Exploring the Human Past, Shaping the Present
My research investigates how people build, inhabit, remember, and reimagine places. Across ancient frontiers and modern communities, I study the traces of human life—ruins, landscapes, inscriptions, and stories—and the ways they continue to shape our present.
This page contains the following key sections (click a link to jump to that section):
- Umm Al-Jimal Archaeological Project
- Roman Frontiers and Urban Hinterlands
- Chorography and the Archaeology of Place
- Current and Future Directions
Umm Al-Jimal Archaeological Project
See all "Umm Al-Jimal" posts on this site.
Since 2018, I have co-directed the Umm Al-Jimal Archaeological Project, an international collaboration that excavates, conserves, and documents one of Jordan's most remarkable archaeological sites.
A town of resilience: Founded in the Nabataean period and thriving through the Roman, Byzantine, and Early Islamic eras, Umm Al-Jimal is a basalt-built town with two Roman forts, 16 churches, more than a hundred individual houses, and an elaborate water system. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2024.
My role: As project co-director and Department of Antiquities permit-holder, I lead excavation, conservation, and digital infrastructure, working with teams of Jordanian and international scholars, students, and local residents.
Innovation: We combine traditional field methods with cutting-edge digital tools: LiDAR and 3D scanning, GIS, photogrammetry, machine-learning feature classification from remote-sensing datasets, and Neo4j knowledge-graph modeling.
Community partnerships: Umm Al-Jimal is also a living town. Our project works closely with residents and the municipality to ensure that heritage benefits the present community as much as it illuminates the past.
Impact: Outputs include the successful UNESCO inscription, co-authored reports with colleagues and students, conservation projects, digital resources, and a forthcoming book: Mother of Beauty, Mother of Camels: An Archaeology of Place at Umm Al-Jimal.
Roman Frontiers and Urban Hinterlands
From the Antonine Wall in Scotland to Umm Al-Jimal in Jordan, I study frontiers where empires met and communities endured.
Before joining the Umm Al-Jimal Archaeological Project, I spent a decade investigating the edges of the Roman world in Britain and the urban hinterland of the city Rome in Italy.
The Antonine Wall (Scotland): I directed surveys and LiDAR studies of this UNESCO World Heritage frontier, exploring how Rome's northernmost boundary was constructed, experienced, and remembered in later centuries. I also produced comprehensive documentation and heritage assessments of each site in the care of Historic Environment Scotland.
Roman Binchester (England): I participated in the long-running Durham-Stanford excavation of a major Roman fort and town in County Durham, analyzing its role in the empire's northwest frontier.
The Tiber Valley Project (Italy): As part of a major collaborative project in Rome's urban hinterland, I contributed to digital mapping and diachronic analysis of urban-rural connections in the heart of the empire.
These projects combine archaeological fieldwork with historical and landscape approaches, as well as digital tools and methods, offering new perspectives on how borders, mobility, and cultural encounters shaped both ancient lives and post-Roman and contemporary identities.
Chorography and the Archaeology of Place
Places have biographies—layered lives that stretch across time, memory, and imagination.
A central thread across my scholarship is place-centered archaeology, deriving from the early modern revival of classical chorography.
Approach: Rather than treating archaeological sites as static ruins, I explore them as living places with biographies shaped by memory, imagination, and material traces across multiple periods, functions, and interpretations.
Contributions: My writings have helped define the role of chorography in contemporary archaeology and other fields, influencing works by Richard Hingley, Chris Witmore, Michael Shanks, and others.
Application: At Umm Al-Jimal, this means telling the story of a town across millennia—from Nabataean caravans to modern families—and showing how each generation reshapes the place they inherit.
Digital humanities and heritage: I bring this approach into the digital realm through heritage informatics, knowledge graphs, and cultural ontologies (e.g., CIDOC-CRM), which allow us to model complex relationships between people, objects, places, and ideas over time.
Current and Future Directions
Archaeology is not only about recovering the past but about asking how its remains live on in the present.
My research continues to expand at the intersection of archaeology, heritage, and digital humanities. Current initiatives include:
Developing graph-based databases for cultural heritage using Neo4j and established ontologies such as the CIDOC-CRM.
Publishing a series of site reports and thematic studies from Umm Al-Jimal in collaboration with project colleagues.
Collaborating with Jordanian and international colleagues on heritage management, conservation, and training at Umm Al-Jimal and the Hauran region of northern Jordan and southern Syria.
Writing a trade book that brings the story of Umm Al-Jimal to global audiences.
Exploring continuity and change in Orthodox liturgical and home-life faith practices between the Late Roman/Byzantine periods and contemporary Eastern Orthodox churches and communities. This is envisioned as a bi-directional ethnoarchaeology, with Umm Al-Jimal as a primary ancient case study in comparison with contemporary (Arab) Orthodox communities in Jordan and Antiochian Orthodox communities in North America. The homilies of St. John Chrysostom, exhorting parishioners to "make your house a church," may provide a useful barometer from an influential patristic figure.
Through these projects, I aim to advance archaeological scholarship while also engaging wider publics in conversations about why the past matters—and how we might steward it for the future.