Event: Pizza Talk: "New Answers from Old Seeds: Two Years of Research into Ancient Agriculture at the Cotsen Institute"

Speaker: Dr. Alan Farahani, Postdoctoral Scholar, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

This talk is a summary of the research conducted by Postdoctoral Scholar Alan Farahani at the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology over the past two years. His research has been focused on the long-term social and environmental consequences of agricultural production throughout the world using the method of paleoethnobotany, which is the study of archaeological plant remains to understand past human cultures. The talk highlights recent fieldwork and preliminary results from Dhiban, Jordan, from Ifugao, the Philippines, and Iraqi Kurdistan, the combination of all of these projects investigating the effects of empire, colonialism, and urbanization on agriculture spanning over six millennia of agricultural practice.