A Brief Biography

I completed my Ph.D. in Anthropology / Archaeology at Arizona State University in 1995 and my M.A. in Anthropology / Conservation Archaeology at the University of South Carolina in 1989. My archaeological fieldwork, museum, and academic experience includes over 30 years of work in Jordan, Egypt, Israel, Ireland, and the U.S. Southeast and Southwest, and, most recently, Greece. I study complex societies and urbanism using spatial analysis, mortuary analysis, and computer applications/GIS. My research has yielded significant publications, software applications, and fieldwork that can help illuminate issues and approaches in the Near East and other regions such as Mesoamerica and North America. I have an ongoing field project in Jordan, and several other research and publication programs. I have more than ten years' (graduate and undergraduate and international) teaching experience, including international teaching in a multi-cultural university and intensive training sessions with Iraqi and Jordanian professionals (my vita has details of courses I've taught). My GIS and Remote Sensing experience, research in complex societies and urbanism and fieldwork is detailed in the paragraphs that follow.

Global Moments in the Levant - The Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land (DAAHL)

I'm working with a group of researchers from the University of Bergen, Norway and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UC San Diego to develop the Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land (DAAHL) as part of the Global Moments in the Levant (GML)/Worldwide Heritage Media (WHM) projects. GML is a collaborative research undertaking of the University of Bergen in Norway and several American and Middle Eastern institutions which seeks to develop new theoretical perspectives with which to understand and interpret the deep-time history and current situation of the Levant. The DAAHL represents a signature project of WHM that brings together many of these advances based on new discoveries and the latest content concerning one of the most politically complex but meaningful geographic regions in world heritage. The control of time and space allow archaeologists to uncover the ‘big questions' of human history and social evolution. These include answering how and why the major technological revolutions of history occurred and influenced social and historical change in the Middle East. In broad strokes, the control of time and space are essential commodities in the construction of the WHM cyberinfrastructure, which come together for scholars and the general public in the DAAHL. New developments in GIS, high-precision radiometric dating methods, and archaeological fieldwork carried out in the Holy Land (Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, southern Syria and the Sinai Peninsula) have helped identify significant "Global Moments" of fundamental social change in this region. The DAAHL will harvest, analyze and disseminate settlement pattern and new archaeological data for each key period of culture change in the Holy Land, from the Lower Paleolithic over 1.5 million years ago to the early 20th century when the region came under British control. This will be done over web-based platforms for data harvesting and distribution, as well as in a series of beautifully produced large-format books that will provide gateways to this project's IGHM cyberinfrastructure. In this sense, the DAAHL presents an essential ‘secular' history of the Holy Land for the world community using the tools, methods and products developed by the IGHM team. The DAAHL will showcase WHM approaches to building the cyberinfrastructure than may be applied to other regions of the globe. I will be developing key software components for the DAAHL, including Google Earth and web-based GIS applications for data-harvesting and presentation, as well as serving as the co-editor (with Tom Levy) of the DAAHL.

Research in Complex Societies and Urbanism

I've been studying early urbanism in the southern Levant for more than ten years, using advanced methods of settlement pattern analysis that I developed. I created computer-based Monte Carlo methods for analyzing rank-size site distributions, where probability estimates are developed empirically, based on a long series of random runs. A comparative study of settlements in the southern Levant and Mesopotamia suggests that they differ in scale, and in kind. Through a series of iterations, this approach may be combined with cluster analysis of site locations to work out cycles of urban florescence and decline, and sheds light on the development of early city-state formation, which is broadly applicable to other early complex societies. The project has been published in American Antiquity 60(1): 37-58; a thorough treatment of the methods appeared in the Journal of Scientific Archaeology 24(3): 233-244. A paper in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 330:31-45 compared the results from the spatial methods I developed to the distribution of polities suggested by the Amarna Letters; the comparison is quite favorable, and provides reassurance that the methods are sound. Another paper applying the methods to the Early and Middle Bronze Age southern Levant is in press. A paper that explores the nature of Early Bronze Age trade networks in the southern Levant through the distribution of basalt spindle whorls is also in press; it derives from my fieldwork in Jordan, and the research suggests that overland connections may have existed between Upper Mesopotamia and Lower Egypt. I've used remote sensing techniques (specifically MultiSpec and Global Mapper with Landsat imagery), archaeological survey, GIS, and ethnographic studies to develop an agricultural model of the western edge of the Madaba Plain during the Early Bronze Age.

