Professor Gordon HILLMAN - B.Sc.

• Honorary Professor in Archaeobotany (Palaeoethnobotany)
• Awards: Distinguished Economic Botanist of 2004 (awarded by the internationally-based Society for Economic Botany)

Main picture: Stalking a somewhat apprehensive specimen of wild rhubarb in the Karakum Desert, Turkmenistan (Photo: David Harris)
Inset picture: In conversation (in Turkish) with Kurdish transhumants at their ‘yayla’ (summer pastures) on Mt Ararat . (Photo by my daughter: Thilaka Markham)

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Research Interests:

The first three research areas are clearly linked:

• Ecological modelling of the past distribution and seasons of availability of wild plant foods in the steppe and woodland ecosystems of western Eurasia during the Late Pleistocene, particularly plants that were rich in assimilable carbohydrates and fats and that could have served as caloric staples;
• Patterns of use of plant foods among hunter-gatherers of the temperate and arid zones from the Middle Palaeolithic to the Mesolithic, particularly cross-cultural common denominators characterizing the subsistence strategies of groups which are geographically and/or culturally isolated from each other, but which utilize similar types of resource environment;
• Large-scale, field-based experimentation with methods of harvesting and processing the wild plant foods of western Eurasia, particularly those likely to have been used by the hunter-gatherers of north-western Europe.

The next three also overlap:

• The origins of agriculture in western Eurasia; more specifically, why erstwhile foragers started to cultivate some of their caloric staples;
• The collapse of dietary diversity that accompanied the shift from foraging to farming, and its effect on past and present patterns of human nutrition;
• The problems of modelling past patterns of consumption of leafy, green foods, with particular reference to their role as sources of antioxidants.

• The genetics and ecology of the domestication of wheats and ryes, particularly the possibility that deeper sowing resulting from early systems of tillage associated with scrub-clearance selected for early increases in grain-size. (See Dorian Fuller ‘s entry under Staff Profile Index ).
• Morphological criteria for distinguishing ancient wheats and ryes (wild and domestic)..
• Traditional systems of arable farming in Europe and SW Asia, and the role of ethno-agricultural modelling in archaeology.

• Archaeological evidence for the prehistoric use of plant hallucinogens in western Eurasia, particularly members of the caltrop family Zygophyllaceae and other plant sources of beta-carboline whether used on their own or (as monoamine oxidase inhibitors) with plants containing dimethyl tryptamine.

Complete List of Publications

Collaborations:

• With Ray Mears: field-based experiments on strategies for gathering, processing ad storage of wild plant resources likely to have been available in aboriginal (hunter-gatherer) Britain. Problems of seasonality and nutrition. (10 yrs and continuing.)
• With Tony Leeds (Dept. Nutrition and Dietetics, Kings College London): nutrient status of plant foods used by pre-agrarian foragers of western Eurasia. (22 yrs and continuing.)
• With George Willcox (Institut Pr é historique Orientales, Jal è s, France).: the Late Pleistocene /Early Holocene transition from foraging to farming in the Middle Euphrates. (30 yrs and continuing.)

Educational Background:

• 1959-65: worked in a) horticulture (the family business); b) dairy/cereal farming; c) the UK Nature Conservancy's Reserve on Alston Moor in Cumbria; d) 4 years in the European Herbarium of the Botany Dept. of the Natural History Museum, London, working under the Latvian grass taxonomist Dr Alexander Melderis.
• 1965-69: BSc in Agricultural Botany at University of Reading, with subsidiary degree in Pure Botany, with particular interests in Evolutionary Genetics and Taxonomy, and with dissertation on “The bio-taxonomy of the Senecio radicans complex”.
• 1969-70: Postgraduate research training in archaeobotany (palaeo-ethnobotany) with Maria Hopf at the Johannes Gutenberg- Universität, Mainz, Germany, and the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum (also in Mainz).
• 1970-75: Research Fellow at the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara (Turkey) researching Neolithic agriculture on the central Anatolian Plateau, traditional (extant) farming practice on the south-eastern Plateau, and pre-agrarian foraging and the beginnings of cereal cultivation in northern Syria, with an extensive series of parallel studies on a) the ecology of useful wild plants of steppe and woodland ecosystems, and b) field + lab-based experiments on their harvesting, processing and edibility.
• 1975-81: Lecturer (Courses in Angiosperm Systematics and Taxonomy, and in Crop-plant Evolution) in the then Dept of Botany, University College Cardiff, Wales. Concurrently Archaeobotany Consultant to the Welsh Archaeological Trusts, with major projects in Gwynedd and Clwyd/Powys.
• 1981- present: UCL Institute of Archaeology. Lecturer in Archaeobotany, then Reader, and now Visiting Professor. Took early retirement in 1997 on grounds of ill health (Parkinson’s disease).

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