Dennis Jenkins

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Dennis L. Jenkins is an American archaeologist and excavation supervisor at the University of Oregon State Museum of Anthropology / Museum of Natural and Cultural History Research Station .

Life

Jenkins earned a BA in 1977 and a Master of Arts in 1981 from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas . From 1982 to 1985 he was excavation director at the Fort Irwin Archaeological Project . The work carried out there in the Mohave Desert in southeast California in the layers of the Pleistocene and Holocene formed the basis of his later doctoral thesis.

In 1986, Jenkins began working in the Fort Rock Basin , a dry maar in Oregon. In 1987 he was hired by the Oregon State Museum of Anthropology. At the same time, he conducted archaeological research for the Oregon Department of Transportation . He received his PhD from the University of Oregon in 1991.

Jenkins has also served as a Chautauqua teacher since 2000, teaching the people of Oregon the techniques used to study the migratory movements of the early inhabitants of America.

Researches

Jenkins' research focuses on the indigenous peoples of America, especially the hunters and gatherers in the Great Basin in the desert states of the southwestern United States. His finds of tools made of obsidian and their age determination by re-hydroxylation brought new knowledge about the inhabitants of the basin.

Jenkins resumed digging the layers of settlement in the Paisley Caves in Lake County in the desert of Oregon , where Luther Sheeleigh Cressman was already digging. The human remains from the excavation findings led four years after the excavations by means of radiocarbon dating to the result that the oldest human remains dated in this way are here. The Danish researcher Eske Willerslev used human coprolites (excrement) found in the caves , whose mitochondrial DNA ( mtDNA ) was examined by means of mass spectrometry . He came to the conclusion that the cave dwellers came from the haplogroups A2 and B2 and lived at Lake Chewaucan 12,300 carbon years before today ( Before Present ), i.e. approx. 1,000 years before the people from the Clovis culture .

Publications (selection)

  • PhD Thesis: Site Structure and Chronology of 37 Mojave and Pinto Assemblages from Two Large Multicomponent Sites in the Central Mojave Desert, Southern California
  • Associate Editor: Archaeological Researches in the Northern Great Basin: Fort Rock Archeology Since Cressman , University of Oregon Anthropological Papers No. 50, 1994
  • ditto: Early and Middle Holocene Archeology of the Northern Graet Basin , University of Oregon Anthropological Papers No. 62, 2004
  • as co-author: Oregon Archeology . Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, Oregon, USA 2011, ISBN 978-0-870716065 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Anyone who touches this should wear gloves in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , July 3, 2011, page 26
personal data
SURNAME Jenkins, Dennis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jenkins, Dennis L. (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American archaeologist and excavation director
DATE OF BIRTH around 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH United States