From left to right: Ruben Davtyan, Lynne Welton, Valentina Tumolo, Dan Lawrence, Graham Philip, Rune Rattenborg, Felicitas Ruschel, Michelle de Gruchy and Cathie Draycott.
A group of Durham researchers were reunited with a range of former postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers from the department in late May at the 13th International Congress for the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (ICAANE), where they were presenting their work. You can read a list of their work below:
Ruben Davtyan - former visiting post-doctoral researcher and current research associate at the Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology, presented his work on Iron Age equine culture and its dissemination to Mesopotamia from the Eurasian Steppe.
Lynne Welton - former visiting post-doctoral researcher as part of the CRANE Project and currently Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, presented her work on determining methods of assessing agricultural productivity of land in the past in the Human-Environment Interactions workshop co-run by Dan Lawrence, Michelle de Gruchy and their colleague Alessio Palmisano at Turin.
Valentina Tumolo - former post-doctoral researcher and current visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley presented within the Human-Environment Interactions workshop and also on her work on seals and sealings in a workshop on the site of Hama.
Dan Lawrence - Associate Professor, co-ran a large 2-day workshop on Holocene Human-Environment Interactions in Southwest Asia: Trends in Population, Climate, and Vegetation in which he delivered talks with colleagues. His work together with Tumulo and current Durham PhD researcher Pertev Basri on evidence of food storage and inequalities was also presented in another workshop on argriculture, food and inequalities.
Graham Philip - Professor, presented his work on determining differences in settlement and society along the Orontes River near Homs in Syria in a workshop on De-constructing a Megalithic Landscape: Dolmens in the Levant between the Late Chalcolithic and the Early Bronze Age II: Landscapes, Rituals and Socio-economics as well as participating in the Human-Environment Interactions workshop.
Rune Rattenborg - former PhD researcher and post-doctoral researcher, currently Researcher in the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Uppsala University in Sweden presented on the conceptualisation and framing of ‘Mesopotamia’ in a workshop on West Asia in the Centre: Decolonising Orientalist Narratives, on his work on determining consumption and rationing of drink in a workshop on Beer Cultures in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, and ran a workshop on Cuneiform in the Age of Digital Archaeology: Online Resources for the Integration of Text and Material Culture
Felicitas Ruschel - current PhD researcher, presented her work on Reassessing Early Urbanism in North-Eastern Mesopotamia: Evidence from spatial and scientific analyses of households at Gir-e Bassetki, Kurdistan in a conference session.
Michelle de Gruchy - former PhD researcher and post-doctoral researcher, currently at the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT), co-ran the Human-Environment Interactions workshop, in which her work features, and also presented work for UNOSAT.
Cathie Draycott - Associate Professor, presented her work on framing the identity of Lycia/Trmmilis in southwest Türkiye as part of a workshop on Reading images at the crossroads of cultures and disciplines. First-millennium BC Lycia as a case study for Near Eastern Studies, participants of which initiated a new Lycian Network.
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