1994-donahue

1994 Rip Rapp Geological Archaeology Award

presented to JACK DONAHUE

Citation by JULIE STEIN


Jack Donahue’s life changed in 1973. Before that time he was happily working as a well-respected petrologist and reconstructor of depositional environments. He had published his research on the laboratory growth of pisolite grains in 1965, and completed his dissertation, at Columbia University in 1967, on the Salem Limestone of south-central India. Jack dabbled in the scanning electron imagery of sand-grain surface textures in 1968 while a lecturer and assistant professor at Queens College, and while continuing his interest in limestones branched out into burrow morphology when he joined the University of Pittsburgh in 1970 as an assistant professor. During the next few years, Jack began his collaboration with Bud Rollins, examining marine transgressive-regressive sequences and paloeecological reconstructions. All of this was traditional research for a promising sedimentary petrologist. But he never suspected what was to come from meeting a colleague at the University of Pittsburgh, a young archaeologist names Jim Adovasio.

Adovasio had found a rock shelter in Pennsylvania, located in a sandstone outcrop. He asked local petrologists to "come on out to the site and take a look." Yes, it was sandstone, so Jack decided to poke around and help out a little. From 1975 to 1994 Jack Donahue has published or co-published 20 articles about Meadowcroft rock shelter (and that does not include contract reports or papers at conferences). Little did Jack know that the simple act of answering the phone that day would lead not only to so many publications but also a new career.

With the work at Meadowcroft came a new direction to jack’s life. He began to explore this new interdisciplinary relationship with archaeology on many different fronts. His first big enterprise was the Dead Sea Archaeological Expedition in Jordan, where he investigated the geoarchaeological aspects of Early Bronze Age sites in 1977 to 1981. He combined his Old World experience with work in the Western Hemisphere. He and his students worked on the Little Platte River from 1978 to 1980; Moche and Chimu sites in northern Peru in 1987; China in 1988; Rio Jama and Rio de la Plata in Ecuador and Columbia in 1991; and Yautepec, Mexico, in 1993.

Throughout these wanderings, as he reconstructed depositional environments and paleogeography, modeled terrace sequences, and analyzed alluvial and coastal settings. Jack continued to ply his trade as a petrologist. The subjects of his petrographic examination had changed. They were now ceramics, not rocks. He examined Bronze Age sherds in Jordan, Woodland sherds from the eastern United States, sherds from St. Catherine’s Island, Georgia, and from the northern Lesser Antilles. He used his skills to further the field of ceramic petrography, and he has published extensively on this subject.

Another research area that Jack pioneered was within the arena of geoarchaeolgical applications to cultural resource managements. Jack was the staff geoarchaeologist at the Center for Cultural Resources Management program at the University of Pittsburgh from 1976 to 1990, and he continues this tradition at the Center fro Cultural Resources Research since 1991, within the Department of Anthropology. In this capacity, he has produced hundreds of reports to contracting agencies and has even acted as an expert witness in two important cases involving the theft of artifacts from public lands. Jack’s ability to team up with cultural resource managers has been a model for many of us who have taken up the effort in the years following his work.

All of us owe a debt of gratitude not only to Jack, but to Him Adovasio for diverting Jack Donahue’s interest from traditional petrology toward geoarchaeology. Not only did Jack conduct all the valuable research I have just mentioned, but he also did a tremendous amount of service for the new, growing field of geoarchaeology. In 1978 Jack ran the first field trip sponsored by the newest division of GSA, the Archaeological Geology Division. The division was officially recognized by GSA in 1977, and for this trip jack took everyone to see (what else) Meadowcroft Rockshelter. He followed the field trip by becoming the vice chair and chair of the division in 1979 and 1980. These were the first years of the division, a time when everyone was wondering if the infant discipline would survive. Jack was on of those who nursed it to health nearly 20 years ago.

Perhaps Jack’s greatest contribution in the area of service was to create the first journal devoted exclusively to the subject of geoarchaeology, the International Journal of Geoarchaeology, published by John Wiley. He was its sole editor from 1985 until he passed the baton to Paul Goldberg and Ofer Bar Yosef this year. We are all grateful for the work that he did in his ten years as editor. In this same vein, Jack became one of the editors of the DNAG (Decade of north American Geology) volume entitled The Archaeological Geology of North America, published in 1990. Jack and Norm Lasca created a volume of 35 chapters that still constitutes the largest single source of references about geoarchaeology, thus establishing geoarchaeology as one of the respected research areas within the Geological Society of America.

