My Story.

I began my academic career not in the humanities, studying ancient Egypt and the Incas, but in the sciences, exploring how cells replicate, how DNA translates into the building blocks of our bodies, and how enzymes catalyse the reactions of life. My undergraduate summer job involved growing little colonies of the bacteria Salmonella typhimurium on plates of agar, and separating fragments of their DNA using methods that, following decades of revolutionary developments in molecular genetics, seem exceedingly quaint.

At the end of four years, I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Cellular, Molecular, and Microbial Biology from the University of Calgary. Many of my colleagues went on to careers in medicine, industry and research. But I was restless. I felt hemmed in by the ordinariness of my everyday life in a sleepy Canadian city, and ignorant of the world that lay beyond. So, within months of completing my studies, I hopped on a long-haul flight headed east, and ended up living in Japan. Together with another science colleague and friend, I formed a small company that helped Japanese scientists communicate their research findings in English. We worked for Japanese universities and pharmaceutical companies, and gradually expanded into supporting museum exhibitions, which led to my editing texts about the history of Japanese castles, shrines and temples. This, and travel to ancient sites in Japan and Southeast Asia, heightened my long-term interest in archaeology. I began to volunteer on archaeological excavations in the enormous city of Osaka where I lived. The ground there was dense with ancient remains, and before new buildings could go up, archaeologists were allowed time to study and salvage the forgotten world that development was slowly erasing.

On a visit home to Calgary, I came across a research paper about a fledgling new field called biomolecular archaeology. Researchers were exploring ways to use the methods of molecular biology to study the past. Their work was revealing that under particular conditions, biomolecules could in fact preserve over long time periods. They could study them to find out new things about the past that could not be learned with traditional methods.

I decided that this was my future. I even translated the words ‘biomolecular archaeology’ into Japanese so I could explain my plans to my baffled Japanese colleagues. No one had heard of it. I was invited to give an academic talk about this obscure new subdiscipline, to introduce the ideas to my Japanese friends. This was before the internet had developed into a particularly useful tool, so I relied on the few papers I had photocopied while I was home. I made crude images that I put up on an overhead projector. My colleagues were intrigued, but none of us had a clue about the revolution that was ahead, the many ways that biomolecular tools, as well as others from physics, earth science, chemistry, and computational science, would transform the practice of archaeology in the decades to come.

From Japan I flew to England. I was going to give archaeology a year to see what I thought. I did an MPhil at the University of Cambridge, a full year of living, breathing and debating archaeology in centuries-old pubs. I loved it. Science at this time, at least at Cambridge, was the poor cousin of what was really the main show in town: archaeological theory. Archaeology was philosophical, phenomenological, post-modern, Marxist, post-critical, queer, feminist. I was about as far from the natural sciences as I could get, questioning everything I had ever accepted as fact, and looking critically at all that had been assumed about the past.

I embarked on a PhD that took me to Rajasthan in India. I went to work on an archaeological excavation with colleagues from Deccan College and some of the local universities, who were kind enough to take me on. But before long I was spending more time at the neighbouring village. I pestered the patient villagers with questions about how and why they built their houses, organised their space and lived their daily lives. I eventually wrote it all up as a PhD that explored material culture and domestic space, and what they mean to people. I wanted to better understand what the things and spaces archaeologists dig up actually meant to people in the past. Not just how they functioned, but what they symbolised and how they structured people’s lives.

After graduating with a PhD from Cambridge, I accepted a series of postdoctoral fellowships, first at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge and later in Paris, where I was based at the University of Paris’ MAE Archaeology and Ethnology Research Centre and funded by the Fyssen Foundation. I began excavating early sites in south India, together with colleagues from India and the UK, exploring the emergence of village life and the first agricultural settlements.  I also continued to pursue my obsession with material culture, eventually writing a book called Material Cultures, Material Minds that was published by Cambridge University Press. I was fascinated by how humans shape the material world around them, and how it shapes them back, often in ways they don’t predict or even recognise.

