Dr Daniel Fuks
Research interestsAs an archaeobotanist, Daniel Fuks studies past human-plant interaction, with a primary geographic focus on the southern Levant. He seeks to bring the local archaeobotanical data he generates to bear on scholarship of long-term plant domestication and diffusion, ancient agriculture/pastoralism, and ancient economic history in the Mediterranean and beyond. He completed undergraduate degrees in Music and Economics at the University of Pittsburgh (USA) and an MA and PhD in Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University (Israel). In between degrees he also gained experience in small-scale vegetable, orchard, and vineyard cultivation in Israel. He conducted his PhD research as a member of the ERC-funded NEGEVBYZ project on the Byzantine-Islamic transition in the Negev, supervised by Prof Ehud Weiss (Bar-Ilan) and project PI, Prof Guy Bar-Oz (U. Haifa). He is currently a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, U. Cambridge, supervised by Prof Matthew Collins and co-supervised by Prof Cyprian Broodbank. His research project, “The flowering desert”, aims to reconstruct first millennium CE agricultural developments in the Negev desert and beyond from ancient herbivore dung microbiomes and rubbish-dump plant remains.
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