This year my trip to a burial site cluster in the west Tibet is unexpectedly interesting. Although it is not directly related to my doctorate research program, which is on the highland pastoralists of the central and southern Tibet, I still participated in the archaeology work there. I sorted those field notes out and wanted […]
Category: 2019
Introduction to Roman Jerusalem trade economy project
The city of Jerusalem has a long history of political, religious, economic and social transformations. Over the last 3000 years, it was besieged, captured, destroyed and rebuilt several times, its population shrank and grew cyclically, and the shifting demographic called for a re-organization of the urban landscape. During the 3rd– 4thcenturies CE, the city witnessed […]
We are starting an R club!
R is a free open access programming tool that is used in Academia and industry to manage very large datasets, carry out statistical analyses and produce professional-looking figures. It’s highly flexible, meaning you can adjust anything you can dream of to your liking. It does require learning how to code, however. If you: 1) Have […]
Congratulations on Ximena receiving Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence
Please join me in congratulating Ximena Lemoine for being selected to receive the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. An award ceremony and reception was held in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge yesterday (April 25). Ximena did an excellent job in teaching “Introduction to Archaeology” (U69 Anthro 190) and serving as Assistant in Instruction in a […]
What can bat poop tell us about past tropical landscapes?
Note: This blog post is republished with permission from Amigos (No. 91 May 2019), the newsletter of Las Cruces Biological Station and also appeared on the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Natural History of Ecological Restoration blog. Many people head to Costa Rica for spring break to see monkeys and sloths at Manuel Antonio National Park or to try their hand […]
Exploring early Central Tibetan Agro-pastoralist Lifeways through Animal Bones
With an average elevation of over 5000 meters above sea level (m.a.s.l.), the Tibetan Plateau’s extreme climate poses specific challenges for human beings including hypoxia and the difficulty of attaining a reliable year-round food supply. Anthropological research has contributed significantly to our understanding of the development of high-altitude adaptations on the Tibetan Plateau, but archaeologists’ […]
Pigs into Dragons & Humans into Farmers: Studying Pigs, People, and Millet in Neolithic North China
In 2014 The Economist dubbed China “The Empire of the Pig”. By that year, nearly one half of all the planet’s pork was consumed and produced in the PRC, but pigs are more than just centerpieces of the Chinese diet—although who but the vegetarians among us can resist a plate of buttery pork belly?—and it’s upon those tasty trotters […]
Introduction to the PIA Valle de Sama Project
In 2018, I conducted field work in Southern Peru on the PIA Valle de Sama 2018 project directed by Dr. Sarah Baitzel. This was my first archaeological project as a graduate student at WashU. It was also my first time traveling to South America. I initially became interested in Andean archaeology after taking an Andean […]
Studying Late Pleistocene plant foods and foodways in North China
How do our assumptions about peoples of the ancient past influence how we study them? This question preoccupied me in the early years of my Ph.D., when I had just begun to dip a toe in Late Pleistocene archaeology. More recently, it resurfaced as I was preparing a lecture for undergraduates at WashU. I told […]
Mapping food globalisation in prehistory
A new paper has recently been published in Quaternary Science Reviews on Feb 15 : From ecological opportunism to multi-cropping: Mapping food globalisation in prehistory. The article highlights the fact that many of today’s principal food crops are distributed worldwide, and while much of this “food globalisation” has resulted from modern trade networks, it has its roots in […]
Tibetan pastoralism ethnographic and archaeological survey: field work photos
I worked as a ceramist for my Master’s degree, and am now training to become a landscape archaeologist on Tibetan pastoralism here at WashU. To start my survey project, I recently went to Shannan with my colleagues to interview pastoralists in the mountains and grasslands of central-southern Tibetan plateau. Through ethnographic interview, we tried to […]
Watered or not? That is the question
In recent decades, the study of prehistoric food globalization has provided us with a vivid picture of the translocation of crops domesticated at both ends of Eurasia from pre-5000 BC to around 1500 BC. Agriculture, at the intersection of nature and culture, manifests a joint force of anthropogenic and environmental influences. Thus, the diffusion of […]
Stable Carbon and Nitrogen Isotope Study of Ancient Human Diets in the Tianshan Mountains of Xinjiang
Xinjiang, located in northwest China, has always been a significant route for the migration and diffusion of Eurasian populations. Beginning in the Bronze Age, cultural exchanges between the East and the West in Eurasia became increasingly frequent. Among these was the spread of wheat and barley crops as well as domesticated herbivores such as sheep, goat, […]