After my Fyssen Foundation fellowship concluded, I returned to Cambridge, where I was based at the vibrant Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies. In 2007, I applied to a new grant scheme that had just been launched by the European Research Council. My proposal addressed a topic that had begun to fascinate me: early globalisation. The seed of this fascination came from some unexpected findings we had made while excavating early village sites on the Deccan Plateau in India. While sifting through plant remains, my archaeobotanist colleague Dorian Fuller discovered, amongst all of the thousands of fragments of Indian crops on the sites, the occasional plant that did not belong. Some came from Africa, one all the way from southeast Asia. How they had reached India by this early date was a total mystery.

In 2008, armed with my first large-scale research funding, from the European Research Council, and a team of colleagues and friends, I set out to find out. Our project was called the Sealinks Project, and it drew on a multidisciplinary set of methods, including those of the now burgeoning field of biomolecular archaeology. What we discovered, in particular through fieldwork led by my close collaborator Alison Crowther, and the investigations of numerous specialist collaborators, was a world of early biological exchange. Plants and animals from Asia had travelled to Africa, and others had made the journey in the other direction. The world we live in, the foods we grow and eat, the ‘traditional’ cuisines we love, are all shaped by this extraordinary, large-scale exchange of species, which had also transformed landscapes, ecosystems and patterns of biodiversity. These biological exchanges could in turn be traced back to the small-scale movements and trade of early individuals and societies, particularly around the dynamic rim of the Indian Ocean world, but also along terrestrial routes that stretched from one end of Eurasia to the other.

2008 also saw me shift from Cambridge to Oxford, where I became a Senior Research Fellow in the University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology, and later a Fellow of Jesus College. My research job did not require me to teach, but I was keen to engage with students, and to share my excitement about archaeology. So I established new undergraduate and Masters research courses, I took on PhD students. I also continued to collaborate with colleagues on research in other areas that interested me, particularly human evolution and the dispersal of our species, Homo sapiens, out of Africa, topics that my husband, the palaeoanthropologist and archaeologist Michael Petraglia, and his friends, insisted on making mandatory dinner conversation out of.

Over the next five years, the Sealinks Project grew into a large multidisciplinary project, fueled by new methods in biomolecular archaeology and archaeological science. Our international team tracked the spread of crops and animals around the Indian Ocean, excavating in Sri Lanka, Kenya, Tanzania, the Comoros and Madagascar. We held numerous conferences, including a Fyssen Foundation-funded gathering in the former residence of Louis XIV in Saint-Germain-en-Laye that led to the publication of the book Human Dispersal and Species Movement from Prehistory to the Present. I edited another book with an old friend, Michael Frachetti, about the world’s first baby steps towards the globalised planet we live on today, called Globalisation in Prehistory.

In 2016, I moved again, this time to Germany to take up a Directorship at the new Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. There I had the resources to bring natural sciences approaches to archaeology in a significant way. We established some of the leading laboratories for archaeological science in the world, investing in state-of-the-art facilities. Before it was closed down and restructured in 2022, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History would go on to become one of the leading research institutions for the study of the human past in the world, training a new cohort of interdisciplinary doctoral students, and establishing many junior researchers on the pathway to dynamic research careers in archaeology.

In the Department of Archaeology, we initiated research into a broad range of topics, from the beginnings of agriculture, to the early spread of people, crops and animals, and the emergence of more complex technologies, societies and trading systems. But a fundamental thread running through much of the work I was most invested in was the human niche. The world around us is being dramatically transformed by human activity, but it is also clear that humans have been shaping the Earth for many millennia, altering ecosystems, changing the distribution of species, transforming biogeochemical pathways, and driving extinctions and extirpations.

Our research set out to explore these patterns, and to better understand their implications for the present and the future.

Today my research continues to draw and build upon these themes. I am now based at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, and I also hold an Honorary Professorship at the University of Queensland in Australia. I work with colleagues around the world to better understand the past, and to help transform the discipline of archaeology from an ivory tower pursuit to a field of endeavour closely tied to modern-day questions and problems, and the challenges of living in the Anthropocene.