In Memoriam, 'Leo' Aoi Hosoya (1967-2019)

It is with sadness that I report the passing of an archaeobotanical colleague and friend, Leo Aoi Hosoya, who passed on 10 July 2019. Our condolences go first to her family, her husband and daughter. Many archaeobotanists at the IWGP held in Lecce in June 2019 will recall her paper presented in absentia, that began with an amusing video message from Leo. Sadly her health did not improve. "Leo" was actually her adopted English name, based on her zodiac sign, as she had thought that her Japanese name, Aoi, might be difficult to manage for the English. So as Leo she became known to many of us and she played a role in international research not just through her own work (on archaeobotany in Japan and China) but through her place in international networks and networking, facilitated by good humour, friendliness and lack of negativity; she was always contagiously optimistic.

IWGP 1995, Innsbruck: left to right:
Gardar Guðmundsson, Mary Anne Murray,
Lydia Zapata, Leonor Pena-Chocarro,
Ann Butler and Leo Hosoya
 [Photo courtesy M.A. Murray]

Aoi was born 14 August 1967. Her global journey could be said to have begun with her post-graduate degrees at Cambridge (from 1992), including her MPhil and PhD. I met her when I started my Master's there in 1995 and we were lab-mates once I started my PhD in 1996. Together with Marco Madella and Victor Paz we formed a group of young researchers interested in various parts of Asia, concerned with rice, millets, etc. and how research approaches that were well-established in Europe, such as analysis of arable weed floras and crop-processing could be translated into new approaches to understanding the Asian past. Leo's work towards her PhD, focused on the Yayoi period in Japan, was very much pioneering, addressing the patterns of crop processing in rice and millets for the first time. She was among the very first archaeobotanist to pull rice spikelet bases out of flotation samples, which we later realized would be essential for studying rice domestication. But her knowledge of Japanese ethnohistorical and archaeobotanical sources also opened my mind to the rich traditions of use and processing of acorns, which very much went on to influence my thinking about nut use in the Neolithic. Her Phd was completed in 2002, but published in a revised monograph-like article in Senri Ethnologica in 2009 [PDF], its title's phrase"Sacred Commonness" reflects her strong interest in relating the mundane of crop processing and agriculture to greater symbolic and social patterns that run through past societies. Her interest in theorizing the social while working through empirical science remains inspiring. Her time as a PhD student in Cambridge brought her to her first International Work Groups for Palaeoethnobotany in 1995 and 1998. (See also the in memoriam of Prof. Martin Jones here).

Leo Hosoya, Dorian Fuller, field trip
during the IWGP 1998, Toulouse, France

For several years, Leo was a post-doctoral research associate at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (Chikyukan) in Kyoto. There she was part of the team of a project "Agriculture and Environment Interactions in Eurasia- A 10,000 year history" directed by Prof. Yo-Ichiro Sato, where I was lucky enough to be an invited researcher in 2007 and 2009. She was also part Junzo Uchiyama's Project "NEOMAP", which was looking comparatively on the Neolithic traditions throughout northeastern Asia. Those were optimistic times for international collaborations, new empirical archaeobotanical research and integration across various datasets. For me, Leo was ever a guide to parts of Japan and Japanese archaeology, that I would have otherwise missed. From visits to sites in Hokkaido or Aomori (such as Komakino, below left, or Kiusu, shown at the top), to a memorable trip over the mountains from Kyoto to visit the Torihama shell midden museum to chase down measurable bottlegourds (in 2009; sadly I could find no photos of anything but gourds and woodend tools from that trip- although it resulted in one joint publication on East Asian gourds). It was also a time of many food-centered parties held at the guest house of RIHN.

Leo Hosoya at back left. 

