I am an environmental archaeologist who studies the long-term sustainability of agriculture and land use, with a focus on ancient societies of the Mediterranean and western and central Asia. My 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.

While I am a specialist in paleoethnobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains, my research develops novel ways of linking ecological theory with archaeological methods to reconstruct agricultural and land-use strategies from plant and animal remains. Some recent interdisciplinary collaborations include regional syntheses of agricultural practices; the 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.

My current research projects include multi-proxy reconstruction of agriculture in Bronze and Iron Age urban centers of Turkey; Hellenistic, Roman, and Early Islamic sites in Israel; and work in both the Aegean (Agora of Athens, Greece) and central Asia (Khorezm Ancient Agriculture Project, Uzbekistan). My recent research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the US-Australia Fulbright Commission, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Loeb Classical Library Foundation, American Research Institute in Turkey, American Philosophical Society, and Boston University.

Academic Appointments

– Visiting Professor of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies, University of British Columbia (2024)
– Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology, Boston University (2023-present)
– Director, Boston University Environmental Archaeology Laboratory (2012-present)
– Director, Program in Archaeology, Boston University (2020-2027)
– Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology, Boston University (2019-2023)
– Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology, Boston University (2012-2019)
– Postdoctoral Fellow, Joukowsky Institute of Archaeology & the Ancient World, Brown University (2012-2013)

Research Interests

• Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology
• Western and Central Asian Archaeology
• Ancient Agriculture
• Environmental Change
• Empires
• Archaeobotany
• Environmental Archaeology

Research Areas

• Roman Studies
• Greek Studies
• Near Eastern Studies
• Archaeology and Material Culture

Projects

Ancient Agora of Athens, Greece
As Director of Environmental Archaeology, I coordinate environmental archaeology and direct paleoethnobotanical research in the civic and economic center of ancient Athens.

Tel Shimron Archaeological Project, Israel
I direct botanical research at the Bronze Age to Medieval tell site of Tel Shimron; project goals include identification of diachronic landscape change and study of strategies for agriculture, arboriculture, and woodland management.

Gordion Archaeological Project, Turkey
For more than a decade I directed botanical research at a mounded, multi-period (c. 3000 BCE – 1400 CE) urban center in central Turkey. I continue to study long-term land use and agricultural change, and their environmental implications, in the Gordion region, through a US NSF-funded research project that uses stable isotope analyses to reconstruct the locations of agriculture in the Gordion region.

Books

– Marston, John M. 2017. Agricultural Sustainability and Environmental Change at Ancient Gordion. University of Pennsylvania Museum Press, Philadelphia.

– Marston, John M., Jade d’Alpoim Guedes, and Christina Warinner (editors). 2014. Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

Recent Articles (* = student co-author)

– *Forste, Kathleen, John M. Marston, Jennifer Ramsay, and Tracy Hoffman. 2024. Cultivating the hills and the sands: a comparative archaeobotanical investigation of Early Islamic agriculture in Palestine. Environmental Archaeology online before print.

– 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.

– *Forste, Kathleen, John M. Marston, and Tracy Hoffman. 2022. Urban agricultural economy of the Early Islamic southern Levant: A case study of Ashkelon. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 31:623-642.

– Marston, John M., and Kathleen J. Birney. 2022. Hellenistic agricultural economies at Ashkelon, southern Levant. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 31:221-245.

– Marston, John M., Canan Çakırlar, Christina Luke, *Peter Kováčik, *Francesca G. Slim, *Nami Shin, and Christopher H. Roosevelt. 2022. Agropastoral economies and land use in Bronze Age western Anatolia. Environmental Archaeology 27:539-553.

– Santini, Lauren, Sadie Weber, John M. Marston, and Astrid Runggaldier. 2022. First archaeological identification of nixtamalized maize, from two pit latrines at the ancient Maya site of San Bartolo, Guatemala. Journal of Archaeological Science 142:105581.

– *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.

Recent Grants

– US National Science Foundation, Archaeology Program. 2024-2025. Principal Investigator (Co-PI: Peter Kováčik, Award #2403754) “Doctoral Dissertation Research: Effect of Colonial Policy on Land Use” (USD $31,500)

– US National Science Foundation, Archaeology Program. 2019-2025. Principal Investigator (Co-PI: David Meiggs, Rochester Institute of Technology, Award #1916824) “Collaborative Research: Spatial Analysis of State Agropastoral Economies” (USD $213,766)

– Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship. 2023-2024. Principal Investigator “Plants in Everyday and Public Life in the Athenian Agora” (USD $18,200)

– American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant. 2023. Principal Investigator “Plants in Everyday and Public Life in the Athenian Agora” (USD $6,000)

– Core Fulbright Scholars Program, Australia (All Disciplines). 2020. Fellow “Agricultural Sustainability at the Nexus of Empire and Climate Change” (AUD $26,500)

Recent Awards

– Templeton Award for Excellence in Student Advising and Mentoring. 2019. Awarded for distinguished mentoring in the College of Arts and Sciences, Boston University

– James R. Wiseman Book Award. 2019. Awarded by the Archaeological Institute of America to the best recent archaeological monograph (for Agricultural Sustainability and Environmental Change at Ancient Gordion, 2017)

– Gitner Award for Distinguished Teaching. 2018. Awarded for distinguished teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences, Boston University

– Best Poster Award. 2017. For best poster presented at the Annual Conference of the Society of Ethnobiology

I am not available to supervise theses at UBC, but always happy to meet with and help students with their research.