In my dissertation research I studied the development of social complexity in Predynastic Egypt through mortuary analysis. At Cemetery N7000 at Naga-ed-Dier, I used a combination of multi¬variate statistical techniques and spatial analysis procedures. I tracked six different social groups within the cemetery, and explore expressions of economic, political, and ideological power expressed by these groups through time. The results present a unique view of factionalism within the Predynastic, which set the stage for the development of the state in Egypt. A significant finding was that during the phase of the cemetery's use in which wealth and status peaks there is a fundamental reorientation of the Predynastic trade network. Prestige goods, architectural styles, and artistic motifs of Mesopotamian origin replaced an earlier emphasis on southern products, such as ivory. The methods and approaches I used are broadly applicable elsewhere, and generated results with considerable comparative and explanatory power for understanding the development of early social complexity. This research was published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 16(4): 226 268 and the Journal of Archaeological Science 25(3): 235-249. An NSF grant of $50,000 funded radiocarbon dating of cemetery materials, published in Radiocarbon 43(3, part 3): 1255-1278.

Current Fieldwork

I established and direct the Moab Archaeological Resource Survey (MARS) in 1999. The project was created to collect settlement, archaeological, and environmental data from the western part of the Madaba Plain in the highlands of central Jordan. The goal of the fieldwork is to gather this information from an area that appears to have contained a single cluster of sites, and therefore probably a single settlement system, in the Early Bronze Age (ca. 3600-2000 BCE). The lab program involves running radiocarbon dates to develop a more reliable absolute chronology for the region; analysis of faunal and botanical remains to establish dietary parameters in the Early Bronze Age, and petrographic analysis of ceramics to investigate the nature of ceramic production/exchange in the settlement system. The work has been published in several articles, including "Settlement Diversity and Multivariate Production: The Evidence for Heterarchy in the EBA Levant." Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 16(1): 33-57; "The Moab Archaeological Resource Survey: Test Excavations and Faunal Analysis from the 2001 Field Season." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan XLVI: 107-124; "The Dolmen Field at al-Murayghat." Archeologia (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw); and "The Moab Archaeological Resource Survey: Some Results from the 2000 Field Season." Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan XLV: 217-236.

GIS and Remote Sensing Experience

I have a long pedigree in GIS and computers that is broadly applicable to many regions and applications. I've been programming microcomputers since 1982--I learned to program on punch cards--and working with GIS since 1988. My M.A. thesis used GIS methods to study settlement patterns in the Late Archaic period along the Savannah River valley. Since then, I've worked for many years in GIS-related projects. I was the GIS Network Manager for Arizona State Parks for seven years, responsible for all the GIS related activities of the statewide agency; I developed systems to manage the AZSite database, which contains over 100,000 archaeological sites and historic properties, more than 25,000 field projects, over 2,000 map and satellite photographs, and more then 7,000 scanned reports. During this time I also completed a number of Microsoft certification classes leading to an MCDBA (Microsoft Certified Database Analyst), as well as ESRI courses in ArcGIS, and Java programming classes. Other GIS applications I have written currently manage large-scale archaeological databases at Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix and the Jordanian Department of Antiquities.

