Dolores R. Piperno

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Dolores Rita Piperno (born April 7, 1949 ) is an American anthropologist and archaeobotanist and paleobotanist at the National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute .

Piperno deals with traces that domesticated plants leave behind thousands of years. These traces include phytolites , pollen and charcoal . In this way, Piperno reconstructs the domestication history of various crops and the ecological history of prehistoric humans and their habitats.

Live and act

Piperno earned a bachelor's degree in medical technology from Rutgers University in Camden , New Jersey , in 1971 . After graduating, she worked for Scott Murphy in hematological research for five years . In 1976 Piperno began studying anthropology at Temple University in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , with Anthony J. Ranere , among others . Her main focus was on archaeobotany . For her master's thesis , she examined phytolites , small, complex-shaped plant inclusion bodies made of silicon dioxide , which, among other things , should protect the plant against herbivores . For her dissertation (1983), she examined phytolites in material that had been excavated in an Abri near Aguadulce , Panama .

As a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), Piperno continued her studies and was able to detect traces of numerous plants and crops in tropical sediments for the first time. Among other things, she was able to show that maize was cultivated in Panama around 7,000 years ago. Another post as a postdoctoral fellow with paleoecologists Mark Bush and Paul Colinvaux at Ohio State University took Piperno to the Amazon in Ecuador , where she examined drill cores from Amazonian lakes. Here, too, she found 6,000-year-old phytolites and pollen from maize and was able to prove that there was considerable human influence on the forest. The presence of people in this part of the world, which had not been archaeologically investigated until then , was proven in pre-Columbian times and the image of the Amazon rainforest as an "untouched forest" was shaken and supplemented by a concept of a cultural landscape . Piperno was able to improve the consistency of their data by adding charcoal analyzes.

In 1988 Piperno got a permanent position at STRI. Among other things, she examined sediments in the crater lake of La Yeguada , the age of which she estimated to be 14,000 years, with which information about the climate and vegetation during the last glacial period and about the changes in environmental conditions during the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene could be obtained. She was also able to show that slash and burn was carried out in Panama more than 7,000 years ago and the cultivation of maize had already taken place at this point in time. The jungle of Panama must also have been more densely populated than anyone had previously imagined. Further work dealt with the cultivation history of pumpkins . Together with Deborah Pearsall , Piperno expanded the method of phytolith analysis in the early 1990s to include crops from other parts of the world, such as rice . With the addition of the results of molecular biological investigations, the knowledge about the history of the domestication of wild plants could be significantly improved.

In the early 1990s, Piperno turned to crops that are native to tropical regions but do not develop any usable phytolites or pollen, including cassava and yams . She analyzed traces of starch found on 5,000 to 7,000 year old stone tools from near Aguadulce, which could be assigned to cassava, maize, yams and arrowroot . Control samples were obtained from a variety of modern crops. The data obtained underpinned the knowledge gained with the other methods on the history of domestication of maize. One of the oldest samples examined was starch from Hordeum spontaneum (wild barley ) on a 20,000 year old stone milling tool from Israel.

More recent work by Piperno deals with the question of when and where maize was domesticated. She identified the valley of the Río Balsas as the likely origin of the cultivation of corn (and pumpkins) at least 8,700 years ago. Since 2004, Piperno has been a scientific curator at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC

The latest work touches on evolutionary developmental biology and deals with models of the ecological potency of plants during the process of domestication. This work includes genetic methods such as RNA-Seq to determine gene expression in wild plants under different ecological conditions. In this way, the concept of genetic assimilation is to be examined in the context of the synthetic theory of evolution .

Dolores Piperno has a daughter.

Awards (selection)

Fonts (selection)

  • Phytolite Analysis: An Archaeological and Geological Perspective. Academic, San Diego, 1988
  • with Deborah Pearsall : The Origins of Agriculture in the Lowland Neotropics. Academic, San Diego, 1998
  • Phytoliths: A Comprehensive Guide for Archaeologists and Paleoecologists. AltaMira, Lanham, 2006

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Piperno, Dolores. In: aaas.org. February 24, 2017, accessed February 26, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present (PDF, 689 kB) at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org); accessed on February 26, 2017.
  3. ↑ Dolores Piperno. In: nasonline.org. Retrieved February 26, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Piperno, Dolores R.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Piperno, Dolores; Piperno, Dolores Rita
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American archaeobotanist and paleobotanist
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1949