I have studied the effects of climate change on past Middle Eastern societies by compiling information, especially radiocarbon dates, into a database.
I am an archaeologist specializing in the Middle East, where I mainly focus on the interaction between people and their environment. I have been part of the EAMENA team since 2016, where I have focused mostly on the Levant and Arabia, and have a special interest in agricultural landscapes and using GIS methods for detecting prehistoric sites. As a spin-off of the latter, in combination with my interest in human-enviroment interactions, I have set up the Karak Neolithic Survey in Jordan. I have been involved in EAMENA-CPF training since 2017, and since July 2020 I have been the Training Manager for Yemen and Egypt. In addition, I was co-founder and am currently part of the Mapping Digital Heritage in Jordan (MaDiH) project, of which EAMENA is a partner.
After my PhD at the University of Reading on the use of crop stable isotopes for the reconstruction of past water availability, I was a Post-Doctoral researcher at the same university. During that post-doc I studied the effects of climate change on past Middle Eastern societies by compiling information, especially radiocarbon dates, into a database - establishing synchronicity between climate and social change is the first step before even starting to think of causality between the two. I have also been generating new climate data based on a 2500-year-old speleothem record from Iraq. I have participated in excavations and experimental archaeology projects in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, the UK, and the Netherlands.
You can find more information and my publications on ResearchGate, Academia.
