News

Angela Zhang presents at anthraco2023 conference

By John M. MarstonSeptember 1st, 2023in Conferences, Research

At the anthraco2023 conference in Porto, Portugal, Angela Zhang delivered the paper "Wood use in Predynastic Upper Egypt: results of charcoal analysis from two predynastic settlements in the Nile Valley". This is the result of Angela's 2022-2023 UROP project and includes lab members Peter Kováčik and John Marston as co-authors. Congratulations Angela!

Trevor Lamb interns with National Park Service

By John M. MarstonJune 13th, 2023in News, Outreach

This summer Environmental Archaeology Lab member Trevor Lamb is serving as the Archaeology Interpretation Development Intern at Blackstone Valley National Historical Park, which is located in the Blackstone River Valley of south-central Massachusetts and northeast Rhode Island. Earlier this month he led a hands-on paleoethnobotany workshop at the “First Friday” event held at Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Events included face painting, birdwatching, and live Cape Verdean music. One of the performers used a traditional Cape Verdean instrument called the cimboa which is made of a hollowed-out bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria). Trevor used this as a starting point to create a variety of paleoethnobotany-focused activities that allowed visitors to explore the history of the bottle gourd and a suite of other crops that were domesticated by Indigenous people in Eastern North America c. 4000 BP, which archaeologists call the “Eastern Agricultural Complex”. Visitors got to view charred goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri) seeds under the microscope, look at maize phytoliths and 3D-printed phytolith models, and color sheets with information about common “weeds”, like goosefoot, that tell exciting stories about people and plants.

Marston, Kováčik, Shin article a finalist for 2022 Don Brothwell Prize

The article authored by Marston, Kováčik, and Shin, along with several other colleagues, titled "Agropastoral Economies and Land Use in Bronze Age Western Anatolia" was published in Environmental Archaeology in 2022. The article was selected as a finalist for the 2022 Don Brothwell Prize by the Association for Environmental Archaeology, given to the best article published in Environmental Archaeology in a given year. Alas, we weren't the winner this time! But you can read the almost-prize-winning article open-access here.

Marston receives grant for botanical research at Athenian Agora

By John M. MarstonFebruary 23rd, 2023in Funding, News, Research

Marston has received a substantial award from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation to fund 2023 fieldwork at the Athenian Agora, where he along with Angela Zhang (CAS '24) and Owen Lannon (CAS '24) will conduct research into the use of plants in the civic heart of ancient Athens. This award will finance travel and research in Athens for the coming field season, the first year of renewed excavations under a new Director of Excavations, Prof. John Papadopoulos of UCLA.

Dorr awarded fellowship at AIAR

By John M. MarstonFebruary 23rd, 2023in Funding, News, Research

Alex Dorr has been awarded a US Department of State Educational and Cultural Affairs Junior Research Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research. Alex will spend one semester of next academic year in Jerusalem to continue work on his dissertation project on agricultural systems of the Hellenistic period in the Southern Levant. Congratulations, Alex!

Forste and Marston publish on Islamic agricultural systems at Ashkelon

By John M. MarstonNovember 4th, 2022in Alumni, Publications, Research

EAL alumna Kathleen Forste (GRS '20) and John M. Marston are co-authors on a new article, "Urban agricultural economy of the Early Islamic southern Levant: a case study of Ashkelon" just published in Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. This article publishes the full Islamic- and Crusader-period archaeobotanical assemblage from Ashkelon, which provides robust evidence for the complex arboriculture system of the Early Islamic period. The article is available for free online for a limited time at this link; permanent DOI link is here.

Tang and Marston publish earliest dated millet in South China

Lab alumna Yiyi Tang (CAS '21, GRS '21) and Marston are co-authors on a new article, "Early millet cultivation, subsistence diversity, and wild plant use at Neolithic Anle, Lower Yangtze, China," published in The Holocene (access it here). In the article, which is based on Yiyi's MA project, we present evidence for a diversified agricultural system, focused on rice cultivation but incorporating also two types of millet and a variety of potentially cultivated edible wild plants. The millet seeds are directly dated to the early 6th millennium BCE, making these the earliest directly dated millet remains from the Yangtze River basin, and thus the earliest firm evidence for millet cultivation in South China. This is Yiyi's first published article — congratulations, Yiyi!