Published: Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Although Hector Neff and Carl Lipo, two Cal State Long Beach anthropology professors, were recently awarded grants to further their research, a large number of anthropology classes are on the chopping block.

Neff, the principal investigator for the Institute for Integrated Research in Materials, Environments and Society at CSULB was awarded $295,226 from the National Science Foundation. Lipo will soon be awarded $310,000. Both grants will be in effect until 2012.

“Getting two grants in a row — it is pretty incredible,” Neff said.

Both professors had to write proposals to NSF and compete against other institutions and schools, such as Stanford University and California Institution of Technology.

“We are doing what we are supposed to be doing; we are bringing the funding and providing research possibilities to students,” Neff said.

IIRMES will be using some of the money to purchase new research equipment such as a laser fluorination system, which will be used to do research on rocks and bricks in order to get the mineral information.

“It will also provide enough money to pay for the expertise to keep the lab running,” said Gregory Holk, a geology associate professor at CSULB and IIRMES co-principal investigator.

The IIRMES lab is used in collaboration by biology, anthropology and geology departments at CSULB.

“Grants allow support — anything that benefits the lab benefits the whole,” said Hayley Zemel, a biology graduate student.

Holk said the instrumentation about the research and lab work is utilized for archaeology findings. According to Holk, there is about $5.5 million in instruments at IIRMES. With the use of a scanning electron microscope, the research facility is able to view small images by using high magnification.

Holk is focusing on light isotope work at IIRMES. The research makes it possible to study the diets of ancient civilizations.

Holk said that by removing the plaque build-up from discovered skeletons, they can look at what the people ate. Each food has a different isotope level of carbon and by studying it, they are able to tell what the ancients ate, such as if it was grain or corn.

The lab has one of two time-of-flight mass spectrometers, which is sought by many researchers. The machine can tell the concentration of an element from archaeological findings such as pottery, Holk said.

“It is important to know the chemical composition of the pottery; it is their form of fingerprints,” Holk said.

However, many undergraduate and graduate students from the anthropology department at CSULB will not be able to work at the research facility.

“Last year, 16 classes were eliminated from the anthropology curriculum,” Neff said. “These classes were the ones that would educate and prepare students in order to work in the lab and prepare them to utilize the equipment, and for future employment.”

The classes were taken off the schedule but may still be offered in future semesters. The College of Liberal Arts and Academic Senate, however, may later decide to eliminate the courses entirely, according to Lipo.

“We are being restricted on the students we can teach,” Lipo said.

Neff said the instructors are told they cannot teach students certain subjects, which they need to learn for future employment.

“The main issues are people’s perception of the sciences. How do we co-habitat — there are many branches of study in the archaeology department,” Lipo said.

There are a lot of difficulties because the work Lipo and Neff are doing are based in science, while those in the liberal arts have a different perspective, Holk said.

Holk said this is the best place for master’s students to go, and that the department has as many instruments as well-funded research labs.

Many master’s students from CSULB are losing out on this opportunity, he said.

Neff mentioned that he has had to get students from other universities to work at IIRMES, such as Cal States Dominguez Hills and Fullerton.

“When the committee decided to eliminate the 16 classes they did not even know what they were eliminating — they only had class numbers in front of them,” Neff said.

Every January, Neff usually takes a group of graduate students to Guatemala to do field research. This coming January, he will not be able to go on the trip.

Neff said, “There are not enough students who know how to use the equipment properly, I need at least some students who know what they are doing.” 

CSULB Group Receives $292,226 Grant to Fund Collaborative Research at Institute for Integrated Research in Materials, Environments, Society

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $292,226 grant to a research team at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) to fund collaborative research at the university’s Institute for Integrated Research in Materials, Environments and Society (IIRMES).

Awarded through NSF’s Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, the grant is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.  The project, which runs through July 2012, will include research on ancient technology and diets, economic interaction and past environments.

“These investigations will be implemented through an outreach program that makes IIRMES instruments and expertise available on a collaborative basis to researchers from the United States and abroad,” said Hector Neff, CSULB professor of anthropology and principal investigator for the NSF/IIRMES project.

