Kuril Islands (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik Gjesfjeld.

Traditional archaeological analysis of pottery remains in East Asia has often emphasized macroscopic features of pottery including decoration, vessel form and paste composition. While these features are important in characterizing the cultural and technological aspects of pottery, microscopic and archaeometric analyses have the potential for enhancing traditional pottery research in this region by developing novel insights into social processes such as the transmission of information and...

DATASET Erik Gjesfjeld.

Descriptive data collected from 1115 archaeological pottery fragments from the Kuril Islands, collected as part of the Kuril Biocomplexity Project under Ben Fitzhugh, direction. The pottery analysis was conducted by Erik Gjesfjeld and this table of data comes from an appendix in his Ph.D. dissertation thesis titled: "Of Pots and People: Investigating Hunter-Gatherer Pottery Production and Social Networks in the Kuril Islands" filed in partial fulfillment of the PhD degree at the University of...

PROJECT Ben Fitzhugh.

A broadly interdisciplinary, international team investigated the complex web of cultural, ecological, geological, and climate systems in the Kuril Islands. The Kurils provide uniquely laboratory-like conditions for this study, permitting examination of past changes in local climates and ecosystems along an island chain. The islands are situated along a latitudinal gradient extending from temperate Hokkaido Island (north of Japan) to subarctic Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia. Evidence of human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hollis Miller. Erin Gamble. Darryl Holman. Ben Fitzhugh.

This paper introduces a method for probabilistically narrowing carbon 14 date ranges on wood charcoal samples by computing the likelihood of selecting a specific tree-age in a random sample of charcoal. Archaeologists and others often build chronologies on fragments of wood that are of unknown age prior to the death of the tree. Here we examine a way in which these sources of error could be mitigated through statistical analysis of tree growth rings. As a case study we analyze specific tree...