Beyond Seeds and Charcoal: Constructing a Past for the Future

The "big issue" of my career has been long-term human impact on the environment, an inherently processual concern. Working on ancient west Asian plant remains, ethnographic analogy and modern vegetation analogs helped me explain how the the demand for energy lead to deforestation and increasing dung fuel use, both of which are traceable through archaeobotanical study. Seeds preserved in dung fuel, in turn, allow us to identify agropastoral practices that created new environmental niches for plants, animals and people. At present, human impact on the environment has become a short-term affair. The analogs that we rely on for archaeological interpretation, both cultural and "natural," are fast disappearing. Much of my current work is concerned with protecting and maintaining as much of the cultural and "natural" context of archaeological resources as possible, most directly the historical landscape at Gordion, Turkey, because today is the past of the future.

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