In Memoriam Steven A. Weber

It is with profound sadness that I record the passing away earlier this week of Steve Weber (1954-2020), an archaeobotanist, a friend, a sometimes sparring partner (on issues archaeobotanical), a sometimes co-author, whose ideas and work greatly enriched my own. For most archaeobotanists, he is probably best known for his work on Harappan plant remains, from his book Plants and Harappan Subsistence, to his co-edited volume on Indus Ethnobiology. Although his PhD (Univ. Pennsylvania, 1989) was on the Harappan site of Rojdi in Gujarat, India, he had previously worked in the American Southwest, especially in the Hopi region. After degrees at Northern Arizona State University and attending the first Ethnobiology meeting held in 1978 in Prescott Arizona, he helped to found the Society of Ethnobiology, with Steven Emslie, and edit its Journal of Ethnobiology that launched in 1981 (recounted in his article of 1986). The first issue of that journal partly celebrated the ethnobiological work of the late Al Whiting, which Steve Weber helped to bring to publication as Hasasupai Habitat, which looked in detail on resource use and settlment system of a native group in part of the Grand Canyon region. Steve departed Arizona to take up his PhD work at Pennsylvania and to establiosh the first really large scale machine flotation program of archaeobotany in the Indus valley region at the site of Rojdi with Prof. Gregory Possehl. He later took over the archaeobotany at the excavations at Harappa throughout the 1990s.

He was professor in the Anthropology Department at Washington State University, where he taught from 1994 onwards. On his webpage there, he describes himself as an "archaeologist and archaeobotanist working throughout the world" and working on the themes of "how and why people adopt new subsistence strategies, and how change in subsistence systems relates to change in material culture and settlement systems." He was always quick to point out that he was a field archaeologist first, but he was also a knowledgable and enthusiastic botanist. He certainly did get around-- we had meetings and encounters in France, in London and Cambridge, in the Delhi airport, n Lucknow, in Zhejiang and Kyoto, in San Francisco and Vancouver, Canada, and no doubt others I have forgotten. He was also intently engaging in conversations, full of ideas for further analysis, and extremely generous with his ideas. Sometimes they were quite accidental. We met once in the Delhi airport, both transiting and tired from long flights from abroad, but over coffee we had a conversation about potentially fundamental differences between wheat and barley on the one hand and millets on the other, and whether or not there was something inherent in the productivity of the big-grained cereals that meant they were more likely to support urbanism. Ideas he later developed in his paper "Does size matter?". In this article he suggests that large-seeded crops have larger and deeper root systems, making them much more productive when soils are well-watered in contrast to the more conservative small-grained crops like millets. While one can find exceptions, like northern Chinese urbanism based on millets, there does tend to be higher productivity in the larger grains cereals, allowing for the support of denser populations.

One time we arrived in Lucknow together, and Steve's luggage has been lost, so we spent the afternoon shopping for clothes for him. (He bought quite sensible clothes, while I opted for a rather louder shorts-- see below). Although we were both there for a conference on Lahuradewa and the origins of agriculture, and especially rice agriculture, our conversation strayed, as it often did, the small millets that constitute so much agricultural diversity, not just in India, but around the world. Steve's take was that the great potential of small-scale sustainable millet agriculture was largely overlooked by modern scholarship, in part because of bias towards interest in those large-grained cereals, that were both more easy to find archaeologically and more likely to support urban elites. This resulted in our joint attempt to call attention to millets in worldwide agricultural and archaeobotanical studies, published in Pragdhara 2008.

KS Saraswat, Steve Weber, Dorian Fuller, Mukund Kajale visiting Lahuradewa excavations, Uttar Pradesh, Jan. 2006

Steve Weber and Prof-Yo-Ichiro Sato (Kyoto, summer 2007).

Some of my most lengthy and enjoyable discussions with him took place in Kyoto, where we both had stints as visiting scholars at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, and where we were meant to bring order to nearly global archaeobotanical questions of origins and spread of crops being posed by Professor Sato.

