Draft:Albert J. Ammerman

Albert J. Ammerman is an American archaeologist educated at the University of Michigan (B.A. English Literature with Honors 1964), University of London (European Archaeology, PhD 1972), and currently is a Research Professor at Colgate University. He worked with Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a population geneticist at Stanford University in the early 197Os on the hypothesis for demic diffusion for the Neolithic Transition explaining the three thousand year period of the spread of farming throughout Europe. Their early simulation modeling (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1971) on the growth of human farming communities, the rate of spread based on the available radiometric dates for fifty early Neolithic sites in Europe, and the estimation of the genetic spread in these populations led to "the wave and advance model" (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1973; 1984; Ammerman 2020).

He initiated the Acconia project in Calabria Italy, a multi-phased archaeological project surveying and excavating Neolithic sites (Ammerman 1981; 1985; Ammerman, Shaffer, and Harmann 1988; and Ammerman, Koster, and Pfenning 2013). His novel insights included the use of quantitative methods for undertaking surveys in contiguous landscape areas (sand dunes), using geophysical prospection (magnetometer surveys) for finding hotspots for archaeological sites, and hand-drilled coring for testing these "hot-spots" for subsurface archaeological sites with burnt daub and fire places. He also discovered the source material for the Neolithic obsidian trade at Acconia. In nine year intervals from (1980s to present) his team conducted re-surveys of the Acconia area, leading to the insight that changing contemporary land-use patterns affected the visibility of archaeological sites.

In the early 1990s he undertook a research project to investigate the ancient landscape of the Roman Forum with geologist Walter Alvarez (Ammerman 2022). Together Ammerman and Alvarez designed a project that used deep machine coring to investigate the Forum basin of the Capitoline Hill in Rome. Their objectives were to discover the ancient substrate upon which the ancient Roman Forum was built; and in doing so, they discovered that the Roman Forum was built as a result of a large land reclamation project undertaken by the Romans in order to build this civic center. In subsequent years in from the 1990s through the early 2000s he would use this methodology of deep coring at the Plaza of San Marcos in Venice to discover early Medieval land reclamation and at the ancient Greek Athenian agora (Ammerman et al. 1992; Ammerman 1996; 2011). Most recently he and Rebecca Ammerman have worked at the Temple of Athena at Paestum (Italy) using deep coring to discover the construction of the temple on a human-made mound (Ammerman 2021).

Ammerman has also conducted research on Cyprus where he discovered evidence for early voyaging in the Mediterranean (Ammerman 2019: Isern et al. 2017). Selected cited sources (in order of appearance):

1. Ammerman, A.J. and Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. 1971. Measuring the rate of spread of early farming in Europe. Man 6; 674-688.

2. Ammerman, A.J. and Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. 1973. A Population Model for the diffusion of early farming in Europe. In The Explanation of Culture Change, edited by C. Renfrew. Pp.343-357. London: Duckworth.

3. Ammerman, A.J. and Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. 1984. The Neolithic Transition and the Genetics of Populations in Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

4. Ammerman, A.J. 2020. The Neolithic transition in Europe at 50 years: Working draft. Festschrift prepared for the 45th anniversary of Ryszard Grygiel and Peter Bogucki’s scientific cooperation.

5. Ammerman, A.J. 1981. Surveys and Archaeological Research. Annual Review of Anthropology 10: 63-88.

6. Ammerman, A.J. 1985. The Acconia Survey: Neolithic Settlement and the Obsidian Trade. London: Institute of Archaeology, Occasional Publication 10.

7. Ammerman, A.J., Shaffer, G.D. and Hartmann, N. 1988. A Neolithic household at Piana di Curinga, Italy. Journal of Field Archaeology, 15(2), pp.121-140.

8. Ammerman, A.J., Koster, H.A., and Pfenning, E. 2013. The longitudinal study of land-use at Acconia: Placing the fieldwork of the survey archaeologist in time. Journal of Field Archaeology 36(4): 291-306.

9. Ammerman, A.J. 2022. The contribution of Walter Alvarez to the investigation of the Capitoline Hill in Rome. In From the Guajira Desert to the Apennines and from Medieterranean Microplates to the Mexican Killer Asteriod: Honoring the Career of Walter Alvarez, eds. C. Koeberl, P. Clayes, and A. Montanari. Geological Society of America Special Paper 557, pp. 21-39.

10. Ammerman, A.J., De Min, M., Housley, R., and McClennen, C. 1992. More on the origins of Venice. Antiquity 99:pp. 501-510.

11. Ammerman, A.J. 1996. The Eridanos Valle and the Athenian Agora. American Journal of Archaeology 100: pp. 699-715/

12. Ammerman, A.J., 2011. Relocating the center: a comparative study (p. 256). na.

13. Ammerman, A.J. 2021. The Mounda at the Temple of Athena at Paestum: The first five Steps in the Research Design. Groma Vol.5- 1-20.

14. Ammerman, A.J. 2019. Cyprus: the submerged final Paleolithic at Aspros Dive Site C. In The Archaeology of Europe's Drowned Landscapes, edited by G. Bailey et al. Pp. 429-441, Springer.

15. Isern, N., Zilhao, J., Fort, J., and Ammerman, A.J. 2017. Modeling the role of voyaging in the coastal spread of the Early Neolithic in the West Mediterranean. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), 1613413114: 1-6.