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Dorian Q Fuller

Portrait of Dorian Q  Fuller

Dr. Dorian Q Fuller is a researcher and professor (since 2000) in archaeobotany at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (UCL), and the Joint Director (since 2012) of the International Centre for Chinese Heritage and Archaeology, the institute co-established by UCL and Beijing University in 2004. He was one of founding editors of the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, which he edited from 2008 – 2020.

He has worked widely in archaeobotany and archaeological field projects across the world, in particular including in India since 1997 with fieldwork focusing on archaeobotanical sampling of archaeological sites aimed to fill in key gaps in direct evidence for past agriculture. As such, he has joined the expert team behind the Millet Revival Project in India, the Comparative Pathways to Agriculture Project (2013−2018), which compared domestication trajectories for more than 30 crops across different regions of Asia and Africa. and the Early Rice Project (2009−2019) across Asia, while conducting botanical and ethnobotanical fieldwork in the study of wild and cultivated rice ecologies across Asia and Africa.

Dr. Fuller has conducted research in Sudan (since 1997), China (since 2004), Ethiopia (since 2011), Turkey (Ҫatalhöyük, 2011 – 2017), Iraqi Kurdistan (since 2014), as well as field projects in Thailand, Myanmar, Morocco, Spain, Gibraltar, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, focusing archaeobotanical sampling of archaeological sites aimed to fill in key gaps in direct evidence for past agriculture. 

With a PhD in Archaeology from University of Cambridge — his 1999 thesis was titled ​“The Emergence of Agricultural Societies in South India: Botanical and Archaeological Perspectives” -, Dr. Fuller was Visiting Professor at Kyoto University in 2007, and in China at the universities of Beijing, Shandong, Sichuan University, and Northwest University in Xi’an — where he is Honorary Professor at the School of Cultural Heritage.

He is on thecommittee of the International Work Group for Archaeobotany; and the committeeof the Sudan Archaeological Research Society. He held a Japanese Society forthe Promotion of Science visiting professorship in Kyoto in 2007. He has taughtcourses as a visiting Professor . He is UK director 

His laboratory work focuses on plant macro-remains, but sometimes includes archaeological wood charcoal, phytoliths and parenchyma. In addition to working on plant assemblages from countries mentioned above under fieldwork, he has carried out or supervised laboratory on archaeobotanical assemblages from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Benin, Mali, Mauretania, Senegal, Libya, Kazakhstan, Iran, Israel, Italy, Britain, Ireland, Serbia, Caribbean, Chile, He has also carried out some ceramic analyses (from India and Sudan).

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