Abstract

Archaeobotany has long contributed information of the nature of ancient crop production, which species were grown and eaten in the past. Recent work has begun to provide new information which come from both the quantitative increase in archaeobotanical evidence but also methodological developments that provide qualitatively new data types.

This presentation will explore three areas of progress along these lines related to the study of domestication, including new applications imaging techniques (micro-CT and synchrotron imaging),  and approaches to reconstructing the cultural creation of foods (or recipes). First the study of plant domestication has increasingly revealed a dynamic evolutionary process facilitated by the expansion of archaeobotanical evidence and quantitative data, such as tracking the changes in seed  size and proportion of seed dispersal modes in various cereals. Second domestication studies have benefited from application of new imaging techniques, including micro ct-scanning and synchrotron x-ray tomography which have allowed us to find plant remains inside pottery as well as anatomical changes inside seeds. Third, the application of SEM to amorphous charred fragments alongside experimental work is providing a means to identify food preparation techniques, from bread, to porridges to steamed foods. Taken together there are new frontiers of archaeobotanical research  new directions in research and new approaches to existing collections.

Biography

Dorian Q Fuller is Professor of Archaeobotany at University College London, where he has taught since 2000.  He works on past agricultural systems and plant domestication through archaeological research in several regions, including sub-Saharan Africa, the Near East, South and Southeast Asia and China. He has worked on excavations in Sudan and Iraqi Kurdistan, and has worked on field projects in Morocco, Ethiopia, Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, China and India. He held an ERC advanced grant (2013-2018) on Comparative Pathways and Agriculture, and had three research grants (2009-2019) from the Natural Environment Research Council on the reconstruction of past rice cultivation systems (in India, China and Southeast Asia). He currently has a research grant on the evolution of vegetative agriculture in Ethiopia. He is author of Trees and Woodlands of South India. Archaeological Perspectives and a co-editor of three books, Far From the Hearth (2019), Archaeology of African Plant Use (2014) and Climates, Landscapes and Civilizations (2012). He completed his PhD on The Emergence of Agricultural Societies in South India (1999) at Cambridge University. He received his BA from Yale University (1995) and grew up in San Francisco, California.