Alison Venetia Graham Betts

Alison has an outstanding international reputation for innovative archaeological research leadership in difficult areas. She has had a four-decade working life dedicated to opening new research pathways in the prehistory of the Middle East and Central Asia. Over the past two decades, she has been particularly concerned with the influence of Eurasian innovations on the rise of early Chinese social complexity. Through work in the cross-roads region of Xinjiang, she and her colleagues have been able to make major contributions to the fundamental questions of the spread of early domesticates into China from the west, and the concomitant spread of eastern domesticates to the west. Seeking proof of these transitions led her to open up a new project in Indian Kashmir on the southern Himalayan rim. Her cutting-edge work in this sphere of inquiry is on the front line of a surge in paleobotanical research across Inner Asia.