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Susan Beasy Latto, slatto@d.umn.edu
315 Darland Administration Bldg.
1049 University Drive
Duluth, MN 55812
(218) 726-8830 Cell: (218) 348-5688
Fax: (218) 726-7413
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA DULUTH
November 13, 2000
Contact:
Susan Beasy Latto, Director of Public
Relations 218 726-8830
Vincent Magnuson, Vice Chancellor for Academic Administration 218 726-8580
George "Rip" Rapp, Director, Archaeometry Laboratory, 218 726-7629
UMD Presents Chancellor's Award
for Distinguished Research
Award Winner, George "Rip" Rapp, to Discuss Archaeological Techniques Used
in Searching for Lost Chinese Cities November 15
George "Rip" Rapp, Regents' Professor of Geoarchaeology and Director of the UMD Archaeometry Laboratory has been named winner of the Chancellor's Award for Distinguished Research. Professor Rapp was selected for the distinction by the UMD Research Seminar Initiative Committee from nominations received from the entire campus.
Presentation of the award will take place at a public ceremony on the UMD campus on Wednesday, November 15, at 3:15 p.m in the Life Science Building, Room 175. Following formal presentation of the award, Professor Rapp will present a seminar on recent developments in geoarchaeology, especially in relation to research searching for lost cities in China. A reception will follow at 4:30 p.m. in the Griggs Center (2nd floor of the UMD Kirby Student Center).
Professor Rapp is a distinguished scholar in the field of geoarchaeology, a field which he helped to create. He came to UMD in 1975, and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his contributions to science, including the American Federation of Mineralogical Societies National Award and the Pomerance Medal for Contributions to the Application of Science to Archaeology. He was the first recipient of the Archaeological Geology Award of the Geological Society of America. He was designated a University of Minnesota Regents' Professor in 1995.
His primary area of research for the past 32 years has been in geoarchaeology. He began geological coring in Greece in 1970 as a method for detecting ancient coastlines at archaeological sites. In 1990 he received an invitation from the Chinese Institute of Archaeology and Harvard University to lead a new project attempting to locate the buried first capital of the Shang Dynasty. Professor Rapp and a current Ph.D. student, Zhichun Jing, discovered not the first capital of the Shang Dynasty, but China's most famous lost city the "Great City Song". Further work discovered yet another major Shang City.