UMD News Releases

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.