Fiona Marshall

Fiona Marshall is an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Her methodological specialties are zooarchaeology and ethnoarchaeology. She has excavated Pastoral Neolithic sites in eastern Africa, focusing primarily on the domestication and herding of animals, particularly cattle and donkeys. She has also conducted ethnoarchaeological research on factors that affect body part representation in archaeological sites, and on foraging ways of life amongst Okiek people of the western Mau Escarpment, Kenya. She has also worked to conserve the Laetoli footprints. She is currently the James W. and Jean L. Davis Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This early food production may have led to the current distribution of wealth. The specialization may have occurred because of the increased pastoral production opportunities in East Africa at that time. Identifying pastoralist sites is not always easy: pastoralists tend to not leave well-defined sites behind after they move on, and what they do leave behind does not always preserve well. Looking at the bones that are represented at a site can help the archaeologist determine whether the site is a butchery site or a habitation site. Albano Beja-Pereira et al. also use her paper in their article "The Origin of European Cattle: Evidence From Modern and Ancient DNA" from 2006. They acknowledge that cattle may have been domesticated from Africa first, and they use Marshall's research to help figure out where the cattle seen in the European archaeological record came from. This paper has been used by the same archaeologists that would have looked at the one mentioned above. This paper has been cited by Diane Gifford-Gonzalez in her paper "Animal Disease Challenges to the Emergence of Pastoralism in Sub-Saharan Africa". Gifford-Gonzalez uses Marshall's work about where specialized pastoralism began to help her make her argument about how being so close to animals may have affected their health. The specialization of pastoralism would have opened up the people to new diseases that they otherwise would not have been exposed to before.