Archaeobotany lab at UCL refurbished and reopened

UCL Archaeobotany Laboratory

This past summer the UCL Archaeobotany Laboratory was refurbished and enlarged (slightly), thanks to funds from the A3RC project funded by the UKRI Research Infrastructure forConservation and Heritage Science program. Over the past term we have moved collections and equipment back into the lab. This offers some improvements for teaching practical courses in the lab, such as my seed identification short course, also a MSc course (email me to get on the waiting list for future), and facilities for visiitng researchers who come to consult the collections for identifications. Over many years Dr. Sue Colledge has been cataloguing the extensive references (more 19,000 accession catalogued), a catalogue which we aim to make available online soon. Dr Ayelen Delgado, the new technician for archaeobotanical collections is working on a new catalogue legacy collections of archaeological plant remians. As part of our lab re-launch we have a new instagram account to feature modern and archaeological specimens, @archaeobotanylab, which will also report news coming out of the lab.

For my part is is high time I reactivated this blog with surveys of important finds from the world archaeobotany and critical reviews of publications, as I was know  for a decade ago. Its time for me to provide some updates on some of my favorite topics, like rice, millets, domestication and archaeobotany in Africa, the Near East, India and China (among other places).

The archaeobotany laboratory here at the UCLInstitute of Archaeology has a been centre for research and teaching for over 60 years. Geoffrey W. Dimbleby (1917-2000) was appointed as Professor of Human Environment from 1964 (to 1979) [obit. by Harris], succeeding the famous archaeozoologist and geoarchaeologist Frederick Zeuner. (Zeuner's successors in zooarchaeology are still going strong here at the Institute too). After Dimbleby's retirement (1979) David R. Harris became Professor Human Environment (1980-1998), moving from UCL Geography. David was a great synthesist and theorist of domestication and agricultural origins. To enhance the more practical aspects of archaeobotanical research and teaching Harris recruited Gordon Hillman in 1981, who brought extensive plant collections from Turkey and Syria. Gordon Hillman tuaght and trained many archaeobotany students through 1980s and 1990s-- although the lab was then in a different and smaller room. Harris and Hillman retired in 1998, and I was lucky enough to be offered a lecturing position starting in 2000. We moved the lab into its current space in 2000/01, the first academic year in which I attempted to teach practical archaeobotany at the Master's level. (I like to think my teaching and experience has come along way in the quarter century since then.)