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To Jordan and back
A career move has led Nancy Coinman on a journey to the Middle East
After 14 years as a public school teacher in California, Nancy Coinman
made a decision.
"I'd always wanted to be an archaeologist," she said.
Her desire was so great that she started taking classes at night. She quit
teaching junior high English literature and history and went back to graduate
school, eventually earning a Ph.D. from Arizona State. She was on the faculty
at the University of Tulsa for three years before joining the Iowa State
anthropology department in 1993.
It was a career move that the Iowa State associate professor of anthropology
hasn't regretted.
"I've gotten to travel to exotic places," she said, "and
I'm doing things I've always wanted to do."
One of those exotic places she has traveled to is Jordan where she's co-directing
a research project on the late Pleistocene. The ongoing fieldwork in the
Wadi al-Hasa involves the investigation of four Upper Paleolithic sites
that date from 40,000 to 20,000 years ago.
The study area encompasses a major drainage system leading into the Rift/Dead
Sea depression. A large lake and extensive marshes characterized the eastern,
upper end of the Hasa, an environment that was occupied intensively by prehistoric
hunters-gathers over some 30,000 to 40,000 years and represented archaeologically
by a dense distribution of sites.
"We have been focusing on investigating changing settlement patterns,
subsistence and technology of the prehistoric hunters-gathers," Coinman
said.
While Coinman worked in the area in the mid-'80s as a graduate student at
Arizona State, her own project began in 1997. The research is co-directed
by Coinman and Deborah Olszewski of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Students
from Iowa State, Arizona State, the University of Tulsa, the University
of Nevada-Las Vegas, and from Jordan are part of the research team which
is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation
among others.
Last summer, two Iowa State anthropology graduate students and one undergraduate
traveled to Jordan with Coinman where they worked for six weeks. The team
excavated at three major sites, including two at the lake region and one
at a rock shelter, which dated back 40,000 years.
"This is a great opportunity for our students," Coinman said.
"They can conduct research on some aspect for their own project. They
are very much a part of the research project."
Two of the sites have produced very large assemblages of animal bones and
teeth of wild cattle and horses, as well as relatively unique late Upper
Paleolithic tools. One of the sites has also indicated a rare Middle to
Upper Paleolithic transition.
Last summer alone, the research team uncovered 15,000 pieces of flint and
77 animal teeth.
"These sites have been particularly rewarding in information on stone
tool technology and human subsistence," Coinman said.
Around LAS
January 15-21, 2001
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