It was at this time that both Leo and I came independently to collaborations with the Zhejiang Institute on the archaeobotany of Tianluoshan, an exciting Neolithic discovery in the Lower Yangtze region made in 2004. Over the years of 2006 and 2007 we made a few tips each to the site to work on sieving and sorting soil samples for plant remains to document the extensive wild food use at the site and the many rice spikelet bases, which lead to recognition of an assemblage in which rice was still undergoing evolution of domestication (another joint publication in Science). This work built on Leo's early efforts both of pulling rice spikelet bases from flotation samples that started in her PhD and of understanding acorn use, which she usefully summarized in this 2011 article.

from Left: Xugao Chen, Ying Zhang, Yunfei Zheng, Dorian Fuller
Ling Qin, Leo Aoi Hosoya, Guoping Sun

While in Kyoto, Leo took a lead roll in organizing some targeted archaeobotanical meetings, bringing together archaeobotanists, geneticists and ethnographic perspectives, first on rice (held in Kyoto in 2009), and later on millets held in Tokyo in 2012. Both lead to special journal issues edited by Leo, on rice, and millets. Subsequent meetings on rice that were held in Beijing and London very much grew out of that first Kyoto meeting. In 2009 she also came to London on a British Academy Darwin researcher's award, and conducted some preliminary work on the processing and detoxification of peach and apricot seeds, plausibly used as nuts or famine foods in Neolithic China (article pdf here).

In subsequent years she became involved in ethnoarchaeological work on rice storage in Bali (2016), which contributed to her ongoing wholistic approach to understanding rice, not just as an agricultural product but as part of social and culinary reorientation of society, as part of what she referred as the "routine-scape" (2014).  Most recently she has been one of the sub-project leaders of a major Japanese-lead international project on "Integrated Studies on Rice-based civilization" for which she has taken a multi-proxy approach to understanding of cooking pots have been used and how this changes over the course of the intensification of rice use in the Lower Yangtze Neolithic an the Yayoi in Japan. She presents some of this work in a chapter published in honour of Martin Jones' retirement, and at the symposium held in Cambridge in Nov. 2018; her chapter "Rice and the Formation of Complex Society in East Asia: Reconstruction of Cooking Through Pot Soot- and Carbon-deposit Pattern Analysis" can be downloaded as part of the book Far from the Hearth (2019). Her in absentia presentation for 2019 IWGP was on the same project, and its holistic approach to an archaeology of cooking is an inspiration for the rest of us to keep working and to enjoy a good meal and a shojiu in Leo's memory.

Please add you own thoughts and recollections using the comment function.

 I can add photos that are  emailed to me.

Rice archaeology symposium, Kyoto, 2009

Leo Hosoya chairing presentations at Rice Symposium

Leo Hosoya (centre) during discussions on the Rice symposium, Kyoto 2009. Prof. Sato (speaking)

Early rice symposium, Peking University, May 2011. Leo Hosoya in front row (second from right)

Early  Rice symposium dinner, from Left: Alison Weisskopf, Heejin Lee, Yuchao Jiang, Michele Wollstonecroft, LEO HOSOYA, Peter Bellwood, Mrs. Bellwood, Mukund Kajale 

The exCambridge Contingent at the International Millets symposium, Tokyo Museum, 2012.
From Left: Victor Paz, Marco Madella, Leo Hosoya, Dorian Fuller, Martin Jones, Xinyi Liu

More photos from the Tokyo meeting (courtesy of Tania Valamoti)

June 2008: Junzo Uchiyama, Leo Hosoya, Oki Makamura (of NEOMAP project)

Pitt-Rivers lab Christmas lunch (1998?), from L: Lila Janik, ?, Martin Jones, Chris Stevems, LEO HOSOYA, Marco Madella,, Hanna Zawadzka, Victor Paz, Dorian Fuller

Pitt RIver laboratory photos ca 1998. Leo Hosoya, seated at right

(Photo courtesy of Tania Valamoti: see appended comment below)

xx

In Memoriam, Gordon Hillman (1943-2018)

It’s with great sadness we bring you the news that Gordon Hillman died on Sunday 1^st July. He is survived by his daughter Thilaka, and three Grandsons. Gordon Hillman was a pivotal figure in the development of archaeobotany at the Institute of Archaeology, and through his research, publication and teaching he had a major influence on the direction of the field worldwide, especially with regards to the origins of plant domestication in the Near East and late hunter-gatherer economies.

Gordon Hillman joined the Institute of Archaeology as a research associate in 1981 funded by the UK Science and Engineering Research Council and then became a full-time lecturer in a new archaeobotany post from 1983. David Harris was then Professor of Human Environment, and together they launched a MSc in Bioarchaeology at that time which offered intensive practical training in archaeobotany in alternate years. A generation of professional archaeobotanists, both in commercial archaeology and international academic posts, began their careers through this degree. This degree laid the foundations for the current MSc in Environmental Archaeology.

