Collaborative Research: Levantine geomagnetic field spike: How high, how fast, how far?

合作研究：黎凡特地磁场尖峰：多高、多快、多远？

• 批准号: 0944127
• 负责人: Thomas Levy
• 金额: $ 17.97万
• 依托单位: University of California-San Diego
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-05-01 至 2012-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0944127&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Levantine; geomagnetic; field

Mining activity has left enormous piles of material in numerous places around Europe and Asia spanning the last seven millennia. Because copper smelting requires melting of ore at high temperatures in furnaces, there is abundant charcoal intimately associated with the copper slag, enabling the direct dating of the archaeological debris. It turns out that metallurgical debris can retain an excellent record of the ancient geomagnetic field strength. This, combined with unprecedented ability to date the material, means that high resolution records of changes in field strength are now available to us. We have already documented a period of time in Jordan (10th century BCE) of extraordinarily high magnetic field strengths, nearly three times the present field. This geomagnetic field "spike" must have happened very quickly. Comparison of these data with those from nearby studies in Greece suggest that there is a significant discrepancy between the Grecian master curve and the data from Jordan. To assess the various possible causes for this discrepancy (e.g., extremely short wavelength features in the geomagnetic field, extremely high frequency temporal changes in the geomagnetic field missed, etc.), we are excavating a second site near to and co-eval with the site containing the "spike" and a co-eval site in Cyprus that has comparable material. The combination of archaeology and the study of the ancient geomagnetic field (paleomagnetism) is inherently interdisciplinary, with broad impacts in both disciplines. Interdisciplinary research is difficult in practice because graduate students need to become expert in their own fields and run the risk of becoming too broad at the expense of depth. We are handling this problem in our research by having two graduate students work closely together, each firmly rooted in one discipline but learning a great deal about the other discipline from the other student. The benefits of such interdisciplinary efforts are wide ranging. From the point of view of studying the geomagnetic field, an accurate picture of intensity changes on a global scale (a goal to which this project contributes but does not solve by itself) is essential for such different endeavors as "ground truthing" numerical models and understanding variations in the production of radiocarbon and the calibration of the radiocarbon time scale. From the archaeological perspective, placing archaeological materials in a tight temporal framework is always a challenge and our work is already being put to use to solve dating puzzles in archaeometallurgy.

过去七千年来，采矿活动在欧洲和亚洲的许多地方留下了大量的材料。由于铜冶炼需要在熔炉中高温熔化矿石，因此铜渣中含有丰富的木炭，可以直接对考古遗迹进行年代测定。 事实证明，冶金残骸可以保留古代地磁场强度的极好记录。 再加上前所未有的材料年代测定能力，意味着我们现在可以获得场强变化的高分辨率记录。 我们已经记录了约旦（公元前 10 世纪）一段时期的磁场强度极高，几乎是现在磁场的三倍。 这个地磁场“峰值”一定发生得非常快。 将这些数据与附近希腊研究的数据进行比较表明，希腊主曲线与约旦的数据之间存在显着差异。为了评估造成这种差异的各种可能原因（例如，地磁场中的极短波长特征、地磁场中遗漏的极高频时间变化等），我们正在挖掘靠近包含“尖峰”的地点的第二个地点，并与该地点共同评估，以及塞浦路斯的一个具有可比材料的共同评估地点。考古学和古代地磁场（古地磁学）研究的结合本质上是跨学科的，对两个学科都有广泛的影响。跨学科研究在实践中很困难，因为研究生需要成为自己领域的专家，并且冒着过于宽泛而牺牲深度的风险。 我们在研究中通过让两名研究生密切合作来解决这个问题，每个研究生都牢固地扎根于一个学科，但从另一个学生那里学到了很多关于其他学科的知识。 这种跨学科努力的好处是广泛的。 从研究地磁场的角度来看，全球范围内强度变化的准确图像（该项目贡献但本身无法解决的目标）对于诸如“地面实况”数值模型和了解放射性碳生产变化以及放射性碳时间尺度校准等不同努力至关重要。 从考古学的角度来看，将考古材料置于严格的时间框架中始终是一个挑战，我们的工作已经被用来解决考古冶金学中的年代测定难题。