Elizabeth Bunin
Visiting PhD Student
Elizabeth Bunin is a PhD candidate at the University of Iceland who visited Petrolab in 2019 as part of a Ministry of Education of Israel excellence grant. Her research uses geochemical and physical sedimentary proxies to understand depositional environments and environmental change in lacustrine and marine sediments. She attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate (BSc, 2011) and later the University of Tromsø (Norway), where she used sediment cores and seismic profiles to reconstruct glacier activity in St Jonsfjorden (Svalbard) following the Last Glacial Maximum (MSc, 2015). Her current projects include 1) a multiproxy paleoenvironmental reconstruction of the late Pleistocene Hula Valley using sediments from the Jordan River Dureijat archaeological site, 2) a paleotemperature record of the Last Glacial at Lake Karakul, a high altitude endorheic lake in northeast Tajikistan and 3) a reconstruction of the relative contributions of precipitation from diverse origins to Lake Lisan. Liz is also interested in modern process studies, geochronology, and geomorphology; she spends most of her free time hiking.
Current research
Multiproxy environmental reconstruction of the Hula Valley (Israel) from 20 to 10 cal ka BP
This project will use sediment collected from the Jordan River Dureijat archaeological site to produce the first decadal-scale multiproxy environmental reconstruction of the Hula Valley during the time period 20-10 ka cal BP. This new Epipaleolithic open-air site represents ten thousand years of sediment accumulation in a shallow lake setting that was repeatedly used as a fishing locale by Paleolithic, and later Neolithic, fishermen; as such, the site includes artifact-bearing layers from four different cultures. Exceptional preservation of botanic and microfaunal remains enables the creation of a well-dated, robust multiproxy paleoenvironmental reconstruction of the late Pleistocene Hula Valley, both to understand living conditions at the site during periods of human occupation and to contribute to ongoing debates about the nature of water availability during the transition from glacial to interglacial conditions. Changing precipitation sources and amounts will be examined using stable isotopes (δ18O and δ13C) from ostracod valves, ostracod species assemblages, sediment geochemistry and accumulation rates. Radiocarbon dates obtained from charcoal collected at the site are used to establish the timing of environmental changes as well as the chronology of human occupation at the Jordan River Dureijat site. The results of the study will improve our understanding of environmental changes in the Levant during the transition from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene and the paleoenvironmental reconstructions produced will be used by archeologists studying the onset of the Neolithic to investigate the relationship between environmental and cultural changes in the Levant, including potential links between environmental change and the development of agriculture. The excavation of the Jordan River Dureijat site is supervised by Professor Gonen Sharon (Tel Hai Academic College).
