PhD candidate

Pottery making in early complex societies of Northern Mesopotamia: a case study of the late 6th/early 4th mill. BCE ceramics of the Balikh valley, northern Syria

PhD abstract: This research investigates the Ubaid and Late Chalcolithic 1-2 (ca. 5300 - 3900 BCE) ceramics from the Balikh Valley, modern northern Syria, in order to gain a deeper understanding of pottery technology and related contexts of knowledge transmission within the region. A chaîne opératoire approach coupled with archaeometric analyses will be applied to the study of selected pottery assemblages from the Valley to reconstruct how those vessels were made at different sites, how their production was organized in relation to the physical and social landscape, and how did artisanal skills and technical knowledge travel across space and time.

The PhD project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Susan Pollock and Prof. Dr. Reinhard Bernbeck.

For further information, please check Bergsas and SMB