Current research involves building records of human exploitation and domestication
of plants from archaeological records, including the Balsas River Valley of
Mexico, and examining human-landscape interactions through time by reconstructing
environmental history with paleoecological records.
During the past few years, Piperno initiated studies
in southwest Asia focusing on plant exploitation
during the Epipaleolithic and early Neolithic periods.
Piperno is using data accumulated from the Neotropics,
southwest Asia , and elsewhere to examine
on a comparative basis human life ways at the origins of agriculture and their
pre-Neolithic antecedents. Piperno is engaged in
a collaborative, multiproxy study of paleoecological records from the Amazon Basin
Human Exploitation and Domestication of Plants