Congratulations to Patrick Bowen

I am pleased to congratulate Patrick Bowen, Michigan Technological University undergraduate student in Materials Science and Engineering.  Mr. Bowen won two major fellowship competitions and he was awarded funds for his ongoing collaborations studying rehydroxylation dating of archaeological ceramics.  He was awarded one of Michigan Tech's Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (SURF) Fellowships as well as a Michigan Space Consortium Undergraduate Research Fellowship.

Patrick has been an important part of the interdisciplinary research team that Jarek Drelich and I put together to assess this newly published dating technique.  Mr. Bowen, Helen Ranck, and Jessica Beck, three MTU undergraduates in the Departments of Materials Science and Social Science, did exceptional work designing tests to assess the usefulness of RHX Dating for the Utah Pottery Project.  Patrick is presenting the preliminary results of their analysis at MTU's 2010 Undergraduate Research Expo.

The SURF and MSC Fellowship programs are both very competitive and I am proud of Mr. Bowen for his successful applications!

We are waiting to hear decisions on the proposal I wrote to support more field research as well as a National Science Foundation proposal to support more research into Rehydroxylation Dating.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed on our outstanding proposals!

Rehydroxylation Dating-- 10-21-09 update

Our collaborating student researchers are making steady progress in their efforts to replicate the ceramic rehydroxylation dating technique published by Moira Wilson and her colleagues over the summer. If you wish to read all my posts about rehydroxylation, click here.

Helen Ranck, Patrick Bowen, and Jessica Beck have been working on different parts of the problem and they've learned a great deal so far.

Here is one of Helen's graphs that describes the mass gain of one of her test samples:

She and Patrick have been trying to find out the best way to keep the sherds at a constant temperature and atmosphere while the fragment absorbs water. Patrick has discovered some key changes in practice that have really helped reduce the variation in calculated dates, bringing the projections closer to our expectations. Jarek Drelich, associate professor in Michigan Tech's Materials Science and Engineering department, has been very helpful working with them both.

Jessica Beck has finished some of her testing. She calculated the porosity of a group of the sherds using a methodology outlined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Jessica discovered that the Davenports' earthenware ranges from 10%-15% porous, and that both the median and the mode will be around 13% or 14%. I'm looking forward to her final conclusions and her estimates on firing temperature as revealed through her other testing!