Silk Road Archaeobotany
Dispersal: Ancient Trade and Plant Mobility
Many consider the Silk Road a mirage in the shifting sands of time, but the ideas and goods that once moved across Eurasia directed the course of human history. Conjuring images of Marco Polo, Scythian warrior nomads, and ancient empires lost to the desert sands, the prehistory of Central Asia is so deeply intertwined with fictional stories that few know the truth about those who occupied this region in the past. And yet, its influence can be seen all around us.
Exploring this legacy through archaeobotanical evidence, Dr. Spengler and his research team focus on ancient exchange routes, examining their impact on our modern world and cuisine.
Together, they’re filling the gaps in the early archaeobotanical map of Asia and showing how important the Silk Road was in spreading crops and technologies. The Spengler Lab team is building a new view of societal development based on agricultural intensification by answering questions about the paleoenvironment, cultural exchange, and social orders, creating a broader understanding of human adaptations and complexity through time.
In his book, Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat, Dr. Spengler presents first-hand research from over a dozen archaeological sites. He shows that, over the past two millennia, Silk Road trade routes brought almonds, apples, apricots, peaches, pistachios, rice, and a wide variety of other foods to European kitchens. His research merges scholarly sources from the biological and social sciences to present the fascinating story of the spread of agriculture across Inner Asia and Europe. He shows that humans are the greatest seed dispersers to ever exist, and the Silk Road was the most extensive route of plant mobility in the ancient world.
Domestication: A Mutualistic Relationship
Dr. Spengler's studies of the archaeological origins of domesticated plants led him to consider further patterns in their evolutionary journies. He believes we must look at evolutionary processes to understand how plants evolved traits of domestication under early cultivation.
In his most recent work, Dr. Spengler critiques mainstream approaches to the study of plant domestication. He uses weeds and ancient crop progenitors to understand how plants evolve under human influence.
Stepping away from models based on the heavily studied cereals, he looks at the process from the perspective of the plant rather than the farmer.
In his upcoming book, Nature’s Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity, Dr. Spengler argues that the earliest domestication of plants and animals was an unconscious process paralleling evolution in the wild. He disagrees with mainstream claims about the origins of agriculture and the earliest domestication of plants being tied to external factors, such as climate change and population pressure. Instead, he suggests that plants evolved in response to mutualistic relationships with humans and other animals as recruitment for seed dispersal.