Image: Pxhere
Research project Mankind started to exploite Fire-Charcoal-Charring a million years ago and with an increasing use over time. The importance of history, purpose, and development of this fundamental process in human societal progress is known. One of the main problems is the lack of suitable analytic methods used in archaeological sciences to easily extract valuable molecular information for excavated material to unravel the use of wood and production of charcoal including charring processes and by products.
Mankind started to exploite Fire-Charcoal-Charring a million years ago and with an increasing use over time. The importance of history, purpose, and development of this fundamental process in human societal progress is known. One of the main problems is the lack of suitable analytic methods used in archaeological sciences to easily extract valuable molecular information for excavated material to unravel the use of wood and production of charcoal including charring processes and by products.
Human biomass manipulati0n and charcoal production in time and space have played an important role in human prehistory. The ways of analysing carbon and charred materials in real world scenarios are plentiful but there is always room for development. The main objective of this projects is to develop a robust multi-mode spectroscopy toolbox to analyse on-site with high spatial resolution as entire areas of interest providing in-situ information for probing interesting spots for further in detail analysis in the lab. Humans have for a very long-time exploited forest resources for generating heat and building material but also converted those resources into valuable material to improve their daily living and drive societal development. Later on in prehistory, one of those and most influential material is charcoal, which together with other carbon based bi-products has been produced intentionally for specific purposes, especially as long as metal working has been a driving part of human technological progress.
Charred material is resistant to decay and can be preserved under beneficial circumstances for very long time because of mineralisation. For instance, in sediments on Stone Age sites to present day, we find charred material in various forms preserved in the sediments and the shape is depending on formation and taphonomy of the material. However, charcoal/charred matters have been of interest but not used to the full potential even though it can be regarded a mass material and thus holds a lot of potential information and holds an interest particularly to environmental sciences and archaeology.
Analytical spectroscopic techniques are constantly improving, and as black carbon has been a challenging matter to approach a combination of techniques is needed. We want to combine several of the analytical techniques available at Umeå University and have them applied to charred materials and their surroundings matrixes. In order to do this, we would like to have two post-docs that can work parallel on the same type of material but using different approaches. The first of the two post docs will deal with Near Infrared (NIR)- Imaging and probing techniques, Raman- and FTIR spectroscopy and the second mainly with Nuclear magnetic Resonance (NMR). The strength of these two post-doc approaches is that one technique is rarely enough to solve complex problems of this kind and there are synergetic effects to gain by having two researchers cooperate side by side focused on the project. Furthermore, they will be able contribute to several different research environments and develop cooperations both with individual researcher as with different research structures.
In the broader perspective this will improve the toolbox to be used in Biomass technology, understanding molecular cycles in different large-scale systems and related processes in soils and sediments and adding to the understanding of the carbon cycle and how humans have impacted this over time.
