Cyber-Archaeology and Grand Narratives Digital Technology and Deep-Time Perspectives on Culture Change in the Middle East

Thomas E. Levy is Distinguished Professor and holds the Norma Kershaw Chair in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and Neighboring Lands at the University of California, San Diego.  He is a member of the Department of Anthropology and Jewish Studies Program, and is director of the Center for Cyber-archaeology and Sustainability at the Qualcomm Institute, California Center of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UC San Diego and was recently appointed co-director of the new Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.  Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Levy is a Levantine field archaeologist with interests in the role of technology, especially early mining and metallurgy, on social evolution from the beginnings of sedentism and the domestication of plants and animals in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (ca. 7500 BCE) to the rise of the first historic Levantine state level societies in the Iron Age (ca. 1200 – 500 BCE) and on to Medieval Islamic times.

Ian W.N. Jones is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses primarily on copper production during the Islamic period in southern Jordan and the economy of the southern Levant in the early 2nd millennium CE. As part of his work with UC San Diego's Center for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability at the Qualcomm Institute, he is also interested in the integration of spatial technologies such as GIS and satellite remote sensing with traditional archaeological field methods for investigating processes of settlement and landscape change.