Elizabeth Niespolo is an American geologist. Her work utilizes geochemical methods to understand archaeological sites and human activity on multiple continents. Niespolo integrates laboratory and field work studying natural materials such as ostrich egg shells, corals, and minerals in rocks to quantify potential human environmental signatures preserved in these materials and their relevance in piecing together understanding of Homo sapiens through time. In the absence of archaeological sites, Niespolo uses high precision isotopic dating of minerals from volcanoes to determine their petrologic and eruptive history.
Early life and education
Niespolo was a first generation college student when she started her studies at the university level and chose to pursue a path integrating science, the Earth, and human history. She earned her undergraduate degree, a Bachelor of Arts, with a double major from the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California. One major she chose in the humanities, Classics, and one major she chose in the sciences, Astrophysics.
During her undergraduate studies, she was drawn towards ancient history. Pursuing this initial inclination she worked for some archaeologists in the classics department to get a feel for what archaeology entailed. Part of this work included on-site field work in Greece where she found herself drawn to natural materials such as soils and fossils, their story, and how their stories were intertwined with the archaeological deposits. This interest morphed into realizations about natural resources and how things including drywall in houses and cell phone electrical circuits, chips, and battery components are partially made of earth materials requiring mining and quarrying to extract from the Earth and put into everyday use. She pursued additional field work in Italy where she worked on pottery from Pompeii and saw Mount Vesuvius, which piqued her interest in volcanoes and their interactions with human civilizations. This theme of human civilization interactions with natural processes became a theme in the course of her graduate studies.
Graduate studies in geology
Niespolo began her graduate studies in geology at California State University, Long Beach in Long Beach, California focusing her thesis work on the minerals in and geochemical signatures of jadeitites from Guatemala. These signatures she used to develop a new way of finding where Mesoamerican jade artifacts originated from. As part of her research she worked at a Mayan archaeological site in Chiapas, Mexico. Her efforts at California State University, Long Beach both on-campus and in the field in Mexico earned her a Master of Science, MS, degree.
After completing her MS, Niespolo continued her graduate studies in geology by pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy, PhD, at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work was split into two settings: on-campus laboratory work including activities such as taking geochemical measurements and on-location field work in various locations including the East African Rift Valley. In 2019 Niespolo finished and filed her dissertation and earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Niespolo's dissertation focused on using both stable and radiogenic isotopes to determine the geochronology and environmental context of human evolution in the past, the Quaternary specifically.
Career
2010s: The Americas, Polynesia, and Africa beginnings
Niespolo started integrating her archaeological experience with her physics background through geochemical dating methods based on fundamental nuclear physical reactions and radioactive decay chains in the chemical elements. Her physics background also came through in instrumentation she used to measure both radioactive and stable isotope abundances including mass spectrometry. Isotopic abundances became a center of her work on jadeitites from Guatemala, Central America. Her emphasis was on finding ways to fingerprint natural materials used by humans to make tools and artwork so the origin of these artifacts and the materials used in their construction can be pin-pointed. She has also emphasized the importance of jade sourcing in terms of economics in the Mayan Empire. As part of this work, Niespolo was a recipient of a research grant in 2014 from the Geological Society of America.
Niespolo furthered her experience working with natural minerals focusing on volcanic sanidine from northern California. This work provided high precision dating to aid in understanding petrologic and eruptive processes that may have been preserved in minerals erupted in the Alder Creek rhyolite during the early Pleistocene.