Jade’s research explores how relationships between people, plants and environments have changed through time, with a longstanding interest in the archaeology of southwest Asia. Her interests extend across the archaeology of food and farming from traditional farming practices and plant management to the development and spread of agriculture and its longer-term consequences. These questions cut across regions and periods and connect with wider debates about how we manage environments and resources in the present day.
She is particularly interested in the emergence of farming in southwest Asia, both as a complex evolutionary process and as a major transformation in human history. Much of her work investigates how people managed plants during the early stages of the Neolithic; how crops became domesticated and evolved under human management; and how the establishment of farming transformed human societies, economies and environments.
Jade specialises in archaeobotany, analysing plant remains from archaeological sites to understand how people used and managed plants in the past. She has extensive experience working with archaeobotanical assemblages and combines this specialist expertise with ecological approaches and evolutionary theory. Her work uses methods including functional weed ecology and stable isotope analysis to investigate past plant management, growing conditions and the nature of early farming systems. This interdisciplinary approach was central to Farming Before Agriculture, her British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship project, which focused on archaeobotanical assemblages from the Early Neolithic sites of Sharara and el-Hemmeh in southern Jordan, and continues to inform her research.
Fieldwork is also an integral part of Jade’s research and she has worked on a range of archaeological projects in Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Türkiye, Italy and Siberia, collaborating closely with excavation teams and leading environmental archaeology programmes on several international projects.
Alongside her academic research, Jade is committed to communicating archaeology to audiences beyond academia and to exploring how perspectives from the past can contribute to contemporary conversations. She has led a number of public engagement initiatives, including Farming: The First 12,000 Years, an exhibition and engagement project exploring the 12,000-year history of agriculture and its relevance to questions about food, farming and sustainability today.
