Jennifer Bates
Jennifer Bates, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Archaeological Science at Seoul National University's Dept. of Archaeology and Art History.
Jennifer is an archaeobotanist with a special interest in the Indus Civilisation of South Asia. She has also worked on material from other regions and time periods including Haua Fteah (Libya, Palaeolithic), FRAGSUS (Malta, Neolithic), Must Farm (UK, Bronze Age), Montelabate (Italy, Etruscan and Roman) and Aşvan (Turkey, multiperiod). Jennifer is interested in the choices people make regarding their uses of plants and how this can reflect broader social, cultural and environmental issues. In order to explore this she uses macrobotanical remains (primarily charred seeds although she has experience in waterlogged, mineralised, and desiccated seeds, parenchyma and fibre finds) and phytolith analysis. She is developing familiarity with other microfossils, particularly pollen, and with geochemical techniques.
Jennifer’s Indus research focuses on how we can address broader social, cultural and environmental questions such how societies were internally organised, how villages and cities interacted during periods of urbanisation and deurbanisation, what happens when cultures meet and interact, and how people reacted during periods of climatic instability, through analysis of the basic universal factor of life: food. Her PhD work (University of Cambridge) explored whether village life was affected by the rise and fall of urban centres in northwest India c.3200-1500BC. Using phytoliths and macrobotanical remains as part of the Land, Water, Settlement Project it explored how agricultural strategies, diet and crop processing strategies linked into bigger questions of social organisation and perceptions of climate change. Jennifer’s first post-doctoral project (Trevelyan Research Fellow, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge) expanded on these themes by reconstructing the dietary and agricultural activities of people on the borders of an urban civilisation to further our knowledge about ‘peripheral’ societies and how their daily lives were affected by social change. She then moved to the Joukoswky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University, as a Post-Doctoral Researcher (with an affiliation as Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Institute at Brown for Environmental Studies) where she explored the intersections between village life and the use of space in domestic settings, drawing on material from the TwoRains Project.
At UPenn, Jennifer is part of the LandCover6k Project, focusing on South Asian land use and land cover. She is using her archaeological and GIS skills to map and database South Asian land use history alongside Prof. Kathleen Morrison. She is also working on material from the Kadebakele project, looking at southern Indian plant exploitation form the Neolithic through to Iron Age, and developing her own research interests in Neolithic ash mounds, with a view to putting forwards a project looking into the seasonality of these prominant features.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of Archaeological Science in the Department of Archaeology and Art History at Seoul National University, working on ashmounds, Southern Indian Neolithic and Iron Age agriculture and Indus Civilization foodways.
Supervisors: Dr Cameron Petrie, Prof. Martin Jones, Prof. R.N. Singh, Prof. Ken Thomas, Prof. Marco Madella, Dr Katherine Boyle, Prof. Kathleen Morrison, and Prof. Peter van Dommelan
Address: Dept. of Archaeology and Art History, SNU
Jennifer is an archaeobotanist with a special interest in the Indus Civilisation of South Asia. She has also worked on material from other regions and time periods including Haua Fteah (Libya, Palaeolithic), FRAGSUS (Malta, Neolithic), Must Farm (UK, Bronze Age), Montelabate (Italy, Etruscan and Roman) and Aşvan (Turkey, multiperiod). Jennifer is interested in the choices people make regarding their uses of plants and how this can reflect broader social, cultural and environmental issues. In order to explore this she uses macrobotanical remains (primarily charred seeds although she has experience in waterlogged, mineralised, and desiccated seeds, parenchyma and fibre finds) and phytolith analysis. She is developing familiarity with other microfossils, particularly pollen, and with geochemical techniques.
Jennifer’s Indus research focuses on how we can address broader social, cultural and environmental questions such how societies were internally organised, how villages and cities interacted during periods of urbanisation and deurbanisation, what happens when cultures meet and interact, and how people reacted during periods of climatic instability, through analysis of the basic universal factor of life: food. Her PhD work (University of Cambridge) explored whether village life was affected by the rise and fall of urban centres in northwest India c.3200-1500BC. Using phytoliths and macrobotanical remains as part of the Land, Water, Settlement Project it explored how agricultural strategies, diet and crop processing strategies linked into bigger questions of social organisation and perceptions of climate change. Jennifer’s first post-doctoral project (Trevelyan Research Fellow, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge) expanded on these themes by reconstructing the dietary and agricultural activities of people on the borders of an urban civilisation to further our knowledge about ‘peripheral’ societies and how their daily lives were affected by social change. She then moved to the Joukoswky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University, as a Post-Doctoral Researcher (with an affiliation as Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Institute at Brown for Environmental Studies) where she explored the intersections between village life and the use of space in domestic settings, drawing on material from the TwoRains Project.
At UPenn, Jennifer is part of the LandCover6k Project, focusing on South Asian land use and land cover. She is using her archaeological and GIS skills to map and database South Asian land use history alongside Prof. Kathleen Morrison. She is also working on material from the Kadebakele project, looking at southern Indian plant exploitation form the Neolithic through to Iron Age, and developing her own research interests in Neolithic ash mounds, with a view to putting forwards a project looking into the seasonality of these prominant features.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of Archaeological Science in the Department of Archaeology and Art History at Seoul National University, working on ashmounds, Southern Indian Neolithic and Iron Age agriculture and Indus Civilization foodways.
Supervisors: Dr Cameron Petrie, Prof. Martin Jones, Prof. R.N. Singh, Prof. Ken Thomas, Prof. Marco Madella, Dr Katherine Boyle, Prof. Kathleen Morrison, and Prof. Peter van Dommelan
Address: Dept. of Archaeology and Art History, SNU
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Papers by Jennifer Bates
However, archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological, and genetic data, alongside the growing archaeological record, are showing that the South Asian subcontinent is a rich ground for exploring the complexity and nuance of changing lifeways during the transition to agro-pastoralism. People in South Asia incorporated both nonnative crops and animals from southwest Asia, Africa, and China into existing systems, domesticated local taxa in multiple regions, and continued to exploit wild resources throughout periods of established agro-pastoral systems. A diversity of Neolithics are therefore demonstrated within the subcontinent, and the mixing of traditions is a hallmark of South Asia and is critical for discussions about what early agriculture and pastoralism looked like and what the impacts of changing lifeways and economies were over time.
simultaneously allowing for a comparative, detailed mapping of land use relevant to the needs of historical scholars. To illustrate the benefits of the classification scheme and methods for mapping historical land use, we apply it to Mesopotamia and Arabia at 6 kya (c. 4000 BCE). The scheme will be used to describe land use by the Past Global Changes (PAGES) LandCover6k working group, an international project comprised of archaeologists, historians, geographers, paleoecologists, and modelers. Beyond this, the scheme has a wide utility for creating a common language between research and policy communities, linking
archaeologists with climate modelers, biodiversity conservation workers and initiatives.