundamentals of Western Civilization. Still legendary among his past students are the famous Mehringer marathon fieldtrips through the Intermountain West that stretched from Pullman to the Arizona-Mexican Border. While at WSU, Pete chaired six doctoral dissertations and 14 master theses, served on dozens of MA and Ph.D. committees, and survived hundreds of faculty meetings.

Pete expanded his research in the Pacific Northwest and northern Rocky Mountains working in a diversity of settings. At the Mannis Mastadon Site on the Olympic Peninsula, Pete helped to reconstruct climate and vegetation following the retreat of Cordilleran ice. In eastern Washington, the focus was on sediment cores from lakes and marshes and the reconstruction of vegetation following the last of the infamous Channeled Scablands floods. In 1987 when the East Wenatchee Clovis Cache was discovered in central Washington, Pete took the initiative to carefully excavate the site and establish stratigraphic age-control. A dearth of carbon suitable for 14C dating limited attempts to date the site. However, detailed granulometric analyses and Pete’s keen eye led to the discovery of fine-sand pumice fragments in the soil matrix directly underneath the artifacts. These pumice fragments were chemically correlated to the 11,200 ¹⁴C yr B.P. Glacier Peak event indicating that the cache was interred shortly after the eruption.

If Pete wasn’t dating archaeological sites with tephra, then he was dating tephra with his lake cores. Indeed, Pete’s has contributed much to understanding the age, distribution, and stratigraphy of numerous late-Quaternary volcanic eruptions in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Not content with pollen, charcoal, and tephra, Pete considered detrital remnant magnetism of lake sediments and their variation through time. His paleomagnetic research on lake core sediments has helped reconstruct late-Quaternary secular variation in the Earth’s geomagnetic field.

Although Pete is perhaps best known for his work in western North America, he has also worked in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the 1970s he made several trips to North Africa collaborating with the Egyptian Geological Survey in helping to reconstruct late Quaternary environments. Working with Fred Wendorf in 1973, Pete was captivated by the hyperarid eastern Sahara. He produced useful paleoecological reconstructions based upon pollen and stratigraphy at remote oases of Merga and Selima in northern Sudan and at Birqet Qarun in Egypt. In the process Pete became an expert driver of Volkswagen “Things” in negotiating the hyperarid desert. Many young scientists of the Egyptian Geological Survey profited from his instruction. Another great disappointment for Pete was the loss in transit of all of the stratigraphically controlled samples from the 1981 field season in Sudan and Egypt. Somewhere someone acquired a large crate in a ship’s container filled with many bags of sediment. Containing no gold or silver, they were probably discarded in disgust.

Later, Pete traveled to China and collaborated with scientists as he visited the archaeological remains of past dynasties. Most recently, Pete has worked in Central America, extracting lake cores to help archaeologists reconstruct and understand past environmental dynamics and their role in the rise and fall of the Mayan Empire. In his recent Quaternary Research paper, Pete and his colleagues shed light on the timing and geographic extent of prehistoric volcanic eruptions, including the catastrophic Ilopango event that caused death and destruction in parts of El Salvador and adjacent Guatamala in the third century A.D.

It is impossible to adequately summarize the many accomplishments Pete Mehringer has made to the fields of geoarchaeology and paleoecology. His mark has been made in many ways, from his numerous publications to his cadre of students who today are doing their part to unravel “secrets of the past”. Fortunately, Pete is still active and continues to do research from his outpost in southeastern Oregon. He is an international scholar whose work continues to represent the highest standards of science. Thus we are pleased to announce that Pete Mehringer is the 2006 recipient of the Rip Rapp Archaeological Geology Award.

  2006 Rip Rapp Archaeological Geology Award - Response by Peter J. Mehringer

Upon receiving the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature Ernest Hemingway responded by deferring to others whom he felt should have been considered before him; they included Carl Sandberg and Karen Blixen. Never — in my wildest dreams — did I expect to receive the Rip Rapp Award, and my response mirrors that of Hemingway’s.

Though surprised — flabbergasted even — I am honored to join the illustrious list of those achieving this recognition. I am much inclined, however, to share the acclaim with those who supported me along the way. Foremost among them is Paul S. Martin. John Lance and Paul Damon, the other members of my University of Arizona Ph.D. committee, tolerated and encouraged me through those stimulating years when the cult of Antevs, the causes of arroyo cutting, and the intensity and timing of Holocene climate change were foremost on the minds of Southwestern archaeologists. The combination of advisors from biogeography, vertebrate paleontology and isotope geochemistry could not have come to pass without the vision of Ted Smiley who instigated and guided the fledgling multidisciplinary Program in Geochronology.

As graduate students, Vance Haynes and I spent fun-filled hours walking Southwestern arroyos seeking secrets of the past. We hit the jackpot at Murray Springs, Arizona. Vance’s tutelage brought initial understandings of alluvial stratigraphy, chronology, and early man archaeology. Emil Haury sanctioned our renewed efforts at the Lehner Mammoth site (American Antiquity 1965). Dick Shutler encouraged me to cut interdisciplinary teeth on the search for the truth of earliest Americans at Tule Springs, Nevada.

Meanwhile at Washington State University, Dick Daugherty established an archaeology-based interdisciplinary Quaternary Studies Option. Certainly — for me — the University of Arizona had been the right place at the right time. Luck struck a second time when I joined Bob Ackerman, Henry Irwin, Frank Leonhardy, Roald Fryxell, and Carl Gustafson in professing holistic notions of human history. At WSU I learned from all of them, from ensuing WSU Anthropology Department geoarchaeologists (Fred Nials, Fekri Hassan and Gary Huckleberry), and from their students. Several colleagues remain generous with their knowledge and cooperative in research (Nick Foit, Ken Verosub, and Andrei Sarna-Wojcicki).

Broader horizons came through associations with Fred Wendorf ‘s projects in the eastern Sahara, Fekri Hassan’s studies in northwestern Egypt, and Jay Hall’s invitation to study past environments in Central American. Mel Aikens introduced me to archaeology in China.

From my first Ph.D. student (Ken Petersen, who studied changing Holocene environments of southwestern Colorado) to the last (Bill Lyons, who established sources of tool stone and pottery temper in southeastern Oregon), students brought varied views and enthusiasm to classes, fieldwork and research. They remain sources of pride, information and inspiration.

So, there you have it. Through serendipity of time and place, and the interdisciplinary visions of Ted Smiley and Dick Daugherty, I am privileged to share the Geological Society of America’s 2006 Rip Rapp Award with mentors, colleagues and students of nearly five decades.

Thank you.