Dr. Gayle Fritz

Gayle Fritz's research is concerned with the processes and sequences leading to the development of agricultural systems in North and South America. In the Lower Mississippi Valley, she has been modeling the transition to farming made by sedentary fisher-gatherer-hunters. She and her students are also engaged in projects studying plant-use and agricultural systems at Cahokia and other archaeological sites in western Illinois, as well as in the American Bottom.

Dr. Fiona Marshall

Fiona Marshall is engaged in long-term multi-disciplinary research on the beginnings and spread of food production in Africa. She has examined issues that lead to the spread and resilience of cattle, sheep and goat-based pastoralism, as the earliest form of food production in Africa. Dr Marshall is currently PI of a multidisciplinary team employing ethnoarcheological, morphometric, and genetic approaches, to studying the domestication of donkeys and their integral role in agricultural and pastoral systems. Collaborative field work at the St Louis Zoo on the behavior of the African wild ass, contributes to this project. Dr Marshall has also conducted ethnoarchaeological field work designed to investigate pathways to food production among Okiek hunter-gatherers of high altitude forests of Kenya, and extensive multi-sited archaeological field work in Africa.

Dr. David Browman

The Titicaca Basin, bisecting the boundary between Peru and Bolivia, at 13,000 feet and up, has been the primary focus of Dr. Browman's research. Over the last quarter of a century, a number of my students have completed doctoral dissertations examining the origins of the Andean tuber and grain agricultural systems, the management of wild resource bases such as fisheries to support incipient experiments in agriculture, and the symbiotic relation between humans and camelids (llama and alpaca) which resulted in an independent center of animal domestication in the southern altiplano. In this harsh environment, many of the potentially desirable wild plants evolved anti-herbivory mechanisms, including phytotoxins. Among the specialized studies this has given rise to is the investigation of the origins and functions of the practice of geophagy, of the use of freeze-drying tubers, and other mechanisms, to increase the palatability of potential foodstuffs and to enhance agricultural potential. Away from the lake, water is a critical resource; our work has also dealt with the development of raised field systems as risk management techniques.

Related Faculty Research:

David Friedel's interest in the agency of divine rulers Maya also ntersects with the study of early food production among civilizations of Mesoamerica. He presently is pursuing the hypothesis that Maya rulers actively abetted the commitment of constituent populations to a diet of domesticated foods centering on zea maize.
Michael Frachetti's project concerning the emergence of mobile pastoralism in Central Eurasia also focusses on the processes of plant and animal domestication that conditioned significant changes in the subsistence economy and mobility patterns of mobile pastoralists throughout Inner Asian mountains as early as the 4th millennium BCE.
T.R. Kidder's research group is engaged in studies of food production among hunter-gatherers as a way of assessing the role of food production as a causal source of emerging complexity. In addition, work at the Sanyangzhuang site is allowing Kidder to approach a better understanding of Han dynasty agricultural practices.