Tragically over the pat couple of years he suffered from a degenerative illness. Despite this he was still intent on numerous research issues and ongoing projects when I saw him at a party and conference session in his honor at the SAAs in Vancouver, marked in part by the retrospective on Steve Weber the visionary written with Jade Guedes for the Journal of Ethnobiology. Steven generously passed on his many archaeobotanical samples to Jade, who had joined his department, and so the legacy of his research can be expected to continue to yield results for years to come. 

One of my earlier interactions with Steve was when I had first started teaching in London and I had offered something of a critique to an article on "seeds of urbanism" that he published in Antiquity. And while our published debate might have read somewhat acrominously, he was nothing but supportive and even enthusiastic about discussions with a younger scholar about the finer points of interpretaing patterning in archaeobotanictal data. He insisted that we should distribution together both his original article, my critique and his reply at the South Asia Archaeological conference in Paris in the summer of 2001. He was so focused on moving the field in the positive direction that he took criticism as a positive.  The discussions we began then lead on to many conversations on the value of different archaeobotanical samples based on inferences about how they formed. And he invited me to work with him on our first joint publication  on "formation processes and Palaeoethnobotanical interpretation," perhaps super-ceded by his later critical review on Palaeoethnobotany.  He was humble in his knowledge and a gentleman scholar. His example of putting the pursuit of archaeological knowledge first, before his ego, is an example I will continue to strive for.

He will be sorely missed. Below are some photos I could locate of him. Please do add your own comments thought and memories. I can add more photos if they are emailed to me. 


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Steve Weber, Dr. Qashid Mullah, Dorian Fuller, above Kyoto (2007)

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Steve Weber at the 2009 conference "Origin of Rice Agriculture and its diffusion to SOutheast and East Asia", Kyoto, August 2009. [from which his publication on rice and millets in Thailand]

Dorian Fuller, Steve Weber, Gao Yu, visiting historic Hangzhou (June 2011)

Steve Weber with Dr Jin Guiyin touring Tianluoshan site, Zhejiang

Visiting Tianluoshan Neolithic site, Zhejiang (Steve Weber at far right). 
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Early rice workshop at Peking University, June 2011

Steve with Jade D'Alpoim Guedes at the SAA conference, Vancouver, Canada, 2018

South Indian aridification press release

The Woods Hole Oceanographic institute has put out a press release on the palaeoclimatic data for India aridification over the late Holocene, based on the GRL paper published a few weeks ago and blogged previously.

Bay of Bengal ardification data and South Indian agricultural adaptation

A new article, out this week in Geophysical Research Letters, "Holocene aridification of India", by, Ponton, Giosan, an others, presents important new, and quite high resolution, data on past monsoon dynamics and vegetation of peninsular India spanning the whole Holocene. This research, lead by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, analyzed evidence from a Bay of Bengal sediment core, which captures discharges from the large Godavari river system. The core data comes from carbon isotopes of leaf waxes, reflecting the amount of arid-adapted/ savannah vegetation in the Godavari catchment, and oxygen isotopes from a marine microfossil that record salinity. This points to a general aridification trend over the course of the middle and late Holocene, supporting what we already would infer from pollen data in Rajasthan or monsoon proxies in the Arabian Sea, but this time providing more direct evidence from South India. My own involvement in this work came in the form of trying to think about how this might be correlated with archaeological evidence for settlement, agriculture and population in South India-- where the archaeological record suggests increasing sedentism, population and agriculture in response to, or despite, aridification, a contrast from the Indus region for example where the long-term trend of population depletion as aridification proceeded. This suggests long term cultural adapatation processes to aridification in peninsular Indian agricultural practices.