Gordon Hillman carrying out experimental paddle
 harvesting of wild einkorn wheat in Wales, ca. 1980

Gordon's ground-breaking career in Archaeobotany began in 1969, with a year of training in Mainz, Germany with Dr. Maria Hopf, who at that time was studying plant remains from Jericho. Gordon subsequently, and for nearly five years lived in Turkey carrying out ethnobotanical research, building up a seed reference collection and carrying out flotation at various excavations of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, such as at the sites of Can Hassan III and Asvan. This period was critical in Gordon’s pioneering of a ethnoarchaeological approach to archaeobotanical assemblage formation through the study of traditional crop-processing. It was also the period when much of the core seed reference collection was put together for both the BIAA and the Institute of Archaeology. It was also in this period that he came to the attention of Andrew Moore who was embarking on rescue excavations in northern Syria at Tell Abu Hureyra, which was to prove a seminal research project for Gordon, providing insights into broad spectrum wild plant use in the Late Pleistocene, plausible evidence for early pre-domestication cultivation and the nature of early integrated agro-pastoral economies.

George Willcox and Gordon Hillman examining fieldweeds near Asvan in central Turkey, ca. 1977

Gordon Hillman retired from UCL as Reader in Archaeobotany in 1998, but continued his research, especially on potential wild plants collected and processed by hunter-gatherers, as an Honorary Visiting Professor at UCL. Part of this work inspired the BBC program Wild Foods in which he appeared alongside Ray Mears, gathering and processing various plant foods in Britain, in France, and in Australia with aborigines. The program also produced a colourful book Wild Foods (2007). Gordon continued to work on a comprehensive compilation of wild plant foods of Britain up until his death. As this monumental research effort, drawing on a lifetime of teaching, research, and experimentation, remains a work in progress, an effort is being made to bring out his observations on a plant-by-plant basis on the Wild Plant Foods of Britain blog. For a list of Gordon's many publications (upto 2008), see here. A volume of studies in honour of Gordon Hillman was published in 2009

Gordon photographing flowers during the IWGP
excursion near Girona, Spain (2004)

Gordon was an inspiration to his students, his colleagues, and well beyond through his publications and TV appearances. He was always a thoughtful, provocative and supportive senior colleague that will be dearly missed. I always had much learn at his feet.

Several excellent obituaries have been published in major newspapers and journals, including The Guardian,
The Telegraph,
The Times, and Nature Plants. The University of Reading has a more Reading-focused account.

Do please add you memories and comments on Gordon Hillman as comments to this blog.

Gordon Hillman, Mary Anne Murray, David Harris, and Sue Colledge,
 in office 311, UCL Institute of Archaeology 1998/99

Ehud Weiss, Ramon Buxo, Ahmed Fahmy and Gordon Hillman, in Girona
during  the 2004 International Work Group for Palaeoethnobotany

Dorian Fuller, Gordon Hillman, George Willcox in Girona at the I.W.G.P. 2004

This photo (below) was found dusty in the back of drawer in the UCL archaeobotany lab. I never got to ask Gordon about it,but I think it is from an early I.W.G.P., in Budapest(?), 1969 or 1971(?). A young Gordon Hillman is in the Middle; also pictured Heather Jarmon (left) and Prof Schulz-Motel (right).

A picnic in Pevensey, Marsh, 2009: Andy Fairbairn, Dorian Fuller, Gordon Hillman, Ehud Weiss

Receiving instruction from Gordon Hillman on the art of acorn processing (June 2010)

...

In Memoriam Alison Weisskopf (1960-2018)

Alison and Oryza nivara in
Orissa, Sept. 2010

Alison Weisskopf (1960-2018), passed away peacefully in hospice in the presence of her immediate family on 11 January 2018. She was a beloved colleagues at the Institute of Archaeology, a fixture in the archaeobotany laboratory for many years and a leading figure in archaeological phytolith research, respected globally. Her research legacy is substantial as her work takes a distinctively ecological assemblage approach to reconstructing rice cultivation ecology as well as crop processing. This has proved innovative and has proved fruitful, and can be expected to continue to inspire further research and agricultural ecology approaches to phytoliths around the world. Despite first being diagnosed with late stage cancer in 2010, she soldiered on was at her most productive as a researcher over the past half dozen years, which is readily evident from her publications list. 

