News
Marston, Kováčik, and Shin publish open-access article on Kaymakçı
A new article in Environmental Archaeology is the culmination of Marston's 10 years of involvement in the Kaymakçı Archaeological Project, with EAL member Peter Kováčik and alumna Nami Shin as co-authors. In the article, "Agropastoral economies and land use in Bronze Age western Anatolia," we combine wood charcoal, seed, and faunal data to reconstruct agricultural practices and environmental change during the Late Bronze Age of western Turkey. Article is available open access here. Congratulations to Peter and Nami!
Lab alumnus Adam DiBattista (CAS ’14) receives PhD, postdoctoral position
Lab alumnus Adam DiBattista (CAS '14) just completed his PhD, titled "The Transformation of Animal Materials in Early Greece," at UCLA. Adam will join the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University in the fall as a Postdoctoral Scholar. Congratulations, Adam!
Lab alumna Sydney Hunter (CAS ’19) selected for NSF GRF
Environmental Archaeology Laboratory undergraduate alumna Sydney Hunter (CAS '19) has been selected as one of nine archaeologists nationwide for a 2021 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This prestigious fellowship will fund three years of her doctoral research. Sydney has just completed an MA at the University of Liverpool and intends to enroll at Ohio State University in the fall. Congratulations, Sydney!
Forste publishes in Ethnobiology Letters
Kathleen Forste's latest article, "An Intrasite Analysis of Agricultural Economy at Early Islamic Caesarea Maritima, Israel," has just appeared in Ethnobiology Letters, the open-access journal of the Society of Ethnobiology. Access the article here. Congratulations, Kathleen!
Codlin wins SAA Student Paper Award
Maria Codlin was announced as the winner of the SAA's Student Paper Award for 2021 for her submission "Hunting and Husbandry at the Ancient Mexican City of Teotihuacan." The paper will appear in the symposium "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" chaired by Codlin and Kathleen Forste. Congratulations on this prestigious award, Maria!!
EAL alumna Shin and Marston publish on Kaymakçı
Environmental Archaeology Laboratory alumna Nami Shin (CAS 2015) and John M. Marston are lead authors on a new study of botanical remains from Kaymakçı, a Late Bronze Age site in Western Anatolia. This study follows up on preliminary results published in 2018 and is an adaptation of Nami's MA thesis at Koç University. The article is available via this link. Congratulations to Nami on her first lead-authored publication!
Marston publishes in Journal of Archaeological Research
Marston’s latest article, “Archaeological Approaches to Agricultural Economies” has been published online in the Journal of Archaeological Research. The article summarizes advances in the study of agricultural economies, following the period of initial domestication, in worldwide comparative perspective. Read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-020-09150-0
Two new wood articles published by Marston
Two articles co-authored by Marston have just been published in Quaternary International, part of the forthcoming special issue from the anthraco2019 conference. The first, entitled "Environmental reconstruction and wood use at Late Chalcolithic Çamlıbel Tarlası, Turkey" and authored by Marston, Peter Kováčik, and Ulf-Dietrich Schoop (Univ. of Edinburgh) presents the wood charcoal assemblage of the early, small-scale metal-producing site of Çamlıbel Tarlası in central Anatolia. The second, entitled "Best practices for digitizing a wood slide collection: The Bailey-Wetmore Wood Collection of the Harvard University Herbaria" and authored by Madelynn von Baeyer (Harvard University Herbaria) and Marston, describes the two-year project to develop and test a digitization strategy for the 35,000+ wood slide collection of Harvard.
Lab alumna Emily Johnson (CAS ’17) selected for NSF GRF
Environmental Archaeology Laboratory undergraduate alumna Emily Johnson (CAS '17), currently a doctoral student in Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been selected as one of seven archaeologists nationwide for a 2020 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This prestigious fellowship will fund three years of her doctoral research. Congratulations, Emily!
Johnson and Marston publish nixtamalization research in JAS
Environmental Archaeology Lab alumna Emily Johnson, now a PhD student at UC Santa Barbara, is first author (with Marston) on an article just published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. This research is based on Emily's undergraduate honors thesis at BU, which received the Michael A. Sassano III and Christopher M. Sassano Award for Writing Excellence in the Social Sciences in 2017. The article identifies, for the first time, a direct archaeological marker of nixtamalization (the process of soaking maize in an alkaline solution to create hominy or masa, which is used to make tamales and tortillas). This is a practice that predates European arrival to the Americas, and while it the practice of nixtamalization is believed to have a deep history, there has never been a way to identify this practice directly until now. These modified starch particles should be able to be found in a variety of archaeological contexts, including ceramic vessels used to prepare nixtamal and grinding stones on which it was ground into flour. Congratulations to Emily on her first publication!