Dennis Jenkins

Dennis L. Jenkins is an American archaeologist and excavation director at the research station of the Oregon State Museum of Anthropology / Museum of Natural and Cultural History of the University of Oregon.

Life

Jenkins earned the 1977 financial statements B. A. and 1981, the Master of Arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. From 1982 to 1985 he was head of excavation at Fort Irwin Archaeological Project. The carried out there in the Mohave Desert in southeastern California working in the layers of Pleistocene and Holocene were the basis of his later thesis.

1986 Jenkins began his work in the Fort Rock Basin, a Trockenmaar in Oregon. In 1987 he was hired by the Oregon State Museum of Anthropology. At the same time he carried out archaeological investigations for the Oregon Department of Transportation. At the University of Oregon, he received his doctorate in 1991.

Since 2000, Jenkins also serves as Chautauqua teacher and taught the people of Oregon, the techniques used in the study of migration of the early inhabitants of the Americas.

Research

Jenkins ' research focuses on the indigenous people of America, especially the hunter-gatherers in the Great Basin Desert in the southwestern states in the United States. His discoveries of tools made of obsidian and their age determination by Rehydroxylierung yielded new insights about the inhabitants of the basin.

Jenkins took the excavations of the settlement layers of the Paisley Caves in Lake County in the desert part of Oregon on again, where even Luther Cressman Sheeleigh grub. The human remains from the excavation findings led four years after the excavations by means of radiocarbon dating to the conclusion here that the oldest date available in this way dated human remains. The Danish researcher Eske Willerslev used in the caves found human coprolites ( excrement ), whose mitochondrial DNA were examined ( mtDNA) by mass spectrometry. He came to the conclusion that the cave dwellers of the haplogroups A2 and B2 and came on Chewaucan Lake lived 12,300 carbon years before present ( Before Present ), ie about 1,000 years before the people of the Clovis culture.

Publications (selection)

• Thesis: Site Structure and Chronology of 37 Mojave and Pinto Assemblages from Two Large Multi Component sites in the Central Mojave Desert, Southern California
• Associate Editor: Archaeological Researches in the Northern Great Basin: Fort Rock Archaeology Since Cressman, University of Oregon Anthropological Papers No.. 50, 1994
• Ditto: Erly and Middle Holocene Archaeology of the Northern Graet Basin, University of Oregon Anthropological Papers No.. 62, 2004