Bangladesh, Nov. 2013: ethnobotany

She has made lasting empirical contributions on archaeological research in China, Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia), and South Asia (Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India). Through ethnobotanical fieldwork (in India, Thailand, Laos) and archaeological projects (in China, Bangladesh, Fiji), many further collaborations she was a key colleague in many international networks and she leaves behind many friends around the world.

Alison joined UCL as a BSc Archaeology student in 2000/01, essentially a career reboot as a mid-life adult. She demonstrated a strong affinity for environmental archaeology and archaeobotany from the beginnings of her studies. She took my “Plants and Archaeology” in 2001/02, and a new course on “Origins of Agriculture” the following year. Her BSc dissertation on phytoliths (“A study of the phytoliths from the late Bronze Age site of Krasnoe Smarskoe, Samara Valley, Russia, and the information they provide on agro pastoral economies and environments”) supervised by Dr. Arlene Rosen was passed with distinction in 2003. In receipt of a AHRC scholarship, she continued her studies in the MSc Palaeoecology of Human societies, with a dissertation on “An investigation of the Neolithic ash mound and settlement at Sanganakallu in the south Deccan, India, using phytoliths and macro-archaeobotanical material”, combined analyses of plant macro-remains and phytoliths and received a distinction in 2005.

Liu River, near Huizui, Henan, China, 2006

She began her PhD in 2005, again funded through an AHRC studentship. She submitted her PhD thesis, Vegetation, agriculture and social change in Neolithic north central China, a phytolith study, in 2009 and was awarded her doctorate in 2010. Her doctoral research took her on field to China several times, such as to the sites of Huizui and Xipo, where she worked alongside colleagues including Arlene Rosen (now University of Texas at Austin), Gyoung-Ah Lee (University of Oregon) and Liu Li (Stanford University). Her PhD represents years of dedicated laboratory work. She later published a revised version of her PhD as a monograph in 2014.

Sept 2010: Sampling Oryza rufipogin in Orissa, with
Rabi Mohanty and Mukund Kajale

In 2009 she took up a post-doctoral research associate position funded as part of a NERC project  'The Identification of Rice in Prehistory' (2009-2012), which came to be dubbed the Early Rice Project, and spawned follow on research projects, including 'The Impact of Evolving of Rice Systems from China to Southeast Asia' (2013-2016), and 'The impact of intensification and de-intensification of Asian rice production: transitions between wet and dry ecologies' (2016-2019). During a intermission between the first and second NERC projects she secured funding through a British Academy small grant to explore comparisons between phytoliths and diatoms in rice paddy soils, and she received a travel grant from the Thai Ambassador to the UK for ethnobotanical fieldwork on non-rice plant use in Thailand. Her research, and her development of phytolith approaches to rice cultivation ecology was central to these projects and their success. This sent Alison into the field to study modern rice ecologies, both cultivated and wild, in far flung parts of Asia, from central China to Laos and the highlands of northern Thailand, through Bangladesh and Assam, remote parts of Odisha state in India, and the Western Ghats mountains along western coast of India. Her unique experience and expertise has meant that she attracted archaeological collaborations and samples for analysis from an even wider range of countries. She authored 29 academic papers or book chapters, in addition to 1 monograph, with many more still in the pipeline. For a list her published academic papers and chapters: see here.

While many have approached phytoliths typologically and metrically to attempt to look at morphological differentiation between domesticated and wild rice (e.g. bulliforms or double-peaks), Alison’s innovation was to focus on the plant communities that occurred with rice and were sampled in harvests, sub-sampled in crop-processing and ended up to systematically recorded, quantified and discriminated in the micro samples from archaeological sediments. In her fieldwork and analyses, her focus on plant communities and how human communities intersected these is evident. It offers a legacy for phytolith archaeology.

Ethnobotanical fieldwork in Thailand,
Nov. 2012: with Katie Manning.