To quote from part of our conclusion: "The significant aridification recorded after ca. 4,000 years ago may have spurred the widespread adoption of sedentary agriculture in central and south India capable of providing surplus food in a less secure hydroclimate. Archaeological site numbers and the summed probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates from archaeological sites, which serve as proxies of agricultural population, increase markedly after 4,000 BP in peninsular India [discussed in detail in the electronic supplementary text]...In contrast, the same process of drying elicited the opposite response in the already arid northwestern region of the subcontinent along the Indus River. From 3,900 to 3,200 years BP, the urban Harappan civilization entered a phase of protracted collapse. Late Harrapan rural settlements became instead more numerous in the rainier regions at the foothills of the Himalaya and in the Ganges watershed."  Most of the archaeological information is summarized in the electronic supplement, Section 4., and included an attempt to sum Neolithic/Chalcolithihc radiocarbon dates (as limited as they are) and to tally known site numbers through the Iron Age. 

This work complements recent sedimentary studies of the Indus river system, such as the Clift et al Geology paper, blogged earlier.

Expanding Indus fibre crops

Two recent articles in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, report new evidence for species used in Harappan fibre work. Rita Wright and colleagues have reported evidence for jute textiles (Cochorus capsularis), based on analysis of fibre impressions preserved in ceramics. As with work done on plant impressions in pottery, this demonstrates that quite fine detail can be preserved in impressions, recorded in casts and studied with SEM. While we have perhaps long suspected jute, which is native to South Asia, was grown in the Indus period, seed finds from sites such as Rojdi (Weber 1991) were ambiguous as whether this species was cultivated, and processed for fibres.  Processing  involves retting (rotting in water), something I encountered a few years ago in the Son valley. My photo below shows a stack of harvested jute which is about to be weighed down with stones (visible in the water behind) for a week or two, before it is pounded to remove the fibres.

Posing for a photo with recently harvested jut that is about to retted  in the side channel of the Son river behind.

 Finds of textiles from eastern Iran published a few years ago by Irene Good, in the book  Ancient Textiles: Production, Craft and Society, included a couple examples of jute, as well as many of sunn hemp (Crotalaria juncea), which were also presumed to have been imported from the Indus to the east. Unfortunately as a small-seeded legume, recognizing the presence of sunn hemp in seed assemblages, especially as this crop and not a related weedy species, is not yet really possible, and could prove intractable. Taken together with evidence for flax seeds, and cotton in the Indus Valley [see my 2008 review pdf], as well as wild silk production (from the Assam silk moth), reported by Good & al. from Harappa in Archaeometry 2009, the Harappan civilization was quite the centre of textile crop diversity in the Bronze Age (compared to apparently only flax cultivation in contemporary Egypt or Mesopotamia). This adds weight to the notion that Indus exports, including those of the textually known Meluhha merchants of the Persian Gulf, included a range of cloth types.

Wild fibre sources were also important, and spun and woven net material from Shahi Tump, has also been reported recently by Thomas, Tengberg et al. in AASc. In this case, they appear to be using the local dwarf Mazari palms (Nannarrhops ritchiana). One of the excellent components of the paper is comparative study of palm phytoliths (admittedly of the limited taxa range that might be found in Pakistan), but which shows clearly that there is significant and taxonomically-informative variation in the spikey silica balls that palms produce. The next challenge will be doing more work on this variation and it taxonomic interpretation in the palm-rich tropics.

