News
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!
Sydney Hunter: Fulbright Scholar and BU alumna featured by University of Liverpool
Fulbright Scholar and EA Lab alumna Sydney Hunter is highlighted for her current Master's work at the University of Liverpool. Her current research is focused on ancient environmental reconstruction using macroscopic plant remains with Professor Eleni Asouti in the Liverpool Archaeobotany Laboratory. Read the wonderful coverage of Sydney and her work on Liverpool's Department of Archaeology, Classics, and Egyptology Bio of Sydney Hunter. We have no doubt Sydney will continue to excel in her studies—well done, Sydney!
Karen Stewart’s work contributes to our understanding of Tudor London
Our own Karen Stewart's latest contributions are now published in Post-Medieval Archaeology, exploring a well preserved assemblage of everyday material culture from late 15th to early 16th century London! Read the article by clicking here, and congratulations Karen!
Marston and Hunter make BU Today’s front cover
A video highlighting collaborative research by Marston and laboratory alumna Sydney Hunter (CAS '19) was showcased on the cover of BU Today and BU's Research Publications outlet The Brink today! Learn how ancient plants can inform our understanding of ancient landscapes, focusing on a remarkable ancient pea recovered from the archaeological site of Sim-Ata 1 in western Uzbekistan, excavated in 2018 as part of the Khorezm Ancient Agriculture Project, directed by Dr. Elizabeth Brite. Find the story and The Brink's spectacular video here.
Marston and West co-authors on Science article
John Marston and Catherine West are co-authors on a paper published today in Science. The article is a reconsideration of the entire history of land use of the Earth. It was sourced by asking regional experts to contribute their areas of expertise and thus represents an expert consensus on land use histories. Marston and West are among those experts who contributed as authors. The primary finding of the article is that humans transformed some areas of the Earth more substantially at earlier dates than previously thought based on global simulations produced from paleoenvironmental evidence, and that environmental archaeological data may provide a better approach to reconstructing past land-use change than paleoenvironmental data alone.