Journal of Quaternary Science

ECR Outstanding Paper Award (Dorothea Bate Prize)

This is awarded annually to recognise the outstanding work of an Early Career Researcher (ECR). To be eligible for this award, a JQS paper must be first authored by an ECR who completed their PhD no more than seven years ago, taking into account any career interruptions. Previous winners have been...

• 2023: Aditi K. Dave, “The patchwork loess of Central Asia: Implications for interpreting aeolian dynamics and past climate circulation in piedmont regions”
• 2022: Neil Adams, “An Early Pleistocene hippopotamus from Westbury Cave, Somerset, England: support for a previously unrecognised temperate interval in the British Quaternary record”
• 2021: Francesca Pasquetti, “On the chronology of the Mediterranean sea-level highstand during the Last Interglacial: a critical review of the U/Th-dated deposits”

ECR Outstanding JQS paper (Dorothea Bate award) for 2024

The award for an outstanding paper by an Early Career Researcher published in the Journal of Quaternary Science (the Dorothea Bate Prize) has been given to Sean Field for his paper “Climate and Community in Central Mesa Verde “. This was described by the assessors as a robust examination of historical climate impacts on communities in SW USA based on a rigorous and sophisticated computational approach underpinned by an explicit and theoretically-informed scrutiny of the concept of acute drought stress; and with an excellent standard of visualisations supporting the text.

Sean Field is Assistant Professor at the University of Wyoming, having completed his PhD in Anthropology at Notre Dame University in 2023. He uses computer applications to study how people have coped with climate stress in the past and present.

The runner-up is Lucy Blennerhassett from the Department of Geology at Trinity College Dublin, for her paper “Tephra detection without pre-separation in ashed peat”.  This was described by the assessors as a novel and original methodological contribution that provides detailed results with thorough discussion of costs and benefits. It was clearly presented and supported well by figures and tables.

The assessors commented positively on the scope and quality of the short-listed entries and thought that all eleven of them would merit recognition.  Reading and ranking them was described as both a joy and a torture!