Obituary, Solveig A. Turpin (1936–2020)

The Plains lost a premier rock art archaeologist with the passing of Solveig A. Turpin, PhD (1936–2020). Solveig is best known for her Texas research into Lower Pecos archaeology and, in particular, the Pecos River style of rock art for the region. Her career spanned over 40 years, beginning at the Texas Archeological Survey (TAS) at The University of Texas, Austin. At TAS she worked alongside Dr. David S. Dibble and later assumed the directorship when Dave retired. She continued at the helm of the contracting branch of the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory as it morphed into the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory – Sponsored Projects (TARL-SP). Solveig later opened her own Cultural Resource Management (CRM) firm when the University withdrew from conducting archeological contracting projects in the early 1990s (Figures 1 and 2). Throughout her career, Solveig balanced CRM projects with more scholarly research endeavors. She was particularly successful at cultivating private sponsors to fund her research in the Lower Pecos region as well as across the US border in Mexico. Her love for this region of stark contrasts between the arid environment and the lush resources along the waterways began as a contract to conduct pedestrian survey of the Seminole Canyon State Park owned by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. That project would form the core of her PhD dissertation and solidify a research focus on the lifeways of huntergatherers who not only adapted to arid lands but thrived in this region. Building on the research of others, including Walter W. Taylor and his concept of tethered nomadism, where people under climate stress are tethered to water sources, Solveig’s research wrestled with the apparent incongruities of increased aridity in a region dominated not by scarce water resources, but by three major riverways. Perhaps the most enigmatic aspect of this adaptation was the development of a monumental polychrome rock art tradition known today as the Pecos River style. The rock art tradition developed and flourished against a backdrop of a subsistence regime focused on arid lands plant and small animal exploitation that persisted, seemingly unchanged, for millennia. The pictographs included monumental depictions of stylized human figures and animals with attendant smaller figures and items of adornment. Solveig’s field projects revealed that the distribution of parietal art motifs were just as useful in defining the territory of the Lower Pecos cultural region as the distinctive projectile points contained in site deposits. Solveig’s research was multi-tiered: documenting the development, distribution, and composition of parietal art; place this art within the archaeological context of environment, subsistence, technology, and ideology; and form a synthetic view of the history of hunter-gatherer adaptations in this region. The ideational aspects of this adaptation would dominate. By shifting the paradigm away from aspects of environmental determinism and subsistence technology (the “you are what you eat” paradigm), Solveig’s research illuminated the development of the social construct of a lifeway and worldview imbued in shamanism. plains anthropologist, Vol. 66 No. 258, May 2021, 175–178