Ksenija Borojevic

Assistant Professor of Archaeology

 

Office: Room 345B
(617) 358-1649
boro@bu.edu

PhD, Washington University at St. Louis, 1998
Areas of interest: Palaeoethnobotany, Ancient Diets and Environments, Archaeology of South and East Europe.

EXCAVATIONS & FIELD WORK & RESEARCH

Earlier in her career, Dr. Ksenija Borojevic primarily worked at the sites in Southeast Europe. During her graduate studies at Washington University, she participated in the excavations in the USA and in analyses of the artifacts from the sites in Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri. As a postgraduate in the Army Corps of Engineering in St. Louis, she catalogued and rehabilitated archaeological collections from military installations in Alabama and Georgia.

Dr. Ksenija Borojevic has worked In the archaeobotanical laboratories in Europe and the USA, where she has identified plant specimens from sites in Arkansas, Illinois, Texas, the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Israel, ranging from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages. Prior to coming to Boston University, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she continued to work on plant remains from the site Opovo in Serbia, Grapceva Cave in Croatia, and Megiddo in Israel.

Dr. Ksenija Borojevic has been the principal archaeobotanist at Mersa Wadi Gawasis, an ancient Egyptian harbor on the Red Sea, and for the Kedesh Project, a Hellenistic period multi-layer site in North Galilee. She organizes the retrieval and floatation of plant remains and palaeoethnobotanical analysis from the tell site Vinca in Serbia. She also analyzed plant macro remains from Megiddo, Israel, a multi-layer site occupied from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (the seventh millennium B.C.E.) to the Persian period (the mid-first millennium B.C.E.)

Dr. Ksenija Borojevic received a two year NSF Grant for the project “Multisclar Approach to the Study of Vegetation and Plant Use during the Neolithic Period in the Central Balkans” (2011-2013).

PUBLICATIONS (Selection)

NEW Microscopic identification and sourcing of ancient Egyptian plant fibers using longitudinal thin sectioning  (together with Mountain, R.) Archaeometry (2012).  Available online doi/10.1111/j.1475-4754.2012.00673.x.

Interpreting, dating, and reevaluating the botanical assemblage from tell Kedesh: a case study of historical contamination. Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011):829-842.

Pests in an ancient Egyptian harbor (together with Steiner, W. E., Gerisch, R., Zazzaro, C., and Ward, C.) Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 37 ( 2010): 2449-2458.

Water chestnuts (Trapa natans L.) as controversial plants: Botanical, ethno-historical and archaeological evidence. Chapter 10 in From Foragers to Farmers: Papers in Honor of Gordon C. Hillman, edited by Andrew S Fairbairn & Ehud Weiss. Oxbow Books, 2009.

Plant Use at Grapceva Cave and in the Eastern Adriatic Neolithic (together with Staso Forenbaher, Timothy Kaiser, and Francesco Berna). Journal of Field Archaeology 33 (2008) 279–303.

Terra and Silva in the Pannonian Plain: Opovo agro-gathering in the Late Neolithic. BAR International Series, S1563, Archaeopress, Oxford 2006.

Nutrition and environment in medieval Serbia: charred cereal, weed and fruit remains from the fortress of Ras. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 14:453-464, 2005 (available also on line).

Archaeobotanical Finds. Chapter 27. In Megiddo IV: the 1998-2002 Seasons. Edited by Israel Finkelstein, David Ussishkin and Baruch Halpern. Monograph Series of the Institute of Archaeology University of Tel-Aviv No. 24, Tel-Aviv, pp. 519-541, 2006

The Transfer and History of “Reduced height Genes (Rht) in Wheat from Japan to Europe.” (together with Katarina Borojevic) Journal of Heredity Volume 96(4):455-459, 2005 (available also on line).

Historic Role of the Wheat Variety Akakomugi in Southern and Central European Wheat Breeding Program (together with Katarina Borojevic) Breeding Science 55:253-256, 2005 (available also on line).

Report on the Thirteenth International Work Group Symposium of Palaeoethnobotany, Girona, Spain, May 16-22, 2004. Society for Archaeological Sciences (SAS) Bulletin Vol. 7, No. 4, Winter 2004 (available also on line).

The Analysis of Macroplant Remains from the Fortress of Ras (the 12th and beginning of the 13th century). Starinar, Vol. LI/2000, pp. 191-205, 2003. (available also on line).