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Dan Lawrence

 

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Adam Barnes Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies CAST University of Arkansas

 

 

 

Dan Lawrence
 Ph.D. Candidate, Durham University, UK
DIA Fellow, Spring 2012

 

Dan's research interests include landscape and settlement archaeology, archaeological uses of satellite imagery and remote sensing techniques and the pre- and protohistory of Mesopotamia. He holds degrees from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London and the University of Cambridge and has conducted fieldwork in Syria, Turkey, Greece, Romania and the UK.

Dan is currently a doctoral candidate at Durham University, UK, supervised by Professors Tony Wilkinson, Graham Philip and Danny Donoghue, and is part of the Fragile Crescent Project (http://www.dur.ac.uk/fragile_crescent_project/). His PhD involves bringing together settlement data from several surveys undertaken over the past thirty years into a single GIS and database. These surveys cover a range of landscape types and environments across Southern Turkey, Western Syria, the Euphrates corridor and the Syrian/Iraqi Jazira. The dataset is enhanced by reanalysis with the use of satellite imagery, particularly declassified spy imagery such as CORONA, to discover new sites both within and outside the boundaries of the original surveys. Such a dataset allows for the analysis of settlement trends at the level of individual sites and surveys but also for a comparison between the different landscape zones which make up Northern Mesopotamia as a whole. Dan is particularly interested in the earliest phases of urban development during the 4th and 3rd Millennia B.C. the relationship between environmental and social factors in the genesis of hierarchical settlement patterns and the different trajectories of urbanisation which may result. Analyses of this period must also take into account long term trends of settlement in the region and the impact both natural and cultural landscape transformation processes have had on the archaeological record. At CAST, Dan is building on his knowledge of remote sensing and spatial analysis techniques. He is also working toward developing ways of visualising archaeological data which can bring out the dynamic cadences of settlement change through time.