Not all of us attended or participated in the birth of geoarchaeology in the early 1970s or are aware that in Pennsylvania a young archaeologist was cajoling a young petrologist to come over and take a look at a sandstone Rockshelter. But from that moment, the discipline of geoarchaeology was forever changed.


Response by JACK DONAHUE

I am both surprised and pleased to receive the Rip Rapp Archaeological Geology Division Award. I would like to outline the evolution of my career, and talk about the events and people who helped me become a geoarchaeologist. In thinking back through the past, I feel that both people and ideas influenced the route I chose to travel. I want to thank up front all the archaeologists with whom I have collaborated, for, without their contributions, I would not have developed the diversity of research topics that enriched my career as a geoarchaeologist.

My parents, Ruth and Len, were the first to influence me by their strong interest in nature and the outdoors. They have inquiring minds and often asked me to think about the "how" or "why" or natural phenomena. We took family camping vacations in the 1950s in Colorado, Montana, and Canadian Rockies, showing me at the early age the splendor of the mountains. This was quite an awakening, as I was growing up on the flat, Pleistocene plains of Illinois.

I attended the University of Illinois as an undergraduate, and with my first course in physical geology, I knew I had found my life’s work, and I declared geology as my major. Two people stand out in my memory from years at Illinois. The first was F. Michael Wahl, a young Ph.D. who taught an excellent course in mineralogy. He kindled such excitement with his daemonic lectures I was seriously considering mineralogy or geochemistry as a research area. The second person who strongly influenced me was F.H. T. Rhosed, a visiting professor of paleontology from Swansea, Wales. He introduced me to the delights of paleontology and paloeoecology and suggested I attend graduate school at Columbia University, where I could study with John Imbrie, one of the leading researchers in paleoecology. As I was a recipient of a National Science Foundation fellowship, I was able to go to Columbia, where the big city changed my life forever! At Columbia, I completed a Ph.D. dissertation on the depositional environments of the Salem Limestone, a Mississippian-age limestone in southern Indiana used extensively for building stone. One of my locations was the rather large quarry from which the stone had come to build the window sills for the Empire State Building. The study of Salem gave me a thorough grounding in reconstruction of depositional environments and thin-section petrography, both of which have carried over into my geoarchaeological research. At. Columbia, I met a fellow graduate student, in marine geology. Jessie and I were married while in graduate school. Considering that we will celebrate out 30th wedding anniversary in January 1995, we have managed to season a happy marriage with a lot of spicy geological discussion. She has helped me throughout my career with encouragement and discussions of research topics. She has also participated in geoarchaeologic filed work and continually challenged me intellectually.

I left New York City in 1970 to accept a teaching position in the geology department at the University of Pittsburgh. A friend and fellow colleague from Columbia had preceded me there, and we were excited to continue together some research directions he had started. Bud Rollins and I worked quite a few years on the paleoecology and depositional environments of the thin marine limestone intercalated in the largely nonmarine fluvial coal measures that are the exposed bedrock in western Pennsylvania.

In 1973, a graduate student in anthropology, Joel Gunn, approached one of our graduate students, Lido DeGasparis, to see if anyone in the geology department would be interested in some cooperative research. Jim Adovasio, with the Department of Anthropology in Pittsburgh, was conducting the summer field school in a large, sandstone rock shelter near Meadowcroft Village. I agreed to take a look at the site, as I am always interested in new research topics. I met Jim Adovasio at the shelter and took four sediment samples from the colluvial slope beneath the rock shelter. I wrote a short summary of my findings and went back to work on the real rocks, my Pennsylvania limestones. Several moths later, a very excited Jim Adovasio called me to say that the radiocarbon dates from the deepest part of the excavation, at that time about two meters, were coming back at 8000-9000 years B.P. Because I was working on limestones that were 250 to 260 million years ole, the full import of his statement did not register.

However, Meadowcroft did not go away. Jim needed more information about the geology, and because some radiocarbon dates from deeper parts of the excavation proved to be in excess of 10,000 years B.P., the site was beginning to emerge as a very important one. By this time, I had learned more about archaeology and recognized the significance of the older dates. I became a regular visitor at the site and collaborated with Jim for many years. My word at Meadowcroft revealed a great deal about mechanisms of sedimentation in sandstone rock shelters and was even more fascinating than Pennsylvanian limestones. From that point on, I never looked back.

In conjunction with the archaeological mitigation program at Pitt, I also investigated sandstone rock shelters in eastern Kentucky and northeastern Mississippi. My studies of sandstone rock shelters were largely completed by 1986 and have, I hope, expanded our understanding of the erosional and depositional dynamics of sandstone rock shelters.

