Daniel Fuks
- Biography
- Selected Publications
Daniel Fuks is an archaeobotanist, studying 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 is currently a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of 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.
Daniel is also co-chair of the Cambridge Food Security Forum of the Cambridge Global Food Security IRC, together with Dr Nadia Radzman.
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 (University of Haifa).
Daniel Fuks and Nimrod Marom, 'Sheep and wheat domestication in southwest Asia: a meta-trajectory of intensification and loss', Animal Frontiers 11, 3 (2021): pp. 20-29. [DOI]
Daniel Fuks and Zachary C Dunseth, 'Dung in the dumps: what we can learn from multi-proxy archaeobotanical study of herbivore dung pellets', Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 30 (2020): pp. 137–153. [DOI]
Daniel Fuks, Guy Bar-Oz, Yotam Tepper, Tali Erickson-Gini, Dafna Langgut, Lior Weissbroad and Ehud Weiss, 'The rise and fall of viticulture in the Negev Highlands during Late Antiquity: An economic reconstruction from quantitative archaeobotanical and ceramic data', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) USA 117, 33 (2020): pp. 19780-19791. [DOI]
Daniel Fuks, Oriya Amichay and Ehud Weiss, 'Innovation or preservation? Abbasid aubergines, archaeobotany and the Islamic Green Revolution', Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 12, 50 (2020): online. [DOI]
Zachary C Dunseth, Daniel Fuks, Dafna Langgut, Ehud Weiss, Yoel Melamed, Don H Butler, Xin Yan, Elisabetta Boaretto, Yotam Tepper, Guy Bar-Oz, Ruth Shahack-Gross, 'Archaeobotanical proxies and archaeological interpretation: a comparative study of phytoliths, seeds and pollen in dung pellets and refuse deposits at Early Islamic Shivta, Negev, Israel', Quaternary Science Reviews 211 (2019): pp. 166-185. [DOI]
