Speaker:

Roxanne Radpour
Ph.D. candidate, UCLA

Speaker:

Christine A. Hastorf

University of California, Berkeley

Abstract:

Plants have been the most common non-human set of species that people have engaged with over human existence.  While most people speak of domesticating plants, they too have domesticated us.  They have formed intimate relations with us, having convinced our ancestors to settle down and care for them.  At times they have become kin, moving in with us and sustaining us, like a good grandmother. How can we see these intimate relationships with plants in the past, given that they are often scarce in archaeological sites? By thinking about plants in more social ways we can begin to get closer to people’s choices, values and engagements with plants as we accept that this has been an intimate relationship since the before the palaeolithic times.

Bio:

Christine Hastorf is a professor of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. She is a leading scholar in the field of paleoethnobotany. She is currently the director of the McCown UC Berkeley archaeobotany laboratory and the Archaeology Research Facility at UC. Berkeley. As archaeologist, she led archaeological work in the Andean region of South America since 1980 with focus on plantpeople relationship. Her published books include Agriculture and the Onset of political inequality before the Inka; Empire and domestic economy; Heads of State: Icons, Power, and Politics in the Ancient and Modern Andes. Her most recent book is the Social Archaeology of Food:Thinking of food in Prehistory.

Speaker and Bio: 

Elizabeth Brite is a clinical assistant professor in the Honors College, Purdue University. She is also co-director of the Khorezm Ancient Agriculture Project in Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan. Dr. Brite received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCLA in 2011.

Abstract:

This talk explores the recent proliferation of studies on the plant-people relationship in ancient Central Asia. Over the last 25 years, signifi cant data sets of ancient plant remains and other dietary indicators have emerged from major and minor archaeological sites across the region. Many of the studies that have produced these data pursue a wide-ranging picture of the transmission of domesticated plants across cultures and emphasize the role of the Silk Road in shaping food globalization in prehistory. Contrasting these are other studies that examine the local, embedded, and indigenous facets of ancient plant usage and domestication within Central Asia itself. Both perspectives capture fascinating aspects of ancient human-environment dynamics in Central Asia using novel approaches. They also mirror contemporary discourse about globalization and its implications for human societies. This talk will explore these bodies of emerging scholarship and present information on new research in Central Asia aimed at addressing some of the recent trends.

William B. Trousdale is Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution and Principal Investigator of the Helmand Sistan Project. Trousdale served both at the National Museum of Natural History and at the Freer Gallery in his 35 year career in archaeology.

Mitchell Allen is a Research Associate at the Smithsonian and the Archaeological Research Facility at UC Berkeley, founded two archaeology-focused publishing houses, AltaMira Press and Left Coast Press, in a 40 year scholarly publishing career.

Abstract:

This presentation will off er a brief overview of the Helmand Sistan Project (HSP), the only multidisciplinary, long-term, comprehensive survey and excavation project ever conducted in the southwest corner of Afghanistan. In the field in the 1970s and sponsored jointly by the Smithsonian and the government of Afghanistan, HSP identified almost 200 sites in the Sistan region-- and excavated 12 of them-- to establish the fi rst cultural history of the region from the Bronze Age to the present, one that has not been superseded because of four decades of subsequent political and military conflict. With publication of this legacy project now underway, we report on a few highlights of the 5000 year history of the region, including a previously unknown early Iron Age culture and a pristine archaeological landscape from the 15th century CE.