In 2022, I was conducting my doctoral dissertation research on data-driven, automated digital farming technologies (drones, autosteering, sensors, GIS, smartphones, Big Data) in Turkey. Amidst the glo…
Industrial trade shows are curious places. Potential customers milling around more than 500,000 square feet of exhibit space; technoscientific exuberance and hype; snappy names and enticing displays; …
Interview by Ziya Kaya https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300215014/becoming-organic Ziya Kaya: In your book, Becoming Organic, you take us to various sites of pre- and post-agricultural p…
A food archaeologist investigates everyday eating and lean times among the ancient Moche of Peru through a remarkable discovery of thousands of llama “beans.” A DAY IN THE…
My podcast with Ahmed AlMaazmi and Tamara Fernando is posted online on the New Books Network.
Vincanne Adams. Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move. Duke University Press. 2023. Pp. 174. ISBN 9781478016755. Pablo Lapegna (University of Georgia) Welcome to …
Meet Katherine Chiou, an archaeologist who conducts research in Mexico and Peru to search for clues about humanity’s spicy romance with hot chili peppers. The world over people…
An archaeologist explains what a 500-year-old horn container found in South Africa illuminates about precolonial Khoisan medical and spiritual knowledges. This article was originally published at The…
An anthropologist takes readers inside a Hong Kong ecovillage, revealing a small but thriving movement built around food, sustainability, and community. A HONG KONG ECOVILLAGE One January morning,…
On May 21, 2022 the cover of The Economist left no space to the imagination: a set of skulls replaced the grains of a wheat straw, and the…
Nature-loving volunteers in the Mexican state of Chihuahua gather weekly on the banks of the San Pedro River to collect trash. But their aims are bigger. ✽ If…
It was often said, in the course of the transition from communism to capitalism in the 1990s and 2000s, that Eastern Europeans are good at surviving. The IMF…
Edward F. Fischer. Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third Wave Tastemakers Create Value. University of California Press. Berkeley: 2022. ISBN: 978-0-520-38696-9 David Sutton (Souther…
An anthropologist delves into the rarefied ritualistic world of specialty coffee, where highly trained brewers and judges compete to determine which beans reign supreme. Excerpted from Making Better…
An archaeologist fascinated by a centurieslong memorial practice in Georgia considers how these unique gravestones reflect shared values and traditions—yet are sometimes destroyed in nationalist cultu…
An archaeologist explains how new evidence stands to change what we thought about how ice age humans prepared food. This article was originally published at The Conversation and…
The allure of the onion Fieldwork can produce odd obsessions. As an anthropologist studying agrarian risk economies, mine was onions. In the central Indian region of Malwa where…
In October, 2022, I participated in the Food Sovereignty Workshop at Ohio State University and discussed the issue of sustainable agriculture and water resource use to improve the…
Victoria Stead and Melinda Hinkston, eds. Beyond Global Food Supply Chains: Crisis, Disruption, Regeneration. Palgrave. MacMillan. Open Access. (2022) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/…
Three researchers use a study of the cypress pine in Arnhem Land, Australia, to explain why large-scale, institutional fire management is inferior to sustainable cultural burning. This article…
An archaeologist considers what farming simulators reveal about humanity’s ancient and evolving relationship with agriculture. ✽ “I hate when I have to harvest at night,” my husband complained…
Traditional farming in al-Ahjur, Central Highlands (photography by Daniel Martin Varisco) The early major civilizations in the Middle East and Asia with their head start several millennia ago…
An anthropologist traces the origins and world travels of one of his favorite kinds of plants. ✽ As someone who grew up in the Philippines, I have always…
Jennifer Jo Thompson, University of Georgia (SAFN President) After three years of planning, postponing due to COVID-19, and then planning again, “Cultivating Connections”—the 2022 joint annual mee…