DIG Links
Developing International Geoarchaeology 2009 / Conférence Avances en Géoarchéologie Internationale 2009
May 25th-29th, 2009
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, CANADA
** Final Program is now available **
July 2009
DIG 2009 conference and workshop was a great success! Thank you to everyone who participated, and to our generous sponsors, and to everyone who provided support.
Please contact us no later than July 17th if you wish to participate in the DIG 2009 conference publication. The deadline for manuscript submission will be October 1, 2009.
Stay tuned for an online project gallery featuring the work of DIG 2009 participants!
May 2009
The deadline for abstract submission has now passed. The final conference program is now posted.
Geochemical Characterization in Archaeology Workshop
We are pleased to announce a Geochemical Characterization workshop using Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis. This workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to gain hands-on experience with INAA, to attend informal discussions led by researchers in this facility, and to learn about the practical applications of INAA in geoarchaeological research. The workshop fees include three days of analytical and safety training, sample preparation and analysis, guided tours of archaeometric facilities, informal lectures, lunches and much more!
Please click on the INAA workshop link above for more detailed information.
Keynote Address
The Keynote Speaker for this event is Dr. Ronald G.V. Hancock from the Department of Medical Physics and Applied Radiation Sciences and the Department of Anthropology, McMaster University. Dr. Hancock’s scientific contributions to Archaeology span almost four decades. After earning his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Chemistry at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, he came to Canada to pursue his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry at McMaster University, in Hamilton Ontario. He was immediately hired as the Slowpoke Reactor Supervisor at the University of Toronto in 1971, where he remained until the reactor’s closing in 1998, having being the nuclear reactor’s director for almost a decade. He continues to be actively involved in the world of archaeological sciences, although he officially retired in 1998. He is still serving on the committees of MA and PhD Anthropology students at McMaster University. He is a driving force behind the creation of dedicated facilities and procedures for Archaeometric studies at the McMaster Nuclear Reactor-Centre for Neutron Activation Analysis.
Dr. Hancock has used his expertise in chemistry to examine a multitude of archaeological materials (glass objects, ceramics, plasters, beads, stone tools and copper implements, as well as soils, teeth and bone samples, to name a few) from a wide variety of regions from around the world (North and South America, Europe, Near east, Asia, Australia and Africa), spanning both prehistoric and historic time periods. He has published more than 400 peer reviewed papers and book chapters. His research has contributed to answering questions that have varied from the technological capabilities of the Neanderthals, to questions of trade and exchange between Europeans and First Nations communities in Canada, to understanding ancient diets through the use of trace elemental contents in archaeological bone samples. Below is the title and abstract for his keynote address.
How good are our archaeometric data? A reassessment and reinterpretation of a published data set of shell tempered pottery
Caution must be used to ensure that a newly-produced ceramic data set is of the highest reliability possible, prior to data analysis. Since we match the elemental concentration fingerprints of samples to sort them into groups, miss-analyses or miss-recordings of elemental concentration data tend to produce chemical outliers whose elemental concentration fingerprints do not match others as they should.
Ceramics that produce chemical outliers are potentially interesting, since they may indicate some sort of trans-regional trade or exchange. When they occur singly, outliers are often rejected from further discussion and interpretation. But, when several appear they may be clumped together, if appropriate, to form a new chemical grouping.
For shell tempered pottery, care must be taken in the way we remove the effect of shell tempering. While the current method of correction, based on the measured Ca concentrations, works relatively well, it falls short when there are missing Ca data. A better approach might be to estimate the maximum Sc concentration in the data set and normallise the data set to this Sc concentration.
A shell-corrected data set from the literature is used to illustrate the above points. Data are corrected using combinations of bivariate plots, and prayer.
Inspection of the corrected data shows that it is possible that minor geochemical differences among wares from a small geographic region may be used to separate them using a small number of elements.