Anthropology Department Associate Professor Carl Lipo received a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to research the cultural transmission of ceramic technology among hunter-gatherer populations of California's Owens and Death valleys.
Native American pot sherds reveal the history of California
prehistoric desert populations.
Lipo and UC Davis faculty member Jelmer Eerkens are performing laboratory measurements on prehistoric ceramics collected from the two valleys so that each broken piece can be placed in time.
"The funding primarily supports graduate and undergraduate students to conduct research in the lab and gives them hands-on experience making luminescence measurements and calculations," Lipo pointed out. "We will use luminescence dating to determine the timing of new pottery types, instrumental neutron activation analysis to examine how the composition of the pots changed and measurements of form to study how pot shapes varied in the study areas."
These analyses will enable Lipo to measure fine-scaled changes in prehistoric pottery technologies from their introduction about 1300 A.D. to their abandonment around 1840. "We'll know much more about how people used the landscape and how these deposits are related to each other in time."
