Indiana Jones – TPS Alum-style!

Perhaps archaeologist Mac Marston ’93 didn’t set out to emulate Indiana Jones, but a list of Mac’s travels through areas such as Turkey, Egypt, and Albania can’t help but call Steven Spielberg’s hero to mind.

As if his travel itineraries weren’t exciting enough, this year Mac won three prestigious academic awards for his research. In January, the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) selected him as the winner of the institute's Graduate Student Paper Award. His paper, presented at the 2010 AIA Annual Meeting in Anaheim, was deemed particularly impressive because of its "integration of the archaeological and environmental evidence into a convincing and cogent scientific argument." In April, Mac won the Best Student Paper Award at the Society for American Archaeology meeting in St. Louis. And to cap it all off, he also received a two-year postdoctoral research grant from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers. The research fellowship is a State Department-funded grant for research in two or more countries that leads to publications with regional significance.

Mac received his Ph.D. from UCLA in June. His dissertation uses the case study of Gordion, the capital of the Phrygian state (in modern Turkey), to understand the changing relationships between people and their botanic environment from 800 BCE to the medieval period. After another dig in Turkey this summer, Mac will be moving to Providence, RI, where he will be pursuing a post-doc at Brown University.

Mac explains, "My research focuses on understanding how people interact with landscapes, past and present, and how they make decisions about land use in the context of specific biological and social environments. I analyze archaeological remains in the context of historical and ethnographic records, ecological data, and behavioral theory to better understand the role of environment in human decision-making processes."

In the past few years, between his research gigs abroad, Mac has found time to work with TPS students. This winter he discussed his work as a paleoethnobotanist with our seventh graders in preparation for their own research projects on "Seeds of Change."

We'd like to think that it was Mac's interdisciplinary work at TPS, as well as his middle school theme reports on Genghis Khan, the Ming Dynasty, and Babylon, that sparked his extraordinary scholarship! Congratulations, Mac! (And congratulations to Emily Marston, Mac's Middle School theme teacher . . . and mom.)