Annual Malcolm H. Wiener Lecture: Agricultural Strategies and Environmental Change in Ancient Anatolia

Identifying how societies make decisions about agricultural practices is important for understanding why some agricultural systems flourish over hundreds or thousands of years while others lead to environmental degradation and societal collapse. Archaeological data offer a unique long-term perspective on agriculture and how societies adapt to complex, intertwined changes in environment and economy on both local and regional scales.

In this lecture, I present recent work from the ancient urban center of Gordion in central Anatolia (modern Turkey), where complex agricultural strategies were employed to adapt to coincident environmental and social change on both local and regional scales. By situating Gordion within its regional agricultural setting over time, I conclude that an understanding of local political economy is necessary to reconstruct agricultural decision making and explain patterns of anthropogenic environmental change.

About the speaker 

John M. Marston is Professor of Anthropology, Archaeology, and Biogeoscience at Boston University. As an environmental archaeologist specializing in paleoethnobotany, he studies the long-term sustainability of agriculture and land use in ancient societies, particularly in the Mediterranean and western and central Asia. His research explores how past communities made decisions about land use in changing economic, social, and environmental contexts, and the impact of those decisions on the environment. Marston’s work integrates ecological theory with archaeological methods to reconstruct agricultural practices from plant and animal remains.

Recent collaborations include developing new ways to study land-use distribution, regional data integration, and reconstructing foodways from modified starch remains. His current projects focus on Bronze Age through Medieval agriculture in urban centers of the eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia, and include directing environmental archaeological research at the Ancient Agora of Athens. Marston’s research has been supported by institutions including the US National Science Foundation, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the US-Australia Fulbright Commission, and Boston University.