Concurrently with my research at Meadowcroft, I was invited in 1977 by Tom Shaub, a biblical archaeologist at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, to join an ongoing excavation in the Dead Sea rift in Jordan. The southeast Dead Sea Archaeological Expedition had been working on some Early Bronze sites and was interested in learning more about the past landscapes and climates. This started a long collaboration among Tom Shaub, Walt Rast (another biblical archaeologist), and myself. I spent time in the field in Jordan in 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1989. This research direction was new for me and involved landscape reconstruction in a tectonically active area and an arid climate. I also began a petrographic study of thin sections of Early Bronze potsherds. This study continues today as a Ph.D. dissertation by one of my students.

In 1982, Jim Richardson, of the Department of Anthropology at Pitt, asked me to do some field work in Peru. He was collaborating with Mike Moseley, an archaeologist now at the University of Florida. Bud Rollins and I visited Moche and Chemu sites in northern Peru. I was struck by the similarity of the desert environment with that of the Dead Sea and realized that the occupants of the sites in both Peru and Jordan had used similar construction and water management techniques. I don’t know if this constitutes the field of paleoethonogeoarchaeology or not.

The late 1970s were the time when I realized that I had become a geoarchaeologist. Peter Storck of the royal Ontario Museum and I organized and led one of the first field trips for the Archaeological Geology Division at the joint GSA-GAC meeting in Toronto, and I served as vice chair and chair for the division in 1979 and 1980. In 1979 I also began a joint appointment in geology and anthropology at Pitt, a position that I still hold.

In 1983, at the Atlanta GSA meeting, I met Rhodes Fairbridge who asked me if I was interested in founding and editing a journal dealing with geoarchaeology. As usual, I was interested in trying something new and said yes. We met with a publisher who was interested in the project. Two publishers and three years later, the first issue of Geoarchaeology appeared. The journal began as a quarterly solidly in the red, went into the black in the fifth year of publication and expanded to a bimonthly with the seventh volume. After serving as editor for ten years, I knew that I was "burning out" and am very happy that Paul Goldberg and Ofer Bar-Yosef have taken over as co-editors for volume ten. Also during the early 1980s, I made the mistake of agreeing to organize and edit the GSA DNAG Centennial Special volume on archaeological geology. Since editing geoarchaeology and drawing together manuscripts for the Centennial volume were relatively small efforts at this time, I thought I could manage both. I had received a letter from Norm Lasca, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, saying he would be interested in co-editing the volume. As both projects grew in size, I contacted Norm to ask for his help. I will always be grateful to Norm because he is the person who drew together and finalized the editing of the DNAG volume.

Beginning in the early 1980s, I began shifting my field studies to Central and South America, both to look at the younger sites int eh Western Hemisphere and to see different environmental settings.

In 1984, Dave Watters asked me to work with him on the island of Barbuda, a small, remote island in the Northern Lesser Antilles near Antigua. Dave is an archaeologist with the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, and had already put in several years work on Barbuda. I made several field visits to the island and looked at old strand lines on a carbonate platform. I also became interested in petrographic studies of Barbuda potsherds. The temper in the ceramics was volcanic, and as the island is all carbonate, is, like a detective game! The volcanic inclusions and temper offer the potential for fingerprinting sherds in order to track trade and exchange routes through the island.

In 1992, I began a study in coastal Ecuador with Him Ziedler and John Issachson, both at the University of Illinois. My work has concentrated on fluvial sequences containing Valdivia sites. All the sedimentary sequences are aggradational in nature, beginning with point bar sands and gravels and working up to floodplain sediments containing paleosols. We are now plotting the stratigraphic sections at a number of localities on a time rather than a sediment-thickness axis. Because we have several dated volcanic ashes in the sections, this is a relatively easy task and one we feel is worth pursuing, because it will add an important time perspective to a stratigraphic section, showing how long any environmental setting was available for human occupation.

I want to close with three comments. The first is that in the past 20 years, the Archaeological Geology Division has certainly become my home at GSA meetings. Second, I want to emphasize that my work over the past 20 years has been aided and abetted by a long list of archaeologists, all of whom I thank for without them I would not have arrived at where I am today. Third, I originally defined geoarchaeology as an interface between geology and archaeology. Ideally, though more difficult to achieve, geoarchaeology is the interactive or synergistic interface where contributions from a geologist and archaeologist create a final product greater than could be achieved by either one alone.