Achievement

UW IPEM Trainee Erik Gjesfjeld has been an active contributor to research synthesis and outreach activities for the IPEM-affiliated Kuril Islands Biocomplexity Project. He has also developed his own set of collaborators in the analysis of pottery from the Kuril Islands, including Russian and Japanese scholars, ICP-MS/INAA labs and technicians involved in pXRF analyses. He has become a sophisticated material sciences analyst in his own right and is sought after to provide expertise by other students interested in learning to use pXRF equipment. As a result of these collaborations he has developed a geochemical database of pottery remains from the Kuril Islands and an iterative regression program for predicting location of archaeological samples based on their geochemical signatures.