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In more than 30 years as an archaeologist, I've worked in Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Greece, Morocco, Ireland, Cyprus, and the U.S. Southeast and Southwest. I have considerable experience in GIS, spatial and mortuary anlysis, computer systems analysis, data management and computer programming. I'm the director of the Geo-Archaeological Information Applications (GAIA) Lab at the Archaeological Research Institute (ARI) at Arizona State University and the IT Manager for ARI.
I established the Geo-Archaeological Information Apllications (GAIA) Lab at ASU's School of Human Evolution & Social Change in 2004 to facilitate the development of a national-scale cultural resource management GIS database for Iraq. Press the "GAIA Lab Home" button on the left side of the page to go to the lab's home page, where you can access additional resources related to the larger Middle East.
As of July 1st, 2010, the GAIA Lab will receive funding from NASA's Space Archaeology program for our project, "Climate Change and Human Impact on Ancient and Modern Settlements: Identification and Condition Assessment of Archaeological Sites in the Northern Levant from Landsat, ASTER and CORONA Imagery." This project will conduct archaeological site prospecting and condition assessment with two methods that utilize Landsat TM, ASTER and CORONA imagery from Lebanon and southwestern Syria. The causes of the Early Bronze Age (ca. 3600-2000 BCE) collapse will be assessed through statistical analysis of settlement pattern data derived from remotely sensed data from the northern Levant, compared to the much better-known settlement systems in the southern Levant. The project will use supervised classification and other image analysis software to find archaeological sites from space and compute precise site location and area dimensions. Site polygon centroids will be used to perform a nearest-neighbor analysis to match remotely-sensed sites to published site names, correct their point coordinates, and record site sizes, using a published inventory whose site locations were recorded only to the nearest kilometer. Collected over a period of about thirty years, satellite imagery can document changes in land cover and development on archaeological sites. Modern site damage will be assessed by comparing the development on sites from CORONA images of the late 1960s-early 1970s to more recent imagery, thus quantifying aspects of land cover change related to development on archaeological sites. You can read about the NASA Space Archaeology program and our successful proposal by pressing the "Space Archaeology" button on the left.
The GAIA Lab is now working closely with Thomas Levy's UCSD Levantine Archaeology Laboratory, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UCSD and the UCSD Supercomputing Center to develop the Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land. This project will unify disparate datasets for Jordan, Israel, the Sinai Peninsula and southern Lebanon.
This site is devoted primarily to resources for the southern Levant, including Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories. You can download a lot of digital data, including:
You can also download two programs I've written, including:
There is also some information about my ongoing field project, the Moab Archaeological Resource Survey, including reports to the Jordan Department of Antiquities for recent field seasons.
These are the highlights of the page, but you can also look at a lot of other stuff, such as my vita, abstracts of some published articles, and data from the Predynastic Egyptian cemetery at Naga-ed-Der and the text of a successful National Science Foundation proposal to conduct an extensive radiocarbon dating program in the cemetery.. Press one of the buttons on the left, or one of the links above. Enjoy!