I created the Geo-Archaeological Information Applications (GAIA) Lab at ASU to implement an integrated cultural resource GIS database for the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage of Iraq (SBAH). The project was developed in collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), the World Monuments Fund (WMF) and the SBAH; it's funded by more than a million dollars of grants obtained from the NEH, UNESCO, the GCI and the J.M. Kaplan Foundation. The prototype database runs in Microsoft Access, with an integrated GIS mapping control programmed using ESRI's MapObjects technology (with about 400 pages of VBA code behind the scenes). The system is fully bilingual in Arabic and English, and will be set up on a server in Baghdad next spring. We held several intensive training sessions for SBAH staff over the past several years. You can see more information about the project on the GAIA Lab's web site--the URL is listed above.

The GAIA Lab is working on several other systems of this sort. The Iraq project was a direct offshoot of a project I did for the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, which was funded in part by a NEH/American Center for Oriental Research Senior Fellowship in the fall of 2003. There are currently more than 10,000 sites in the Jordan Archaeological Data Information System (JADIS). I converted it from its old DBase IV format to an integrated MS Access/GIS technology. Write-ups of this work have been published in ArcNews (Spring 2004) and the Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 48:141-146. I'm currently beginning a similar project with UNESCO, al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco and the Institut National des Sciences de d'Archéologie et du Patrimoine. This will be a multi-million dollar, multi-year development project that will involve graduate students from Morocco and the U.S. in software development and archaeological / architectural survey in Morocco. The initial, pilot project will be conducted in partnership with UNESCO in and around Meknes, and we anticipate a UNESCO grant of $250,000 to get started.

Courses Taught

I've been teaching at the university level since 1993. I've taught a variety of Near Eastern, Old World, New World and general courses at the graduate, advanced undergraduate and introductory undergraduate levels at several different institutions. The following table summarizes the courses I've taught:

Research Philosophy

I believe in cooperation and sharing, rather than competition and hoarding. The tools and data that I've made available on my personal web page and the GAIA Lab's web page best exemplify this approach. For example, archaeologists working in the Near East have long struggled with various map projections. There are over two dozen in use in the region, and it has been devilishly difficult to convert between them, which made it almost impossible for many researchers to take advantage of satellite imagery, topographic maps, and shapefiles used by other colleagues. Nothing would match up, and most archaeologists do not have the technical skills to write conversion software. I solved this problem by writing the ReprojectME! program, which converts between all the major projections used from Egypt through Iraq—producing shapefiles, coordinate lists, and individual coordinate pairs. The United Nations used the program to help convert between map projections and locate old minefields left behind in south Lebanon by the withdrawing Israeli army. Although the program is worth quite a bit of money, I have chosen to make it freely available on my personal web site because it's a tool that people really need, and I want to see research go forward. Another example is all the Landsat and topographic map data I have accumulated, post-processed, and placed on my web site. Yet a third example is the RankSize program, which I developed for the settlement pattern analysis I described earlier. It is also available for free. These three tools let many researchers do detailed spatial analysis and GIS studies in an area where it was very difficult in the past.

Summary

My long experience in Predynastic Egypt, south Levantine archaeology, GIS and remote sensing research and programming is broadly applicable and expanding to new areas. My applied research programs have generated a lot of interest in fostering sustainable development in the Near East and North Africa, and the GAIA Lab's activities are designed to implement strategies of infrastructure development and cultural resource preservation. The way to achieve these desired results is through cooperation and collaboration with other researchers and professionals in governments of the Near East and North Africa. These methods have generated considerable interest in other regions, especially those who lack the cyber-infrastructure or local expertise to develop their own systems. The GAIA Lab I created develops and serves these applications; it is built upon the philosophy of helping local governments create sustainable approaches to cultural resource management. My long-term studies in complex societies and early urbanism have relied upon methods of analysis that I developed, with broadly applicable results. They suggest intriguing new insights into the nature of early complexity, and introduce methods of analysis that can be used in other regions where early complexity evolved. My fieldwork is based on the analysis of early complexity through the use of different levels of scale, where the integrative unit is the settlement cluster. The approaches, methods, and applications I have developed can be applied not just in the Near East, where my research has concentrated, but also in other areas where social complexity developed, making them appealing to researchers in areas outside the Near East.