Academic whose worldwide studies shed new light on the complexity and origins of farming
The beginnings of farming, 10,000 or more years ago, have often been discussed in relation to a few discrete "centres of origin", for example the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, and Central America. That we are now aware of a far richer, deeper, more diverse history of plant and animal exploitation right across the globe is thanks, in large part, to the contribution of David Harris, who has died aged 83.
Five decades of academic life took David through departments of geography, anthropology, botany and archaeology, and his fieldwork took him to each of the world's inhabited continents. A seminal moment in his career came during a journey through the Venezuelan rainforest in early 1968. While travelling in a dugout canoe to a particularly remote part of the upper Orinoco, he was able to observe and record the sophisticated forest management practised by the Waika Indians.
Root crops and fruit trees were inter-planted within clearings that merged with the forest ecosystem, in a way of life that integrated cropping, fishing and hunting with the use of the forest resources. That experience led David to question the conventional idea of a simple split between hunter-gatherers and farmers, and to challenge it in a series of publications.
In the following decade, he continued his explorations of tropical ecosystem management, in the Torres Strait Islands to the north of Australia. The work of David and his colleagues in these islands identified one of the most ancient locations of complex plant management in the world, with a history of several millennia of taro cultivation in drained and managed plots.
Throughout his career, he highlighted the diversity of the world's ecosystems, and the corresponding diversity and complexity of human management and its history.
David was born in London to Herbert and Norah Harris, and educated at St Christopher school in Letchworth, Hertfordshire. His interest in natural history was encouraged from an early age by his father. At school he became increasingly conscious of the eurocentric focus of history teaching, and keen to learn more about the past of a much wider world. After 18 months as a conscript in the Royal Air Force, he went to study geography at University College, Oxford.
A fellowship awarded in the mid-50s took him to Berkeley, California, where he was greatly inspired by the US geographer Carl O Sauer, who shared his global perspective on agricultural beginnings.
A teaching appointment at University College London in 1964 brought him ultimately to the Institute of Archaeology at UCL, where he was professor of human environment (1979-98) (then emeritus), and director (1989-96).
He was a major figure in fostering archaeological science in Britain, and archaeobotany in particular. He served as president of the Prehistoric Society (1990-94) and of the UK chapter of the Society for Economic Botany (1995-97). In 2004 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy.
David's enthusiastic and generous support of younger scholars such as me was exceptional, and left a lasting imprint on the strength of both the Institute of Archaeology and the much wider community of scholars of early farming in a wide range of disciplines. Two particular volumes bear witness to the interdisciplinary breadth and range of the community he brought together, Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation (1989) and The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia (1996). Contributors included archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, geneticists, geographers and linguists.
Co-editor of the first volume was the archaeobotanist Gordon Hillman, whom David brought to the institute, and they continued to collaborate closely until his retirement. One of their projects culminated in David's last major monograph, Origins of Agriculture in Western Central Asia: Archaeological-Environmental Research in Turkmenistan (2010).
Retirement allowed David to put theory into practice, and to immerse himself in the cultivation of root crops and beans in the large garden behind the Rickmansworth house in which he and his wife, Helen, whom he married in 1957, lived for many years. They were enthusiastic walkers, particularly enjoying the more rugged landscapes.
Neither retirement nor changing health curbed David's desire to see new regions of the world, and he continued to attend and contribute to conferences. During his final years, he accepted an invitation to travel around China, to meet scholars and visit archaeological sites. I had the pleasure of accompanying him on one leg of this trip, and of being hauled up on stage with him during the enactment of a traditional Mongolian wedding. Bedecked with a silk shawl and required to down three cups of strong spirit in front of an applauding audience, David at 80 had lost none of his charm and humour.
He is survived by Helen, their four daughters, Sarah, Joanna, Lucy and Zoe, and eight grandchildren.
• David Russell Harris, geographer and archaeologist, born 14 December 1930; died 25 December 2013