Graham Philip

Graham Philip

Durham University
2014 Grant Recipient
Philip1

Final Report on the 1991-94 Excavations at Tell esh-Shuna North, Jordan

After a PhD at Edinburgh University (1988), I spent nine months in Baghdad before moving to Jordan to become Assistant Director of the British Institute for at Amman for Archaeology and History (1989-92). It was during this period that I began work at Shuna. I was briefly a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology University College, London before taking up a lectureship in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University, in January 1994, becoming professor in 2007. Since 2012 I have been a co-Investigator on the international collaboration Computational Research on the Ancient Near East (CRANE) funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and since 2016 on the multi-institutional collaboration Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa, where, with support from the Cultural Protection Fund of the British Council, I lead a team that works with colleagues at the Directorate General of Antiquities, Lebanon and the State Board for Archaeology & Heritage, Iraq to develop recording, management and protection methods for archaeological heritage.

Between 1991 and 1994 I co-directed the excavations at Tell esh-Shuna (N) in Jordan (with Douglas Baird, now professor at the University of Liverpool), directed a Syrian-British regional project, Settlement and Landscape Development in the Homs, Region, Syria, with partners in the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums of Syria (1999-2010) and since 2105, the excavation of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age archaeology at Tell Koubba in northern Lebanon, in collaboration with Dr Hélène Sader of the American University of Beirut. A key research interest is landscape archaeology – including archaeological survey and remote sensing techniques – and large-scale settlement analysis. This is combined with my long-term interest in artefact studies – ceramics and metalwork in particular. These two lines of research are used in combination to understand the internal dynamics and external connections that were critical to the development (and success or failure) of small-scale complex societies in the Middle East. In recent years my research projects have begun to address a different part of the picture - the movement of people and livestock through isotopic analysis of skeletal remains.

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