This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
A team of archaeologists and geologists at the Institute for Integrated Research in Materials, Environments, and Societies (IIRMES), California State University - Long Beach (CSULB) will use NSF funding to support research on ancient technology, economic interaction, ancient diets, and past environments. These investigations will be implemented through an outreach program that makes IIRMES instruments and expertise available on a collaborative basis to researchers from the US and abroad. IIRMES instruments used to study the human past include a scanning-electron microscope, three inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometers (ICP-MS), a laser ablation system for solid sample analysis via ICP-MS, a stable-isotope ratio mass spectrometer, and luminescence dating equipment. The current grant will fund purchase of a portable x-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer and an elemental analyzer for carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. The latter instrument will serve as a front-end for the stable-isotope ratio mass spectrometer, so that stable-isotope ratios can be determined in a variety of organic materials. Collaborating researchers participate in the IIRMES Archaeometry Program in two ways. First, submission and acceptance of a short proposal gains eligibility for subsidized analyses on one or more of IIRMES analytical instruments. The NSF subsidy pays for most of the costs of analysis, and the collaborating researchers pay a small per-sample cost for consumable supplies. For researchers who desire or need a more hands-on role in the analytical work, a fully subsidized short-term visiting researcher program is available. Participants in this program spend one to three weeks in Long Beach, during which they work closely with the project PIs in the generation and interpretation of analytical results. In the past, the visiting researcher program has been especially valuable for graduate students working on MA and Ph.D. theses, since they gain practical experience that they can take with them into their future professional careers. One major way in which analytical work at IIRMES promotes understanding of prehistory and history is through the determination of sources of stone-tool raw material, clays for ceramics, and metal ores. Once sources are identified, patterns of human-population movement and economic interaction can be reconstructed by comparing locations of discovery with the location of production determined via analysis. Although trace-element analysis via ICP-MS or XRF is the standard approach to such source-determination studies, stable isotopes can be useful for turquoise, marine-shell, bone, and ivory. Stable-isotope ratios are also useful in environmental reconstruction and dietary studies. For instance, enrichment of carbon-13 in a sediment core can be used as an indication of increasing maize and weedy species in a watershed, thus providing evidence to check the results of pollen studies. Oxygen-18 enrichment, meanwhile, can be a marker for rainfall variation in carbonates, such as speleothems and shells. And carbon and nitrogen isotopes are widely used in paleodietary studies of human bone and faunal remains. This project builds on a model of shared analytical resources that has served archaeology well during the past two decades. In this model, the NSF Archaeometry Program partially funds labs with demonstrated long-term commitments to collaborative archaeological research. With the NSF subsidy, analysis costs are much more affordable for academic researchers, so that it becomes practical to plan analytical efforts involving sample sizes large enough to address significant archaeological questions. The project will also have important impacts locally on the research and education environment at CSULB, a designated Hispanic-serving institution in the heart of the largest urban area on the west coast. Diverse CSULB students from departments in several colleges benefit from the opportunity to use state-of-the-art analytical instruments in geology, biology, chemistry, and archaeology, and in research projects that join one or more of these fields. Support for CSULB students and visiting researchers requested here helps populate the lab with committed researchers from a range of disciplines, which furthers IIRMES' interdisciplinary mission. This environment encourages students to ignore disciplinary boundaries that may restrict their scientific creativity.
