Office Artifacts: John Marston

CAS assistant archaeology prof studies plants to look for climate change clues

Office Artifacts: John Marston

CAS assistant archaeology prof studies plants to look for climate change clues

1 2 3 4 5

John Marston, BU assistant archeology and anthropology professor

Marston picked up this map when he was doing fieldwork in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus. “This is one of the earliest maps of Cyprus,” he says. “Luigi Palma di Cesnola, who was the American consul to Cyprus back when it was part of the Ottoman Empire, went around Cyprus buying up archaeological statues. The entire Cypriot collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is unparalleled, is his collection. This is the map of his travels.”

“This is like my favorite thing,” Marston says of this eclectic bronze (looking) sculpture. It’s actually an ice bucket. “I found it in my grandparents’ house when we were cleaning it out after they died. It’s just fun.”

A game only an archaeologist could love: this card game about yam trading is “based on ethnographic research of the South Pacific from the early 1900s,” Marston says. It was a gift from a former student.

Terra-cotta Army Warrior replicas Marston’s mother brought him from China. The army of thousands of life-size soldiers, horses, chariots, and more from the third century BCE was discovered in 1974, one of the major archaeological finds of the 20th century.

A Student Paper Award for the best paper presented at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in 2010

As a PhD candidate in archaeology at UCLA, Marston won this Student Paper Award in 2010 for the best paper presented at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting.

Click on the circles above to see more of what John Marston displays in his Stone Science Building office.

January 24, 2018

Amy Laskowski

Jackie Ricciardi

In his course Eating and Drinking in the Ancient World (which he will teach again in spring 2019), John Marston introduces students to what our ancestors ate a very long time ago. Last semester, the College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of archaeology and anthropology obtained grain used in ancient times and baked bread to give students a firsthand taste of a type of wheat that was domesticated 10,000 years ago.

When a colleague gifted him with an “interesting” mezcal from Mexico, he gave his students, emphasizing, “if they were of age,” a “very, very small taste in Dixie cups”—he points to a stack of the tiny cups stockpiled precariously in the corner of his office. The distilled alcoholic beverage is derived from the agave plant, which was one of the most sacred plants in pre-Spanish Mexico.

Most of Marston’s research focuses on the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and his office is a hodgepodge of gifts students and colleagues have given him. A canteen made out of a gourd and a corncob came from a student who’d been to Mexico.

A 2013 Peter Paul Career Development Professor, Marston studies plant remains. He says he has always been interested in environmental science, plants, and history, but wasn’t sure how to combine the three. As a Washington University undergrad, he had a eureka moment when he took a course that involved studying plant remains on archaeological sites: “Oh my god, it’s everything that I’m interested in, all at the same time,” he recalls thinking.

“The reason I look at different seeds is to look at ancient agriculture,” he says. “One of the questions I’m interested in is how do people decide which kind of plants to grow in order to minimize the risk that it will be a drought year, or hail, where it will destroy their entire crop. This has implications in the modern world, and that’s one of the connections I work on.”

In our series “Office Artifacts,” BU Today highlights interesting artifacts professors and staff display in their office. Have a suggestion about someone we should profile? Email amlaskow@bu.edu.

This Series

Office Artifacts: Lawford Anderson

Also in