Using Ramped Pyrolysis and Oxidation (RPO) to Date and Characterize Geoarchaeological Deposits: A Pilot Study from the Ancient Mesopotamian City of Ur

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Geoarchaeological sediments represent robust archives of human-environment interactions. Given the growing importance of paleoenvironmental research in anthropology and the absence of critical chrono-stratigraphic and ecological evidence from challenging contexts/regions, opportunities to refine chronological frameworks through novel instrumentation are desirable. We report on the application of a uniquely suited thermal fractionation method, Ramped Pyrolysis and Oxidation (RPO), to extract chronological and paleoenvironmental proxy data from geoarchaeological samples when coupled to radiocarbon and stable carbon analyses. RPO, developed at the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (NOSAMS) facility in Woods Hole, MA, was initially created to date and explore the chemical composition of carbon-poor sediments from the Arctic seafloor. As a proof of concept, we used RPO to analyze recently collected sediment samples from exposed archaeological sections at Ur, Tell Muqayyer, an important Mesopotamian city in southern Iraq. Sir Leonard Woolley excavated deep pits at Ur in the 1920s and dated their strata through ceramic sequencing. Ultimately, we compared RPO results with Woolley's interpretations to evaluate the method's potential for chronology building in archaeology. We also discuss the prospects and limitations of RPO more broadly based on additional measurements from the site and region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41512.0