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Hi! I’m Morasha Rabinowitz, an undergrad summer researcher! I’ve been working with Melissa Ritchey on her research on early Central Asian pastoralists, as well as starting a project analyzing samples from Classical Greece and Cyprus. I’m part of a program through the Center for the Environment at Washington University, which brought together many students working […]

Collaborative research by colleagues in the Department of Biology, Jordan Brock and Kenneth Olson, and lab member Melissa Ritchey combine genetic and archaeological datasets to trace the origins of domestication of Camelina sativa (false flax or gold-of-pleasure). This oil seed crop has seen recent scientific interest as a potential for sustainable, low‐input biofuels for aviation. […]

An article recently published in World Archaeology by lab members Melissa, Yufeng, Xinyi and Petra, shows the role that Central Eurasian cuisines played in changing the morphology of barley (Hordeum vulgare) as it spread across the continent during the Bronze Age. Barley becomes shorter in Monsoonal China, interpreted as a selection for smaller-grain size to […]

An article published on Archaeology (a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America) featuring our research by emphasising the social dimensions of the global foodways. “When grains like wheat and barley, which are rooted in the grinding and baking tradition, enter a cuisine that favours boiling and steaming and eating whole grains, what’s going to […]

On April 10, I gave a TEDx talk titled ‘An archaeologist’s view of how connectivity shaped our human past’ at the 6th annual TEDx Youth Prague conference.

In my recent paper titled “Exploring Diversity in Neolithic Agropastoral Management in Mainland Greece Using Stable Isotope Analysis” (2021, Environmental Archaeology), I collaborated with archaeologists and archaeological scientists from Greece, England, France, Australia, and the United States on three very exciting archaeological assemblages from Neolithic Greece. The three sites provided distinct environmental settings from the […]

In November 2020, we took advantage of the boom in video communication and online conferencing and hosted a symposium that brought together researchers from Australia, Japan, China, Lithuania, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Under the auspices of the McDonnell Institute at Washington University in St Louis, the symposium ‘The Origin of Eurasian […]