Congratulations
Archaeologist Edward Maher awarded an NEH fellowship
to conduct research in Israel.
Edward F. Maher, a visiting lecturer of archaeology in the Department of Classics and Mediterranean Studies, has been awarded a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It will enable him to conduct research for five months during the 2009-10 academic year at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, Israel, where he will be studying remains from an ancient archaeological site in Israel.
Maher’s research will concentrate on archaeological material from the site of Qubur al-Walaydah, in southwest Israel, where excavations are jointly directed by Professors Gunnar Lehmann and Steven A. Rosen of Ben-Gurion University. Aiming to consider the regional importance of this rural community from the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, the project looks at the nature and intensity of the exchange system between rural agricultural producers and urban consumers as it existed over 2500 years ago. Studying the economic configuration of a rural population will allow Maher to bring into sharper focus local economic strategies, of which little is known since most of the available contemporaneous data comes from urban contexts. Most cities and rural populations were economically and politically intertwined, and as the urban centers cycled between autonomy and vassalage throughout their respective histories, rural producers for the urbanized societies were also been impacted. Maher, a zooarchaeologist, will study the skeletal remains of animals on which the agrarian foundations of the rural village at Qubur al-Walaydah were based to assess how urban demands were met by rural production strategies.
Founded in 1900 as the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, the Albright Institute fosters North American participation in, and provides support for, archaeological excavations and surveys, and it promotes working relationships with related institutions in Jerusalem and the neighboring communities. The Albright Institute’s NEH Fellowships are open to Near Eastern scholars from prehistory through the early Islamic period, whose projects incorporate the fields of archaeology, anthropology, art history, Bible, epigraphy, historical geography, history, language, literature, philology and religion and related disciplines.
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