January 2026: Dr. John “Mac” Marston (CAS/Archaeology & Anthropology)

Dr. John Marston is a professor of Archaeology and Anthropology. He is the director of Boston University’s Archaeology Program and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an environmental archaeologist who studies the long-term sustainability of agriculture and land use, with a focus on ancient societies of the Mediterranean and western and central Asia. His research focuses on how people make decisions about land use within changing economic, social, and environmental settings, and how those decisions affect the environment at local and regional scales. A specialist in paleoethnobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains, Marston’s contributions to the field include novel ways of linking ecological theory with archaeological methods to reconstruct agricultural and land-use strategies from plant and animal remains.

Dr. Martson’s recent interdisciplinary collaborations focus on comparative study of cultural adaptation to environmental and climate change in the past and present; developing new methods to study the spatial distribution of land use from archaeological animal and plant remains; and the ecology of plague. His current research projects include multi-proxy reconstruction of agriculture in Bronze and Iron Age urban centers of Turkey; Hellenistic, Roman, and Early Islamic sites in Israel; and work in both the Aegean (Agora of Athens, Greece) and central Asia (Khorezm Ancient Agriculture Project, Uzbekistan). Dr. Marston’s recent research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the US-Australia Fulbright Commission, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Loeb Classical Library Foundation, American Research Institute in Turkey, American Philosophical Society, and Boston University.

My research sits at the intersection of the social and natural sciences, as I attempt to understand how and why people transform landscapes and, in turn, how societies adapt to environmental change. In retrospect, these have always been my interests: from a young age, I wanted to understand why the world was the way it was. When I became exposed to history and ancient cultures, I grew more curious about what life was like for people long ago, and how similar or different their experiences were from mine. Archaeology provides an opportunity to explore these questions and understand the present world as a product of all that came before.

I am wrapping up publication of the data from a small archaeological site which I excavated with colleagues in Uzbekistan. This site sits along the Amu Darya river, one of the major watercourses of western central Asia, and was part of the ancient Silk Road city of Kath, the capital of the Khorezm region. We found evidence that occupation at Kath began earlier than previously documented, as early as 400 BCE, and thus predates its rise as a historically documented city by nearly 800 years. Agricultural practices included diversified millet and rice cultivation, both at very early dates in comparison with prior evidence from the region. This study illustrates how sophisticated were the ways in which ancient inhabitants strategically manipulated locally variable riparian and wetland contexts for resource exploitation across the more than two millennia of occupation at Kath.

Decide what type of goal setter you are: 1) aim as high as possible and be content with never more than partial success, or 2) be realistic and aim for sufficient, but achievable goals so that you can achieve what you set out to accomplish. This is especially useful information to learn about a collaborator early in the relationship, so that expectations can be aligned!

I most enjoy teaching AN/AR 510, Proposal Writing for Social Science Research. The course is intended for PhD students beginning their doctoral projects and crafting a dissertation prospectus or a substantial grant to fund their doctoral research. The course is divided roughly evenly between research design and writing process, with the aim of helping students learn to become better and more productive writers. I love to see the progress students make and the lasting benefits of healthy writing habits in their future careers!

I am fascinated by tiny, remote, but inhabited islands—their archaeology and ecology but also their very geological existence! I would love to visit more of these.