Marston John M. Agricultural Sustainability and Environmental Change at Ancient Gordion

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. — 223 p. — (University Museum Monograph 145; Gordion Special Studies 8).This book aims to reconstruct agricultural decision making using archaeological and paleoenvironmental data from the ancient city of Gordion, Turkey, to reconstruct agricultural and landscape changes at the site over a period of 3,000 years. John M. Marston argues that different political and economic systems implemented over time at Gordion resulted in patterns of agricultural decision making that were well adapted to the social setting of farmers in each period, but that these practices had divergent environmental impacts, with some regimes sponsoring sustainable agricultural practices and others leading to significant environmental change.
The implications of this book are twofold: Gordion is now be one of the best published agricultural datasets from the entire Near East and, thus, serves as a valuable comparable dataset for regional synthesis of agricultural and environmental change, and the methods the author develops to reconstruct agricultural change at Gordion serve as tools to engage questions about the relationship between social and environmental change at sites worldwide. Other books address similar themes but none in the Near East address these themes in diachronic perspective such as we have at Gordion.