Frank Asaro
| Frank Asaro | |
|---|---|
Frank Asaro
|
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| Born |
July 31, 1927 San Diego, California |
| Died | June 10, 2014 (aged 86) El Cerrito, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Nuclear Chemistry |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Doctoral advisor | Isadore Perlman |
Frank Asaro (born Francesco Asaro, July 31, 1927 – June 10, 2014) was an Emeritus Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory associated with the University of California at Berkeley. He is best known as the chemist who discovered the iridium anomaly in the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary layer that led the team of Luis Alvarez, Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro, and Helen Michel to propose the Asteroid-Impact Theory, which postulates that an asteroid hit the Earth sixty-five million years ago and caused mass extinction during the age of the dinosaurs.
Asaro went to college at age sixteen during World War II and earned both his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. For his doctorate, he worked with Professor Isadore Perlman on alpha decay processes in nuclear chemistry. Asaro and Perlman collaborated over the next fourteen years on studies of nuclear structure. It was during this time that they developed a high-precision technique of neutron activation analysis that has become a standard for determining the origin of ancient artifacts, in particular pottery. Asaro initially agreed to work on the project for a few months. He writes, "How good was Perlman at choosing new fields? I thought I would take three months off to do this. I made that decision in 1967, and I'm still doing this work 32 years later."
One of the first projects Asaro tackled with Perlman was a study of ancient pottery from Cyprus, known as Cypriot Bichrome ware. Aided by the Swedish archaeologist Einar Gjerstad, they obtained 1,200 pottery sherds from the second millennium B.C. excavated by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition in 1927-31. Among the many results of those studies was the work done with Michal Artzy, a then graduate student at Brandeis. Up until that time, a distinctive type pottery called "Bichrome Ware," first found in Tel Ajjul in Palestine by the archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie, was believed to originate in Palestine after which it was exported to sites in the eastern Mediterranean. Thrown on a fast wheel and painted with animals and birds, the unusual pottery appeared to be the work of a new painter or school of painting. The Berkeley group showed that in fact the chemical composition of the pieces matched that of pottery made in Cyprus, which meant it had later been exported to Palestine and other sites, a result that had extensive ramifications on the archaeology of the eastern Mediterranean.
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