We are delighted to welcome Dr. Robert N. Spengler III, one of the leading scholars in archaeobotany and the study of ancient plant use. Dr. Spengler is the Director of the Paleoethnobotany Laboratories at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, where he also leads the Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution Research Group. His work brings together archaeology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and the history of human food systems.
For the past two decades, Dr. Spengler has studied the archaeobotany of Central Asia through field projects at more than two dozen archaeological sites across Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, China, and Mongolia. His research has helped transform our understanding of the ancient Silk Road—not only as a route for trade in luxury goods, but as one of the most important pathways for the movement of crops, technologies, and culinary traditions across Eurasia.
Dr. Spengler’s work shows how familiar foods such as apples, almonds, apricots, peaches, pistachios, rice, and many grain crops moved across ancient landscapes and became part of cuisines around the world. His book Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat explores how Central Asia shaped the modern dinner table and highlights the deep history behind many foods we now consider everyday staples.
In this seminar, Dr. Spengler will focus on one of the most fascinating questions in human history: how did domestication happen?
Rather than seeing domestication simply as a story of humans deliberately “inventing” agriculture, Dr. Spengler asks us to look at the process from the perspective of the plants themselves. How did plants evolve under human influence? What traits allowed certain species to thrive in human-made environments? And what if domestication was not only a human achievement, but also an evolutionary strategy through which plants benefited from their relationships with people and animals?
Drawing on his recent research and his forthcoming book Nature’s Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity, Dr. Spengler challenges conventional explanations of agricultural origins. He argues that early domestication was often an unconscious and mutualistic process, shaped by long-term relationships between plants, humans, animals, landscapes, and seed dispersal. In this view, humans were not simply controlling nature; they were also becoming part of the evolutionary worlds of plants.
This seminar will be of interest to students and researchers in archaeology, anthropology, environmental humanities, biology, history, geography, food studies, and anyone curious about the origins of agriculture and the deep history of the foods we eat today.
Join us for a thought-provoking talk on domestication, evolution, and the surprising ways plants and humans have shaped each other’s histories.
Forskarseminariet i arkeologi
Seminar with Dr. Robert Spengler, Max Planck Institute, Jena, Germany
Chair: Natalia Riabogina/Bettina Schulz Paulsson
All lectures are on campus in a hybrid format.
https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/69359491559?pwd=ZktCM2crbDdZcEJQUUFZYmRPMTdFUT09