Dr. Emily Hammer

Biography

Emily Hammer is an anthropological archaeologist specializing in the Middle East and South Caucasia. Her research applies spatial analyses of material culture to investigate the territorial organization of ancient polities, the development of early cities, and long-term changes in interactions between culture and environment. Utilizing geographic information science (GIS) methods and archival research tools, she works to recover human experiences that are often sidelined in narratives of the past, particularly those concerning mobile pastoralist communities that lived in agriculturally marginal environments like deserts and highlands. Her field research includes Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, and Iraq, focusing on the relationships between mobile pastoral and sedentary communities from the Bronze Age through the medieval/Ottoman periods. Current collaborative projects involve the survey of Mesopotamian sites in southern Iraq and fortifications in Naxçıvan, Azerbaijan, as well as laboratory research on ancient hunting traps in eastern Jordan and pre-Islamic fortification patterns in northern Afghanistan. Emily is also a participant in the global collaborative project “LandCover6K,” aimed at reconstructing land use in the Middle East over the past 6000 years to enhance climate change modeling.

Research Interests

Experience

Courses