Boston University
Department of Anthropology
675 Commonwealth Ave, Suite 347
Boston, MA 02215
marston@bu.edu (617) 353-2357
Profile
John Marston is a Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. He is also the Director of the Archaeology Program.
An environnemental archaeologist, John M. Marston studies the long-term sustainability of agriculture and land use, especially in the Mediterranean and Western 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 environmental 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. His current field projects include work at two urban centers in Turkey (Kerkenes and Gordion) and one in Israel (Tel Shimron). Marston’s recent research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, Council of American Overseas Research Centers, American Philosophical Society, American Research Institute in Turkey, and Boston University.
Selected Publications
J. Marston, and P. Vaiglova (2024). Mapping land use with integrated environmental archaeological datasets. Archaelogical Papers of the American Anthropological Association in Press.
K. Forste, J. Marston, and T. Hoffman (2022). Urban agricultural economy of the Early Islamic Southern Levant: a case study of Ashkelon. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 31:623-642.
J. Marston, K. Barney (2022). Hellenistic agricultural economies at Ashkelon, southern Levant. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 31:221-245.
J. Marston, C.Cakirlar, C. Luke, P. Kovacik, F.Slim, N. Shin, and C. Roosevelt (2022). Agropastoral economies and land use in Bronze Age western Anatolia. Environmental Archaeology 27:539-553.
Y. Tang, J. Marston, and X. Fang (2022). Early millet cultivation, subsistence diversity, and wild plant at Neolithic Angle, Lower Yangtze, China. The Holocene 32: 1003-1014.
J. Marston (2021). Archaeological approaches to agricultural economies. Journal of Archaeological Research 29: 327-385.