Alison, herself was a key node in our community. Having worked in the archaeobotany lab as a post-graduate student and post-doctoral staff member for some 15 years, she was often the focus of discussions, both of science and of social life. She has also trained and supported numerous students, offered countless cups of tea, words of encouragement, and a warm sense of humour. She is warmly remembered.

I invite comments to be posted to this blog by those who knew and miss here. And I append below various photos of Alison in action.

Gyoung-Ah Lee and Alison on the Liu river, Henan, China (2006)

Alison collecting rice weeds in Bangladesh, Nov. 2013.

Nov 2011: Northern Thailand: Cristina Castillo (Left) and ALISON (right) with Karen rice farmers in Northern Thailand

Ellie Kingwell-Banham and ALISON WEISSKOPF in Maharashtra, India (Sept. 2010)

14 July 2004, IoA foyer on lab botanical shirt day: Phil Austin, Emma Harvey, Meriel McClatchie, Jon Digby, ALISON WEISSKOPF, Emma Jenkins. Alison was an MSc student at the time, and was apparnelty the original source of the idea for this day.  Below a full photos of the whole lab group.

Dorian, ALISON, and Deepika Tripathi at the IWGP in Thessaloniki (2014)

Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association conference, Siem Reap, Jan. 2014. Participants in session on "Foraging and Farming". Alison fifth from Left.

Early Rice and Its Weed Flora, Symposium at Peking University May 2011

A tribute to Alice Berger, a research student lost too soon

A personal tribute from Alice’s PhD supervisors at UCL

This week we learned the sad and shocking news of Alice Berger’s passing. As Alice’s PhD supervisors at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, we extend our deepest sympathies to her family and friends. Alice came to the Institute from the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University. Her Masters thesis on “Plant Economy and Ecology in Early Bronze Age Tel Bet Yerah” won the prestigious John Evans postgraduate prize, awarded by the Association for Environmental Archaeology, and her achievements were recognized by the further award of UCL’s Overseas Research Scholarship and Graduate Research Scholarship to support her PhD research.

Alice was a fiercely independent researcher of extraordinary capacity, breadth, and originality. She possessed a flair for environmental archaeology that was quite unusual, mastering techniques of botanical and zoological analysis that are often treated as isolated specialisms, and reminding us all that these are simply vehicles in a wider project of understanding the human past, and its changing relationships to the non-human world. Her doctoral project, teasing out the environmental correlates of Early Bronze Age urbanisation and migration in the southern Levant, was producing exciting results, presented by Alice at conferences around the world with a style and confidence that always rose to the surface when she spoke in public. She was deeply passionate about her research, which was attracting widespread praise and attention.

Alice was also a gifted and natural teacher, seeming happiest and calmest when instructing students. While some specialists are intellectual hoarders, Alice’s approach to knowledge was democratic to the core. She excelled as a teaching assistant at the Institute, and in the field at Tel Bet Yerah she transformed her laboratory into a centre of learning, taking pride and delight in the ability of undergraduates to identify prehistoric animal remains after just a short time in her company. Anyone who had the privilege to know or work alongside Alice will also know the struggles she faced on a daily basis, and the courage with which she confronted them. One always had the feeling that, whatever the obstacle, Alice would eventually emerge, smiling, resolute, and in search of her next challenge. Hers is a dreadful loss to our subject and our community, and we will miss her terribly.

But we also feel sure that Alice would not want our brief tribute to end on a sombre note. So we will finish with a recollection that perhaps captures something of Alice, and the intensity with which she seized life, both inside and outside the laboratory. It relates to Alice’s first encounter with the Institute in London, when she undertook Dorian’s intense short-course in archaeobotany. David Wengrow, her host at the time, recalls her coming to his office within a few days of arrival, to explain that she had suffered a concussion while attending a Rob Zombie concert. ‘But don’t worry’, she reassured him, ‘I actually find that as a result I can stare down the microscope for much longer periods of time’. May you rest in peace, dear Alice.  

David Wengrow, Louise Martin, and Dorian Fuller

Many more posts from Alice's friends and colleagues can be found on her facebook wall.