Sourcing the 'lost Saraswati' river: new geological evidence

Recently published on-line in Geology  is a paper which might not appear on the surface to be very archaeobotanical, but which is important for thinking about the past agriculture of the Indus valley. This is by Clift et al (2012) on "U-Pb zircon dating evidnece for a Pleistocene Sarasvati River and capture of the Yamuna River". This paper provides sources for the headwater sediments in the various rivers of the Indus system based on zircon finger-printed (geological source dating in the 1000s of millions of years). These dated source profiles in turn are stratified in the Pleistocene and Holocene river sequences which have been dated by OSL. These river systems include the now extinct Ghaggar-Hakra river, often equated with the 'lost Saraswati" of Indian epic. The paper shows that while the Ghaggar-Hakra used to be much larger in the Pleistocene, drawing on the headwaters that now feed the  Yamuna, tha Yamuna had begun to flow  east into the Ganges before the End of the Pleistocene, and therefore well before the start of Harappan urban societies. Throughout the Holocene, including the Harappan period this river was fed only by seasonal monsoon rain in the east. This rain-fed Ghaggar-Hakra was  active until after 4.5 ka and was then covered by dunes before 1.4 ka. What this means is that the Ghaggar-Hakra, unlike any of the major Indus tributaries, was not fed by snow melt, which begins in Spring and may be unpredictable, but was entirely reliant on swelling its banks from the summer monsoon. This means it would have been an ideal river for winter crop agriculture, along the lines of the Nile flood regime which is keyed to the Blue Nile's monsoon source, with sowing of wheat and barley in Oct.-Nov. as the monsoon flood began to recede to leave behind a rich floodplain. These could then be left to mature until harvests in March or April, without fear of early snowmelt floods ruining crops. It really should come as no surprise then that so many Harappan Bronze Age sites concentrated in this valley. Nevertheless as monsoons gradually weakened (already underway during the Harappan period) with the flood water source retreating eastwards, and the Thar desert expanding, the valley became gradually drier and eventually choked with desert sands. This, however happened in Iron Age or post-Iorn Age times, so thus there is no basis for correlating any catastrophic shift in the Ghaggar-Hakra with the end of the Harappan civilization-- a notion which has often appealed to archaeologists.
[edited for typos 9.2.2102 DF]


For further discussion of the sedimentological results by geologist blogger: see here

New Journal for Archaeological Sciences (& Archaeobotany !)

We are now about two years into a new journal, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, which published archaeobotany as well as a broad swathe of other scientific approaches and applications in archaeology. It about almost two years since the initial editorial board was signed up, and the first articles were published in early 2009. Our 6th issue is in production now for June, and will be a special issue on rice (some of the articles are already on-line first). It might be useful to draw attention to some of the other archaeobotany, already published over the past year. This goes back to issue 1:1,

(1) with an article by Walton Green on a novel, visual approach to apprehending and displaying multivariate archaeobotanical data;

(2) soil micromophological site formation process of a South African Palaeolithic case by Goldberg et al.-- but with evidence for non-food uses of plants and depositional processes.

(3) A methodological student on charcoal reflectance by MacParland et al.-- this is an exciting new approach to extracting a new kind of evidence from archaeological charcoal, namely the maximum temperature, and to some extent the range of temperatures, reached by charcoal in a past fire. This should allow one to judge the temperatures used in different pyrotechnic activities, and I suspect there is untapped potential to get at independent estimates of the temperature reached by carbonized grains, which might better allow us to correct for shrinkage when look at archaeobotanical seed metrics.

(4) A study of the archaeobotany and small fauna from late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Moli del Salt rock shelter by Ethel Allue et al. (2010),-- the evidence is mostly wood charcoal that indicates a mainly upland woodland was exploited for fuel, and a few seeds attest to gathering hawthorns, sloes and rosehips (not far off what we manage to gather with our undergraduate students each autumn on a trip down to Sussex), alongside a lot of hunting (or trapping) of rabbits, and fewer big game.

(5) Messager et al. (2010) report some even older seeds from the Lower Palaeolithic related site at Dmanisi, although it is not at all clear that Homo erectus/ergaster had anything to do with gathering these seeds.

(6) Weber et al. (2010) ask "Does size matter?" in this case is there some relationship between the grain size of crops (large grains like wheat or barley versus small grains of various millets) and the size of the settlements supported by those grains. They explore this through an overview of Harappan archaeobotany in which the an intriguing correlation between urban sites and dependence on large grains is indicated. An interesting approach to thinking comparatively and creatively over a wide region.

Keep archaeobotanical submissions coming. We aim to be eclectic in terms of region, period, type of plant remains (from phytoliths through charcoal), from shorter (and more speculative studies) to denser, more long-developed reviews.