George Pitt-Rivers Laboratory for Bioarchaeology
University of Cambridge
Introduction
The George Pitt-Rivers Laboratory for Bio-Archaeology supports a range of research into early food, economic plants, and the environmental context of the food quest. Our core resources are our botanical reference collection (see below) and a suite of microscopes. These are mostly low power stereoscopes, with some higher power binocular. We have a close relationship with the Multi-Imaging Centre (a few minutes walk away) for electron microscope use. The lab is also equipped for basic wet chemistry.
Our recent projects have included: palaeolithic plant foods, tree exploitation in arid zones, Greco-Roman agriculture, and Eurasian crop plant movement (see FOGLIP). We favour multidisciplinary research, and archaeobotanists, isotope researchers and archaeogenetics work very closely together in the laboratory, and also work closely with culturally oriented archaeologists. Researchers at all stages of their career meet and exchange ideas on a regular basis, and there are many opportunities for presenting their work to colleagues.
History of the lab.
The Lab was established with the creation of the George Pitt-Rivers Professorship of Archaeological Science in 1990, and slightly predates the current buildings housing the McDonald Institute. Early work in the lab included Delwen Samuel’s pioneering research into the archaeobotanical and chemical evidence for brewing in ancient Egypt, and pioneering work of Alex Power-Jones and Marco Madella on phytolith analysis, now continued and expanded by Marco at his own lab in Barcelona.
Our extensive plant reference collection was built up through the formidable energies of Dr Lila Janik, and used to support important work in early agriculture in Europe, India, Africa and Asia. Many of the lab members from that period now run their own research groups, including Dorian Fuller at London, Lydia Zapata-Peña in Bilbao Victor Paz in Manila, and Manon Savard in Quebec.
We have always been interested in the interconnections between archaeobotany, genetics and palaeodietary isotope studies, and a number of our projects have explored those boundaries, from our early work, together with Terry Brown (Manchester) and Robin Allaby (Warwick) on ancient plant DNA, through to our current work on historic crop DNA (Diane Lister and Hugo Oliveira), and isotopic analyses of plants (FOGLIP and other projects).
