Qinghai Lake.
Contacts: Heather Emmons, DRI PIO, heather.emmons@dri.edu (775) 673-7313
All DRI News Releases available at: http://news.dri.edu/
June 24, 2004
Reporters and Editors, Please Note News Media Advisory:
DRI Paleoecologist David Rhode travels to Tibet for unique excavation study
|
|
|
| A traditional Tibetan house located near the Hiema He (Black Horse River), where several ancient firehearths were located. One of the firehearths has been radiocarbon dated, showing that Upper Paleolithic hunters had camped on this spot approximately 13,000 calendar years ago at the end of the last glacial period | Jeff Brantingham, principal investigator, points to the trace of the 13,000
year old firehearth buried in loess at Hiema He, near Qinghai Lake. |
An eager future archaeologist helps Brantingham expose the firehearth for detailed study (second from right). The firehearth, seen from the top. |
|
|
|
| Several other similar firehearths have been observed in the cutbank, and will be exposed during the upcoming trip. | On the road from Golmud up to the high Tibetan Plateau, with the glacier-laden Kunlun Mountains in the distance. Rhode and his group will be working at sites along the margins of the glaciers during this trip and will camp on the plateau to search for other archaeological sites containing evidence of Upper Paleolithic people in the high country. | During an earlier trip to Tibet, Rhode and his group work at an archaeological site at Kunlun Pass, the northern entryway to the Tibetan Plateau, at approximately 16,000 feet elevation |
WHO: DRI research professor David Rhode
WHAT: Major archaeological surveying and excavation activities during five-week trek across Tibetan Plateau. Rhode is part of a team in search of archaeological remains of Ice Age people and the environmental conditions in which they lived, a part of a three-year National Science Foundation project.
WHERE: Xining-Qinghai Lake, Golmud, Xidatan, High Plateau, Heimahe, Xining and Beijing, China
WHEN: Friday, June 25 - Sunday, August 1, 2004
HOW: Rhode will join Jeff Brantingham, principal investigator for the project from University of California, Los Angeles, as well as two other U.S. scientists, four students and four Chinese scholars on the trip. Rhode and Brantigham will have a cell phone with them and will be available for live interviews from Tibet, giving updates on their progress and what they have discovered.
Often called the "roof of the world," the Tibetan Plateau in China is the world's highest geological feature and poses serious challenges and questions to scientists like David Rhode. The team's trek will take Rhode to over 15,000 feet - surpassing the likes of Mt. Ranier in Washington and Mt. Whitney in California in height - which is a difficult elevation in which to unearth treasures from the late Pleistocene era, or the last Ice Age between 125,000 and 10,000 years ago. Rhode's task is to search for and unearth artifacts, like a 13,000-year-old firehearth that has been discovered near Qinghai Lake, as well as plant life, bones, tools and even core samples from small lakes to better understand when and how Ice Age people survived at such a high altitude in such a cold, arid climate. His group's research will help answer questions about what evolutionary and ecological processes led hunter-gatherers to occupy these extreme environments and what behavioral strategies facilitated successful human colonization.
A nonprofit, statewide division of the University and Community College System of Nevada, DRI pursues a full-time program of basic and applied environmental research on a local, national, and international scale. Nearly 400 full- and part-time scientists, technicians, and support staff conduct some 150 research projects at DRI annually. More than 80 percent of DRI's annual $37 million operating budget consists of research grants and contracts obtained by its scientists. The balance is received from the state of Nevada for administrative costs.