The 69th volume of the Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research is devoted to studies of botanical and faunal remains from three major sites in Jordan: Tall al'Umayri (Bronze to early Iron Age), Karak Castle (Middle and Late Islamic Period), and Khirbet al-Mudayna al-'Aliya (early Iron Age). Although each paper reflects the work of different teams, they are all thematically linked by their contributions to the study of agro-pastoralist economic activities in the region. Each paper offers insight into contextually specific historical circumstances but also insight into agriculture and pastoralism more broadly. Likewise, each paper offers different approaches for working with faunal and/or botanical evidence that will be of interest to specialists in bioarchaeology more generally. Scholars of pastoralism will be interested in all of these papers, which touch on issues of foddering and animal consumption.
About the Author: Kevin McGeough is an Associate Professor in the Geography Department at the University of Lethbridge. He was the series editor of ASOR's Archaeological Report Series for six years and is currently the series editor of the Annual. Jennifer Ramsay - is an assistant professor at the College at Brockport, State University of New York, in Brockport, New York. Jennifer is an archaeobotanist that specializes in the Near East and her research involves examining the agricultural economies of ancient societies ranging in date from the Chalcolithic up until the Islamic period. Natalie Mueller - is an archaeobotanical Ph.D. Candidate in the Anthropology Department at Washington University in St. Louis. Natalie is currently focused on studying ancient native North American seeds crops in the Midwest. Robin Brown - is an independent scholar of Islamic archaeology of the Southern Levant with specialized experience in the material remains of the Middle Islamic castles in Jordan where she conducted several excavations. Kevin Rielly - is a professional zooarchaeologist working since the mid 1990s for a commercial archaeology company in London, UK. He was previously employed as a freelance faunal specialist at a number of sites (particularly dated to the Islamic period) in Jordan. Alan Farahani - is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. Alan is an archaeologist and paleoethnobotanist who has worked on several field and laboratory projects based in Jordan, as well as in Spain, Armenia, and the Philippines. Benjamin Porter - is Director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and an Assistant Professor in the University of California, Berkeley's Near Eastern Studies Department. He is the author of Complex Communities: The Archaeology of Early Iron Age West-Central Jordan. Hanna Huynh - recently graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in Anthropology. She spent the past year working as an archaeology intern at the Presidio of San Francisco investigating the Spanish-Colonial site of El Presidio de San Francisco. Bruce Routledge - is Reader in Archaeology in the Dept. of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool (UK). Bruce directed excavations at Kh. al-Mudayna al-'Aliya, Jordan between 1994-2004 and currently co-directs the Dhiban Excavation and Development Project also in Jordan.