Lab Blog

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 […]

New research led by Petra and Xinyi shows that meat and dairy played a more significant role in human diets in Bronze Age China than previously thought. The analysis also suggests that farmers and herders tended to sheep and goats differently than they did their cows in the eastern Hexi Corridor — keeping cows closer […]

Before the summer, anthropology department announced the recipients of the Robert W. Susan Graduate Student Research Award. Zhengwei (and Brad Jones) are the winners of the prize for 2019-2020. Congratulations Zhengwei and Brad! The nomination letter reads: “Zhengwei Zhang is a doctoral candidate in the fifth year of the graduate program in Anthropology. works on issues concerning human […]

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 […]

Several members of the LAEF (Zhengwei Zhang, Ximena Lemoine, and Xinyi Liu) and our colleagues in China and US have recently published a research paper together in Quaternary International(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040618219307554): The importance of localized hunting of diverse animals to early inhabitants of the Eastern Tibetan Plateau at the Neolithic site of Xiaoenda. Our paper presents the first detailed […]

This is Xinyi here again, and it is also a long due blog… A (relatively) new edited volume entitled: Far from the Hearth – Essays in Honour of Martin K. Jones was published at the end of 2018 by McDonald Institute Conversations, Cambridge. I am an editor of the volume, together with Emma Lightfoot and Dorian Fuller.  […]

Many congratulations!!! Mana Hayashi Tang has been named the 2019-2020 recipient of the H. Kathleen Cook award. This award is based on nominations from fellow grad students, and recognizes “excellence in scholarship, dedication to teaching, and commitment to building and sustaining the graduate student community in the Department of Anthropology and at Washington University in St. Louis.” Video […]

This is a long due blog. December last year, several researchers from the LAEF lab group,  Petra Vaiglova, Melissa Ritchey, and Xinyi Liu, traveled to China to attend a symposium held at Xi’an city. This was before the pandemic outbreak, and the world was in a very different (brighter) place, as international travel for research was […]

In my new paper published in Nature: Scientific Reports, I collaborated with archaeologists and scientists from the University of Haifa, the Geological Survey of Israel, the Israeli Antiquities Authority and the University of Connecticut. We analyzed faunal material from three archaeological sites in the Negev Desert, which were recently excavated by Guy Bar-Oz and his team […]

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 […]