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 still a norm in academia. The symposium is entitled International Symposium of Palaeoethnobotanical Discoveries and Studies on the Tibetan Plateau and Surrounding Areas, which is organized by archaeologists in the Northwest University (西北大学).
In this two-day conference, Petra delivered a speech on “Tracking the spread of barley and wheat water management in East Asia using isotopic analyses of archaeobotanical plant remains”, Melissa presented on “Parallels in history: Examining the role of production strategies in agropastoral societies from Iceland to Kazakhstan,” and Xinyi presented a paper entitled “Mobil crops and conservative cuisines: The Bronze Age globalisation of Eurasian foodways.” Professor Michal Frachetti could not attend the meeting but submitted a paper on “Problems of geography across the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor,” which is read by Xinyi.
Two past lab members, Drs Duo Tian and Haiming Li (both was visiting Ph.D. students of the LAEF lab), presented the results of their recent archaeobotanical research in Gansu and Xinjiang, respectively. We also congratulate their recent graduations and the progress in their academic career. Duo now holds a post-doctoral position at the Northwest University, and Haiming is elected as an assistant professor at Nanjing Agricultural University. Other participants include two WashU alumnus, Dr. Robert Spengler (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History), and Dr. Taylor Hermes (Kiel University), as well as colleagues from Lithuania, Japan, India, Australia, and many institutions across China.
This is an exciting time for scientific innovation in the archaeology of the Tibetan Plateau. There is considerable momentum in understanding the prehistory of this region, and the consequent knowledge is having profound implications for our understanding of the human past on a broader Eurasian scale. Several research projects within our group contributed significantly to this recent flourish, which includes, for example, Mana’s work on the phenotypic traits in Chenopodium in high altitude environments contra to China’s central plain; Zhengwei’s zooarchaeological and isotopic investigation on the agropastoral system and animal-based subsistence strategies in central and eastern Tibet; and the recent surveys led by Xinzhou to understand the pastoralist settlement pattern in the Yarlung River Valley.