Academic Posters and Projects

One of the first projects I worked on during my graduate studies was a multi-analytical approach to determining the chemistry of concretions discovered in a test pit on the coast of Guatemala. The strata that the concretion were found in date to the Early Formative period from around 1800 to 1500 B.C. The hypothesis is that these concretions are calcareous floors made from burned and crushed shell. I used several techniques to determine the chemistry of these floors including loss on ignition, x-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, and laser ablation inductively coupled mass spectroscopy. The results of the study showed that the floors were predominately calcium carbonate, silica, and alumina. Diatoms and pieces of shells were seen in some of the images of the floors taken with the SEM.

Analyses of Early Formative Calcareous Floors from Albeño 2 in Escuintla, Guatemala

Another project I worked on was a part of a class called Archaeology Field Research Design and Methods. The class went out to Zzyzx, California in the Mojave Dessert to do geophysical surveys of known sites. One of the sites we surveyed was SBR-05417. Both GPR and Magnetometry surveys picked up some pretty interesting anomalies. We generated a isopleth map of the elevation of the area and plotted the position of artifact clusters in our GPS. The project I worked on involved correlating the position of these artifacts in relation to the anomalies detected with the geophysical instruments as well as the elevation and slope of the landscape. This project was in part a pilot study for the analysis that I am doing for my thesis which attempts to relate artifact densities with potential subsurface structure detected with GPR and Magnetometry at El Baul in Santa Lucia Cotzumalguapa, Guatemala. A link to the poster regarding the Zzyzx data is located below.

Comparing the Spatial Distribution of Surface Artifacts to Subsurface Features Detected with Ground Penetrating Radar and Magnetometry

One of the largest projects I worked on during my academic career at CSULB involved measuring shell temper variability in Mississippian period undecorated ceramics from the lower Mississippi River Valley. The idea is that variability in attributes of shell temper in ceramics is directly related to modes of ceramic manufacture including temper preparation, vessel thickness, and vessel function. Some of the attributes of shell temper is obviously related to function including temper size and density where larger particles and a greater abundance are needed for vessels of greater thickness. But, attributes such as shape and angularity are more likely related to stylistic attributes such as modes of processing temper before introducing it into the ceramic paste and modes of vessel formation (e.g. coiling, piecemeal, etc.).

In this project I tested both functional and stylistic attributes of shell temper in these ceramics using a small digital microscope and the open source software ImageJ to quantify temper variability. The most interesting observation that I made in this study was a significant correlation between the distribution of temper variability among assemblages (collections from particular sites) and the distribution of decorated ceramic types from the same collections. Sites that shared similar distributions of ceramic types also exhibited similar distributions of temper variability.

The poster that I generated from this research project was presented at the 2008 Annual Society for American Archaeology conference in Vancouver, BC. A link to download the poster is listed below.

Digital Images Processing of Shell Temper Variability in Late Prehistoric Ceramics from the Lower Mississippi River Valley