Agricultural Sustainability and Environmental Change at Ancient Gordion

Summary

This book publishes the results of 220 botanical samples from the 1993–2002 Gordion excavations directed by Mary Voigt. Together with Naomi Miller’s 2010 volume (Gordion Special Studies 5), this book completes the publication of botanical samples from Voigt’s excavations. The book aims to reconstruct agricultural decision making using archaeological and paleoenvironmental data from Gordion to describe environmental and agricultural changes at the site. Different political and economic systems implemented over time at Gordion resulted in patterns of agricultural decision making that were well adapted to the social setting of farmers in each period, but these practices had divergent environmental impacts, with some regimes sponsoring sustainable agricultural practices and others leading to significant environmental change. The implications of this book are twofold: Gordion will now be one of the best published agricultural datasets from the entire Near East and this volume will serve as a valuable comparable dataset for regional synthesis of agricultural and environmental change. The methods developed to reconstruct agricultural change at Gordion function as tools to engage questions about the relationship between social and environmental change at sites worldwide. Other books address similar themes but no work on the Near East address these themes in diachronic perspective as done at Gordion.

John M. Marston is Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at Boston University. As an environmental archaeologist, he 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 environment 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.