Professor, Director of Archaeology Program, on leave 2024-25
Affiliations
Archaeology Program, Program in Biogeosciences
Website
Environmental Archaeology Laboratory
Areas of Expertise
Environmental archaeology; sustainability and resilience; agricultural risk management; archaeology of the Mediterranean, Near East, and central Asia; ecological and social theory; plant ecology; archaeological science; writing pedagogy
View Professor Marston’s CV – September 2024
About
An environmental archaeologist, John M. Marston studies the long-term sustainability of agriculture and land use, with a focus on ancient societies of the Mediterranean and western and central Asia. His research focuses on how people make decisions about land use within changing economic, social, and environmental settings, and how those decisions affect the environment at local and regional scales. A specialist in paleoethnobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains, Marston’s contributions to the field include novel ways of linking ecological theory with archaeological methods to reconstruct agricultural and land-use strategies from plant and animal remains. Recent interdisciplinary collaborations focus on comparative study of cultural adaptation to environmental and climate change in the past and present; developing new methods to study the spatial distribution of land use from archaeological animal and plant remains; and the ecology of plague. His current field projects include work at multiple Bronze and Iron Age urban centers in Turkey (with ongoing fieldwork at Kerkenes and Gordion) and a multi-period site in Israel (Tel Shimron), as well as work in central Asia (Khorezm Ancient Agriculture Project, Uzbekistan). Marston’s recent research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the US-Australia Fulbright Commission, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, American Research Institute in Turkey, American Philosophical Society, and Boston University.
Selected Publications
- Marston, John M., and Petra Vaiglova. 2024. Mapping land use with integrated environmental archaeological datasets. In special issue “Finding Fields: The Archaeology of Agricultural Landscapes” of Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 35:73-83.
- Marston, John M., and Lorenzo Castellano. 2023. Crop introductions and agricultural change in Anatolia during the long first millennium CE. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany online before print.
- Marston, John M., and Kathleen J. Birney. 2022. Hellenistic agricultural economies at Ashkelon, southern Levant. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 31:221-245.
- Tang, Yiyi, John M. Marston, and Xiangming Fang. 2022. Early millet cultivation, subsistence diversity, and wild plant use at Neolithic Anle, Lower Yangtze, China. The Holocene 32:1003-1014.
- Marston, John M. 2021. Archaeological approaches to agricultural economies. Journal of Archaeological Research 29:327-385.
Courses
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CAS AR 280 Eating and Drinking in the Ancient WorldCAS AR 307 Archaeologucal ScienceCAS AR/AN 510 Proposal Writing for the Social SciencesCAS AR 516 PaleoethnobotanyCAS AR 594 Scientific Applications in Archaeology