Dr. Cohen’s field research focuses on human-environment interactions during the Late Paleolithic of China (including the development of microblade technology in North China and the world’s earliest pottery in South China during the Last Glacial Maximum), the transition from hunting-gathering to sedentary villages, and the long process of the origins of rice agriculture. He is the Co-Director (2015-present) of the Shizitan Sites and Adaptations to the Last Glacial Maximum in North China Project, working with scholars from Shanxi University, Harvard, and the University of Trento, Italy, and the Deputy Director, since 2009, of the Sino-American collaborative project, The Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Yangzi River Basin Project, carrying out excavations in collaboration with the Hunan Institute of Archaeology, Harvard University, and Peking University. Dr. Cohen’s excavations and analyses of two Late Pleistocene cave sites, Xianrendong 仙人洞 Cave (Jiangxi) and Yuchanyan 玉蟾岩 Cave (Yuchanyan), published in Science (Wu XH et al. 2012) and PNAS (Boaretto et al. 2009), have securely dated the appearance of the earliest known pottery in the world to 20,000-18,000 years ago, fundamentally changing our views of hunter-gatherer adaptive behaviors during the Late Paleolithic and the origins of ceramic technology. Dr. Cohen’s work also includes excavations of Early Neolithic villages of the Pengtoushan 彭頭山 Culture in northern Hunan, and earlier excavations (1990s) in North China’s lower Yellow River region, of Yangshao 仰韶, Longshan 龍山, early Bronze Age (Yueshi 岳石 Culture), and Warring States period sites, looking at the development of socio-political complexity from the Late Neolithic through Bronze Age, for his doctoral dissertation research under the late Prof. K.C. Chang 張光直 at Harvard. In addition to his main research in China, Dr. Cohen is also involved in field projects in the Philippines, including the Catanauan Archaeological and Heritage Project, working with the Archaeological Studies Program, University of the Philippines, Diliman, and Australia National University, and the Palawan Island Paleohistoric Research Project, Dewil River Valley, Palawan Island, with project PIs from UP Diliman and University College Dublin.  Dr. Cohen’s research on a tremendous earthquake-induced outburst flood on the Yellow River, reported in Science (Wu Q.L. et al. 2016), made international headlines, as the dating and great impact of this devastating flood, ca. 1920 BC, might relate to China’s Great Flood legend and the founding of the Xia Dynasty. Dr. Cohen is a recognized expert in research on the origins of agriculture in China, and he was a member of the seminal Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Symposium, The Beginnings of Agriculture: New Data, New Ideas, in 2009 (paper published in Current Anthropology in 2011). His work has been supported by grants from the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology, the Taiwan Ministry of Education, the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (USA). Dr. Cohen served for a decade as the Managing Editor of the Journal of East Asian Archaeology (Brill Academic Publishers), and since 2013 as the Consulting English Editor for Asian Archaeology (published by Springer-Nature).

影響我最深的50本書⋯⋯