Erin Mathison uses geoarchaeology to better understand past life
As a geoarchaeologist, Erin Mathison specializes in delving into the nitty-gritty.
The first-year doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology studies soil geology to better understand the lives of past people. And she has a fitting field lab at Spring Lake, the headwaters of the San Marcos River and a jewel of the San Marcos Campus.
“Geoarchaeology is using geoscience to look at archaeological sites and understand how the development of soil and deposition of sediment have interplayed with people living on the landscape,” Mathison explains. “Sites like Spring Lake are important because we have a record of human occupation here for at least a 13,000-year time span. If we can understand how the environment changed and study that in tandem with the cultural material, we can understand the bigger picture of how human behavior and use of the site changed through time.”
Mathison completed her master’s degree in anthropology in August. For her thesis, she studied core samples that drew soil and rock from as deep as 35 feet below the surface in areas around Spring Lake. By analyzing traits like sediment particle size, organic material content, and magnetic susceptibility, she was able to characterize the different layers preserved in the core and identify potential flood events, erosion, and topsoil development, and their distribution north of the springheads.
Dr. Heather Smith, Mathison’s advisor and an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, says Mathison’s background as an archaeologist gives her the framework to better evaluate the geological context of archaeological deposits.
“As a Ph.D. student, she is taking her expertise even further as she studies not only geological processes that formed or erased archaeological sites, but also evidence for past environments and climates that influenced geomorphological processes and the potential for human habitation,” Smith says.
Mathison’s work caught the attention of the National Science Foundation, which awarded her a $159,000 Graduate Research Fellowship Program grant in July. The funding will cover three years of tuition and living expenses and also enable Mathison to start her dissertation. She intends to conduct her research in the volcanic uplands of the Alaskan Peninsula.
“It’s taking these same kinds of principles from Spring Lake and applying them to volcanic landscapes to understand human interaction with volcanic events, which are pretty catastrophic,” she says. “The goal is to build a paleoenvironmental record to help understand the environment that people were living in as they used those spaces.”
