Research

Our lab members are developing research projects across the world, from Northern China, the Tibetan Plateau, Central Asia, to South America. See their blogs about most recent updates.

Current Graduate Student Research:

Sewasew Assefa investigates the ways in which European colonialism and local competition, conflict, and environmental factors shaped the diets of populations in urban trade centers of 15-17^th c. Kenya .

Melissa Ritchey studies Bronze and Iron Age investment in cultivating cereal crops (wheat, barley, millet) by agropastoralists in Tibet and Central Asia.

Previous Graduate Student Research:

Lucia Diaz investigates dietary patterns of people living in the Andean highlands
Introduction to the PIA Valle de Sama Project

Yufeng Sun investigates the management of earliest crops in China
Watered or not? That is the question

Ximena Lemoine studies the domestication of pigs in northern China
Pigs into Dragons & Humans into Farmers: Studying Pigs, People, and Millet in Neolithic North China

Zhengwei Zhang studies animal management strategies in central Tibet
Exploring early Central Tibetan Agro-pastoralist Lifeways through Animal Bones

Xinzhou Chen investigates pastoral land use in central Tibet
Tibetan pastoralism ethnographic and archaeological survey: field work photos

Mana Hayashi Tang’s research sheds light on plants that are largely missing from the narratives of early foodways in China
Studying Late Pleistocene plant foods and foodways in North China

Current Undergraduate Student Research:

For her senior thesis, Morasha Rabinowitz is using plant stable isotopes to understand cultivation strategies various crops (grape, olive, almond, wheat, barley, and more) from Ancient Greece.

 This project (funded by the National Science Foundation and Wenner-Gren) investigates diet and foodways at two urban centers of the East African coast, Mtwapa and Manda, Kenya, during the 14th to 17th century, a period in which local East African urban populations negotiated colonialism in the region. Identities of urban East African Coastal populations were shaped by millennium-old currents of international trade, politics, and religion. As such, burial populations of urban elites from Mtwapa and Manda provide an unprecedented insight into sociopolitical and economic fragmentation and continuity. The goal of this project is to reconstruct dietary patterns to understand how localized socioeconomic and political conditions impacted foodways and to examine how these conditions are differentially experienced by individuals of various identities. Using carbon and nitrogen stable isotopic analysis, the project aims to 1) reconstruct and compare human dietary patterns between Manda and Mtwapa as reflective of ecologically and historically distinct communal experiences; 2) understand dietary variation between individuals of diverse identities including age, gender, socioeconomic status, and religion at Manda and Mtwapa; and 3) develop a local isotopic baseline using archaeological animal tissues to interpret human dietary data 4) develop high resolution burial sequence using radiometric dates. 

 This project funded by the National Science Foundation investigates labor investment in plant cultivation in mountainous regions which were optimal for mobile pastoralism. While there has been considerable recent momentum in research investigating the development of animal-based subsistence and pastoralism in mountainous Inner Asia, this project emphasizes the plant side of the story, particularly the social arrangement for an intertwined cultivation and husbandry system. We examine how communities during the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC in mountainous: the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor (IAMC) and western Tibetan Plateau (TP) organized labor to negotiate the time and effort of plant cultivation in regions more optimal for mobile pastoralism. Was the introduction of wheat and barley in IAMC and TP accompanied by labor intensive cultivation strategies, or did communities modify Southwest Asian cultivation strategies to fit a more extensive agropastoral lifestyle characteristic of mountainous mobile pastoralism? We utilize systematic archaeobotanical analysis of weed taxa from 9 sites coupled with stable carbon and nitrogen isotope measurements of charred wheat and barley grains investigate this. We aim to not only unpack locally specific questions of subsistence choice, but also global themes about the variability of agropastoral choices within challenging environments.

  This project (funded by National Science Foundation senior archaeology program) considers two of the ecologically hardiest cereal crops: broomcorn (Panicum miliaceum) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica). Today, these two minor cereals are consumed less frequently, thus attracting little scientific attention in comparison to their high-yielding, large-grained counterparts. However, they were once among the most expansive food crops in geographical terms, with a centre of origin in northern China and spreading to India and Europe in prehistory. Embracing multiple disciplinary approaches to study broomcorn millet and foxtail millet, we seek answers to two questions. First, when did millet first become a staple food for human consumption? Second, when and how did millet cultivation expand from its place of origin in North China to Central and South Asia? In answering these questions, we aim to raise awareness of the past, present and future utility of these crops, to understand the nature of primary producers of millets and their societies, and to situate their role in the broader trajectory of human agricultural systems. Read more here.

In this project, we will study the faunal material recently excavated under Wilson’s Arch just outside the Temple Mount area in the Old City of Jerusalem. These excavations, carried out by the Israeli Antiquities Authority, have uncovered the remains of an unfinished amphitheater. The faunal assemblage yielded a large number of teeth that hold clues to where the animals originated before they came to Jerusalem to be slaughtered for lavish Roman feasts. We will use a combination of isotopic indicators to trace where the animals were born and raised, and use this information to detect any patterns in exchange networks between the city and its hinterlands. Were the domestic animals reared in particular ‘hot spots’ in the surrounding Judean hills or the farther Mediterranean coastal zone? Did the patterns in animal trade change through time during this transformative period in Jerusalem’s history?

Many of today’s major food crops are distributed worldwide. While much of this ‘food globalisation’ has resulted from modern trade networks, it has its roots in prehistory. Recent investigations have shown that between 5000 and 1500 cal BC, the Eurasian and African landmass underpinned a continental-scale process of food ‘globalisation’ of staple crops. At the core of this process of globalisation is the movement of several principal staples. Free threshing wheat (Triticum cf. aestivum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) moved from southwest Asia to Europe, India and China, while broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica) moved in the other direction: from China to the West, via Central and South Asia; rice (Oryza sativa) travelled across East, South and Southeast Asia; and African millets (Pennisetum glaucum and Eleusine coracana) and sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) moved across sub-Saharan regions and ultimately across the Indian Ocean to South Asia. Other economic important plant taxa, including pulses and fruits, as well as domesticated animals, also spanned across the Old World in various episodes of prehistory. By 1500 BC, this process of food globalisation had brought together previously isolated agricultural systems, to constitute a new kind of agriculture in which the bringing together of local and exotic crops enables a new form of intensification. Read more about the Food Globalisation Project here, and also see this article on the SOURCE.

A period of amenable climate in North and East Africa, known as the African Humid Period (AHP), is thought to have lasted from about 11 to 5 thousand years ago, but the precise timing and pacing of both the initiation and conclusion the AHP is disputed. Very few climate records are available from the Horn of Africa, making it a region of particular interest. Together with Wash U Anthropology Professor, Dr. Fiona Marshall, we are investigating past changes in aridity in the Horn of Africa using the geochemistry of sub-fossil mammal tooth enamel obtained from a unique archaeological faunal assemblage from southern Somalia.