Fiona Marshall

Dr. Fiona Marshall
Nationality	American
Academic background
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley
Thesis	(1986)
Academic work
Discipline	Anthropologist
Sub-discipline	Ethnoarchaeology and Zooarchaeology
Institutions	Washington University in St. Louis
Website	https://anthropology.artsci.wustl.edu/marshall_fiona

Fiona Marshall is an archaeologist and ethnoarchaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis. She specializes in the Pastoral Neolithic of eastern Africa, focusing primarily on the domestication and herding of animals, particularly cattle and donkeys.

Biography

Fiona Marshall got her Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1986. She currently is a Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. At Washington University she has also become a James W. and Jean L. Davis Professor, in other words, an endowed professor.

She has conducted ethnoarchaeological research that looked at what might affect body part representation in archaeological sites and alternative food production methods among Okiek people of western Mau Escarpment, Kenya. She also works in conservation projects in Laetoli.

Research

Fiona Marshall works in Neolithic Pastoral sites in eastern Africa. Because she works in Africa, it means that the Neolithic period that she studies is mainly the domestication and herding of animals, mostly cattle. She found that while the rest of the world was going through the Neolithic Revolution, Northern Africa was domesticating cattle. But pastoralism didn't spread throughout all of Africa, it was more sporadic. She also looks at the difference between the archaeological remains left behind by pastoralists and hunger-gatherer groups.

She also looks at bones at her Neolithic sites to see what the people at those sites were eating. She looks at the alternative use of bones in ancient times, such as: alternative uses for bones as food sources. She discovered that the people living at Ngamuriak in Kenya relied more on the nutrients from inside the bones that the meat from the animals they were killing. She also analyses the arrival of specialized pastoralism in East Africa. The specialization may have occurred because of the increased pastoral production opportunities in East Africa at that time.

Important writings

• Marshall, Fiona. (1990) "The Origin of Specialized Pastoral Production in East Africa". American Anthropologist. 92 (4)
• Marshall, Fiona; Hildebrand, Elisabeth. (2002) "Cattle Before Crops: The Beginnings of Food Production in Africa". Journal of World Prehistory. 16 (2)
• Shahack-Gross, Ruth; Marshall, Fiona; Weiner, Steve. (2003) "Geo-Ethnoarchaeology of Pastoral Sites: The Identification of Livestock Enclosures in Abandoned Maasai Settlements". Journal of Archaeological Science. 30 (4)