| Recipient | Danielle McLean |
|---|---|
| Date | 01 April, 2024 |
| Amount | £8000.00 |
| Summary | A North Africa Postdoctoral Writing Fellowship Award We have located numerous microscopic volcanic ash (cryptotephra) layers preserved within key Palaeolithic sites in NW Africa. This writing fellowship will produce a high-impact paper demonstrating that these offer a powerful method of linking and dating the rich archaeological sequences. The paper will outline the stratigraphic context of the newly identified cryptotephra and their unique geochemical fingerprints. The geochemistry (major and trace elements) permit the distal ash to be correlated to specific eruptions in the North Atlantic (e.g., Azores, Canary Islands). Using newly obtained and published 14C dates for the eruptions, updated Bayesian age-models for the archaeological sequences are generated, facilitating new insights into the timing and onset of early human behaviours. Moreover, the co-located ash layers also identified in the offshore marine cores (ODP 958B), allow precise comparisons of these cultural transitions and past climate variability, which we can discuss for the first time. |