Also involved with the project at co-principal investigators are Lora Stevens-Landon, assistant professor of geological sciences; Gregory Holk, associate professor of geological sciences; and Carl Lipo, associate professor of anthropology.

IIRMES serves to embrace and extend existing interdisciplinary research collaborations between faculty and students from the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and the College of Liberal Arts at CSULB.  The principal goal of IIRMES is to enhance educational and research opportunities for students and faculty members who want to pursue interdisciplinary academic studies that integrate physical, natural and social sciences.

IIRMES houses a variety of state-of-the-art analytical instruments, including three inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometers (ICP-MS), one coupled to a New Wave UP213 laser ablation system, an analytical environmental scanning electron microscope, and a luminescence dating laboratory.

“The ICP-MS instruments and the ESEM are useful to archaeologists for analysis of their materials,” Neff explained.  “They are sensitive to a wide range of trace elements as well as major and minor elements.  The equipment allows archaeologists to perform chemical profiling in order to match artifacts with source raw materials.  That way, archaeologists can investigate things like human mobility patterns, trade, technology and other aspects of the human past.”

Neff added that once sources are identified, patterns of human population movement and economic interaction can be reconstructed by comparing where materials were found to where they were made.

Neff believes the project is an efficient use of scarce research funds available in archaeology since it makes high-end instrumentation available to researchers from multiple institutions. “It’s an alternative to trying to put instruments in everybody’s labs,” he said. The collective expertise of the co-principal investigators on the project is another unique feature of the IIRMES archaeometry program. Said Neff, "We have the expertise to define archeological problems, to run the instruments, and to analyze the data they produce.”

Collaborating researchers participate in the program in two ways. First, submission and acceptance of a short proposal gains eligibility for subsidized analyses on one or more of the IIRMES instruments. A fully subsidized short-term visiting researcher program is available as well. Participants in this program spend one to three weeks at CSULB during which they work closely with the project PIs.

Neff looks forward to the opportunity offered by the NSF grant to pursue his research into the interaction between climate and human occupation in southern Mesoamerica. “This year marks the 10th year of my work with coastal wetland sediment cores,” he said. “With the elemental analyzer (funded by this project) connected to the IIRMES isotope-ratio mass spectrometer (funded by an earlier NSF grant to co-PI Holk), it is possible to create a record of landscape changes that complements other records, such as pollen. How much of the environment was grass versus forest at a particular time? We’ll be able to look at the impact of human activity."  The current grant also funded a portable x-ray fluorescence spectrometer, which extends IIRMES capacity for provenance studies of artifacts, such as obsidian, pottery and metals.

Neff believes the project offers CSULB’s diverse enrollment the chance to use state-of-the-art analytical instruments in geology, biology, chemistry and archaeology as well as participate in research projects that join these fields. “This support will help to populate CSULB with committed researchers from a range of disciplines, which furthers IIRMES’ interdisciplinary mission,” Neff said. 

Neff is an expert on archaeological chemical analysis. He worked on a post-doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for four years before joining the University of Missouri, where he served as a senior research scientist for 12 years. The Long Beach resident received his A.B. from Stanford and his M.A. and Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara. His work earned him the 2003 Award for Excellence in Archaeological Analysis from the Society for American Archaeology, and he has also been named a member of Guatemala’s Academy of Geography and History.

While much of his work is lab based, Neff also enjoys archaeological fieldwork. During January 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009, he led CSULB students to Guatemala’s Cotzumulguapa region to use geophysical survey techniques to map buried structures at the Classic Period city of El Baul.

Neff is pleased by the chance offered by the project to demonstrate the interdepartmental cooperation that has become a byword at IIRMES. “IIRMES itself is an interdisciplinary institute. It is based on the principle that the same instrument can be useful in multiple disciplines,” Neff explained. “For instance, the isotope-ratio mass spectrometer is not only useful for geological research but for dietary reconstruction based on the analysis of skeletal materials and for paleo-environmental reconstruction. IIRMES is fundamentally an interdisciplinary institute. That’s why it was founded. We work together quite well. In my view, interdisciplinary collaboration is the direction science is moving.”