In Memoriam, Professor David R. Harris (1930-2013)

It is with a heavy heart that I report the passing of David Harris during the holiday period, Professor Emeritus of Human Environment at the Institute of Archaeology (UCL) and former director of the institute (1989-1996). Our sympathies go to his widow Helen, their children and grandchildren. He also leaves a hole in the intellectual community of the Institute and wider research community on domestication and agricultural origins. For a few generations of archaeologists he was an influential teacher on past subsistence, drawing on a global and encyclopaedic knowledge of ethnographic subsistence systems and world archaeology. Through his writings, edited volumes, and conference organization, and no doubt peer-reviewing, he influenced generations of environmental archaeologists, especially archaeobotanists, and he promoted a comparative and world approach to the transition from forager to farmer. While I was not a student of his in the classroom, I was heavily inspired by his writing on tropical and savannah cropping systems [e.g. 1967, 1972, 2006, 1980 book], on the spectrum transitional subsistence systems that included pre-domestication cultivation (while he did not coin this term, he probably did more than anyone else, to promote its use and to clarify the concept, in part through a series of highly influential and reproduced diagrams-- e.g. Harris 2007, or this 2007 derivative). He was also a dedicated and knowledgible historian of the Institute of Archaeology (e.g. 1997), of Gordon Childe's work, and their influences on the development of Neolithic research.

David Harris studying swidden farming in the upper
Orinoco River, Venezuela, 1968 (from AI 9)

When I joined the institute, David become a mentor, friend and frequent discussant; he informed my ideas, the direction of my research, and always made me look wider, inter-regionally. In many ways he was a unique figure because he adopted archaeology, having moved to the Institute as Professor of Human Environment in 1980 after some two decades teaching in Geography (in UCL Geography from 1964). He had long had predilections for archaeology, indicated by his involvement in the Ucko and Dimbleby conferences on "The domestication and exploitation of Plants and Animals" and "Man, Settlement and Urbanism". His papers on tropical agriculture and the importance of vegeculture were highly influential in encouraging the development of tropical archaeobotanies, from the Neotropics to Africa to New Guinea. His recruitment of Gordon Hillman led an fruitful and extremely influential partnership, both for research, synthesis (their jointly edited book, Foraging and Farming, remains in many ways unparalleled). His contributions were in many world regions, from early work in the Caribbean and Neotropics (e.g. 1962, 1971), the American Southwest (e.g. 1966), to the Torres Straits islands (e.g. 1995), the Fertile Crescent and his more recent work on Djeitun in Central Asia (e.g. 1997;  2010 book). He is well-known for his clear working definitions of slippery concepts, and his monumental syntheses, often streamlining what was the best current knowledge of the origins of agriculture in various regions, often including the Near East and China , along tropical regions.

David photographing tea cultivation in
Zhejiang, Sept. 2010

Several colleagues have written to express their gratitude to and memories of David. Andy Fairbairn points that he was “ great advocate for our work and was a major influence on taking archaeobotany from a minor sideshow to a discipline in its own right”. Keith Dobney recalls “some rocking seminars with him and others on domestication.” Ehud Weiss remembers him as influential teaching, “amazed by his knowledge”. Several more have written to me about how he was inspirational on their work.

Please do leave further memories and observations in the comments on this blog.

I will append some addition photos below. Feel free to submit others.

Visiting the Harvard arboretum in Boston (2008): Dorian Fuller, Ksenija Borojevic, David Harris

 

At the excavation of the Liangzhu city (ca. 2500 BC) wall, outside Hangzhou: Liu Bin, Zheng Yunfei, Qin Ling, Helen Harris, David Harris (Aug/Sept. 2010).

Peking University archaeologist Ling Qin discussing Liangzhu ceramics with David Harris and Helen Harris (Aug/Sept. 2010)

Visiting Hemudu archaeological site museum, Aug. 2010: DQ Fuller, Ling Qin, Helen and David Harris.

Victor Paz, Lewis Binford, Dorian Fuller, David Harris, Lazslo Torok (Cambridge, 1998).

David Harris in conversation with Prof. Barbara Pickersgill and Dr. Mark Nesbitt, Linnean Society of London 2006.

Gordon Hillman, Mary Anne Murray, David Harris, and Sue Colledge, in office 311, UCL Institute of Archaeology 1998/99.