I’m thrilled to spotlight this year’s awardees from the Geoarchaeology division! These exceptional individuals have made a significant impact in their fields, and their dedication, innovation, and leadership truly inspire us all. We’re eager to celebrate them and honor this achievement! 🎉👏
The recipient of the 2024 Rip Rapp Archaeology Geology Award is…
Paula J. Reimer
Queen’s University Belfast
Rip Rapp Archaeology Geology Award
Dr. Paula Jo Lucas Reimer recently retired as Professor at Queen’s University Belfast and as Director of the 14 CHRONO Center for Climate, the Environment and Chronology. She began as a research assistant working in the Quaternary Isotope Laboratory at the University of Washington in 1977. This marked the start of a career-long focus for Reimer on radiocarbon dating and carbon-cycle topics, and especially improving the accuracy and precision of age determinations via a reliable calibration curve. Radiocarbon dating is fundamental to most pre-modern archaeology but also to a range of environmental sciences. Radiocarbon measurements require calibration in order to obtain calendar ages. Reimer was a co-author of the first widely used computer program, CALIB, for radiocarbon calibration (1986 – through current version 8) and has made it her life’s work to improve radiocarbon calibration for dating the last 55,000 years. In so doing, she has created a fundamental resource for archaeologists and scientists all around the world. In 1998 she was part of the authorship of the first IntCal curve, as well as completing her PhD on carbon cycle variations in a lake context, and from 2002 through the publication of the IntCal20 curve, Reimer led the IntCal working group responsible for internationally recognized calibration curves (moving to Belfast in 2004), producing the ever richer and more sophisticated IntCal04, IntCal09, IntCal13 and most recently IntCal20 curves. Another substantial contribution has been Reimer’s work on understanding and defining marine radiocarbon reservoir ages—highly relevant for accurate dating of coastal contexts and marine samples, and for wider oceanographic sciences.
“IntCal”, and the citation “Reimer et al.”, have become ubiquitous in many fields as her work underlies almost all absolute dating efforts in the late Pleistocene and Holocene, whether in archaeology, climate science, geomorphology, ocean systems, etc. Recognizing her exceptional scientific contributions, Reimer received among other awards the Lyell Medal (Geological Society of London, 2013), the Archaeological Institute of America Pomerance Award for Scientific Contributions to Archaeology (2021), the James Croll Medal from the Quaternary Research Association (2022), and was appointed Honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) (2022).
- Prof. Sturt W. Manning, Cornell University
We’d also like to highlight our two student awardees:
Spencer Chase
Willamette University
Richard Hay Award
Sophie Forbes
The University of Georgia
Claude C. Albritton, Jr. Award
Congratulations to our incredible awardees! 🌟 If you're interested in learning more about the Geoarchaeology awards, including how to nominate someone or apply, visit https://community.geosociety.org/geoarchdivision/awards.