Profile

Hi, my name’s Jena and I’m an archaeologist! I live in Cambridge for most of the year when I’m not away digging in India or Italy or Malta or Turkey (phew!). I’ve been an archaeologist since I was 7 years old when I dug a 2-meter deep trench in my mum and dad’s garden and found a 2000 year old pot. Since then I’ve become really interested in what people would have been eating in the past, how they lived from day-to-day, and I’ll talk a bit more about that below in the ‘my work section’. Other than archaeology, I’m a HUGE Star Wars fan, and am part of a Star Wars costume group. I even have a full stormtrooper costume. My group uses our costumes to raise money for charity at weekends. In my spare time I make costume parts, spend time with friends and look after two goldfish (Luke and Leia).

My work looks at how people used plants in the past. So that includes everything from what people were eating, and how they got that food (did they grow it themselves, did they find it in the wild, did they get it from someone else?), to using plants to make building materials (e.g.: bedding, roofing, structural supports), to clothing (e.g.: cotton and linen), to fuel use (e.g.: wood or cattle dung – yes you can burn poo for fuel IF it is the right kind of dung and prepared well), to how people interacted with their environments.

I’m interested in this because plants are everywhere, you have to interact with them every day for food, building materials, clothes, environment, they are universal, but people use them in lots of different ways. For example, what do you consider food? Do you think budgie seed (sawa millet) is a food? Possibly not, but in parts of the Indus Civilisation of South Asia 5000 years ago it was an important part of the everyday diet. Today in South Asia sawa millet is often seen as a famine food. What is seen as food and how important it is varies depending on many things, and so we can think about some BIG questions:

Social organisation: can everyone eat the same food? Are some foods more expensive than others?
Religion: are some foods not allowed to be eaten (taboo)? Are there special foods for certain events? Are there certain events that have big feasts or fasting?
Trade and environment: could people have grown or found all these foods locally or are some exotic? How did they get access to them?

I’ve been exploring these kinds of questions mainly in the Indus Civilisation of South Asia about 5000 years ago (3200-1500BC). I’ve been looking at how villages reacted when cities developed nearby – did they change what they were growing to feed the cities? And when the cities were abandoned – was it because villages stopped giving them food? And at the moment the cities start to shrink there is a climate change event called the 4.2k event. The Indian Summer Monsoon which gives rain in the summer months stopped for 200 years and I wanted to ask – does that affect village agriculture? And more recently I’ve been looking at how sites on the edge of the Indus Civilisation reacted when they made contact with the Indus people, did they change what they were eating, or ignore them completely and carry on regardless?

If I’m in the UK I get up,  play Pokemon Go on my way to work, then either pour chemicals on soil to extract phytoliths (microscopic fossils of plant cells) to put on microscopic slides while listening to Florence and the Machine, or I analyse charred seed remains down the microscope. At the moment I am looking at samples from northern Pakistan, and have been finding bottlegourd, which is very unusual from that place and time period.

If I’m on an excavation, I get up around 6am, we go to the site and we usually have our responsibilities on site to monitor throughout the day. As the plant person I am in charge of something called flotation (adding soil to water and pouring it through a mesh) to get ancient charred seeds out of soil so have to make sure samples for that are taken. The whole dig team joins in the excavation though in the morning. We have breakfast around 9am, before more digging, sieving for artefacts, pottery and bone, taking samples, recording and drawing, and measuring height and layout of the site. After lunch later in the afternoon it gets too hot to work out on site so we go back to the site house and wash and sort finds, record them, the pottery specialists count pot sherds, and I get to do the flotation. As the sun sets its back to base for dinner and chilling out for the rest of the evening. If we finish early, possibly some shopping in town too. 🙂