Quark-Hadron Duality in Spin Structure Functions g1p and g1d

New measurements of the spin structure functions of the proton and deuteron g1p(x,Q2) and g1d(x,Q2) in the nucleon resonance region are compared with extrapolations of target-mass-corrected next-to-leading-order (NLO) QCD fits to higher energy data. Averaged over the entire resonance region (W<2 GeV), the data and QCD fits are in good agreement in both magnitude and Q2 dependence for Q2>1.7 GeV2. This global duality appears to result from cancellations among the prominent local resonance regions: in particular strong sigma{3/2} contributions in the Delta(1232) region appear to be compensated by strong sigma{1/2} contributions in the resonance region centered on 1.5 GeV. These results are encouraging for the extension of NLO QCD fits to lower W and Q2 than have been used previously.