Archaeology

Professor Glynis Jones

Telephone: 0114 222 2904
E-Mail: G.Jones@Sheffield.ac.uk

Professor Glynis Jones, BSc, PhD

Professor Jones is an expert in ancient plant remains and early agriculture, with particular reference to Britain and the Mediterranean region. Her field projects include archaeobotany in Britain, Greece, Hungary and Turkey and ethnoagriculture in Greece and Spain. She is a member of the Sheffield Centre for Aegean Archaeology

Research interests

• The ecological study of crop husbandry practices. Dr. Charles and I are investigating the effects of different crop husbandry regimes (e.g. irrigation, fallowing, manuring) on weed floras in areas where traditional cultivation methods are still practised in order to identify past agricultural methods. We are currently creating a functional ecological database for the weed species commonly occurring in archaeobotanical assemblages so that the new methodology can be widely applied in the interpretation of archaeological data from Europe and the Near East.
• The spread of agriculture in Europe. In collaboration with University of Manchester, the University of Cambridge and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB), we are investigating the ‘domestication’ of Europe through phylogenetic, archaeobotanical and DNA analysis. The objective of this project is to determine the extent to which phylogeographical analysis of modern landraces of barley and wheat, combined with examination of ancient DNA in preserved specimens, can reveal genetic information pertaining to the spread and establishment of cereal cultivation from its point of origin in Southwest Asia into and through Europe. Among other aspects, we will investigate the possibility that crop genetics could be used to evaluate the relative roles of climatic adaptation and human assimilation in determining the rate of agricultural spread and the success of cereal cultivation in different geographical regions.

• Ancient cereal DNA. In collaboration with University of Manchester, we are investigating the effects of charring on ancient DNA preservation, and developing analytical methods appropriate for the investigation of ancient charred grain, which will allow the more widespread application of DNA techniques in archaeology.
• Archaeobotanical investigation of past agricultural practices and land use. My research on charred plant assemblages from British neolithic, bronze and iron age sites is concerned with the relative contributions of gathered plant foods and cultivated cereals, the scale and intensity of cultivation in different periods, the extent of surplus production and other issues relating to production and consumption.
• Early agriculture and the origin of crops. Field projects in Greece (Assiros), Hungary, Italy and Turkey (Catalhoyuk) are producing new evidence for the past genetic diversity of early cereal crops which is providing insights into the origin and subsequent development of early agriculture.
• Crop storage and stable isotope analysis. The aim of this collaborative project with the NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory (NIGL), is to determine whether single local cereal harvests can be distinguished from pooled storage from several locations or years, on the basis of distinctive isotopic signatures. This has provided evidence for centralised storage related to the emergence of a hierarchical society.

Selected Publications

Research Supervision

We would be interested in applications from prospective PhD candidates for the following projects.

Integrating the Evidence for the Spread of Cereal Agriculture in Europe

The aim of this project is to model the spread of cereal crops through Europe in relation to geographic parameters. The project involves the measurement of multivariate morphological traits (mostly of cereal chaff) through image analysis software programmes, and the mapping of these in relation to topographic, edaphic and climatic variables in GIS, to establish the role of local carrying capacity in the spread of agriculture. Archaeobotanical compositional data and radiocarbon dates based on cereal remains will also become available during the course of the project, and can be mapped alongside the morphological and geographic variables, in collaboration with the Department of Probability and Statistics.

Exploring the Evolutionary Process of Cereal and Pulse Domestication through functional and ecological analysis

This project will approach the process of cereal and pulse domestication by exploring the functional attributes (e.g. ability to form a seed bank, specific leaf area) related to tillage, harvesting, palatibility/predator defence and growing conditions in European and Near Eastern grasses and legumes. The interactions between these attributes will be analysed and the functional differences between domesticated cereals and pulses, their wild progenitors and wild grasses and legumes will be examined to determine the evolutionary parameters governing this process. This will be backed up by experimental work on ecological characteristics (e.g. growth rate, water-use efficiency), and will be jointly supervised by staff in the Departments of Archaeology and Animal and Plant Science.