I am an archaeologist who works on the Arabian Peninsula and surrounding regions. I approach the peninsula from a number of different perspectives, such as: longue durée regional archaeology; the archaeology of the Late Antique period, the rise of Islam, and the Islamic periods; human economic strategies in semi- to hyper-arid environments; and interaction between the Arabian peninsula and surrounding regions/empires/economies, including the Sasanians. The geographical location of the peninsula also means that there is real value to using the relatively accessible and well-preserved archaeological record as a window onto wider inter-regional developments such as Indian Ocean trade and globalization. I graduated from the Institute of Archaeology in London (now part of UCL) in 1984 and completed a PhD at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) in London in 2001. I have been involved in archaeological fieldwork in many countries, including Italy, Bulgaria, Syria, Jordan, Cyprus, Egypt and Libya, as well as (in the Arabian Peninsula) Oman, the UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. I have also directed research projects in India and China. In the early 1990s I held the post of Resident Archaeologist at the National Museum of Ras al-Khaimah (UAE) before moving to the Department of Archaeology at Durham University in the UK for 25 years, with two-years teaching in the Department of Archaeology at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. I moved to Chicago in 2024.
Recent books include the Archaeological Atlas of Samarra (with A. Northedge 2015, BISI); Excavations at Paithan, Maharashtra: Transformations in Early Historic and Early Medieval India (with M. Kasturi Bai and J.V.P. Rao, 2020, de Gruyter); Sasanian and Islamic settlement and ceramics from Southern Iran 4th – 17th century AD: the Williamson Survey (with Seth Priestman, 2023, British Institute for Persian Studies/Oxbow). I am expecting the following book to appear in 2024: The Bronze Age communal graves of Qarn al-Harf, Ras al-Khaimah (UAE): Southeast Arabia at the dawn of the second millennium. (with A. Caine, A. Hilton, C. Velde, L. Weeks and others, Oxbow).
I have published numerous papers in academic journals and conference proceedings including, recently: ‘The nature of 3rd-millennium settlement: the example of al-Tikha (Rustaq) an Umm an-Nar site on the Batinah coast of Oman’ (with W. Deadman, M. de Vreeze and N. al-Jahwari in Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 2022) and ‘Longquan celadon: a quantified archaeological analysis of a pan-Indian Ocean industry of the 12th to 15th centuries’ (with Ran Zhang, P. Brown, X. Song, G. Wang, Y. Zhai, and M. Wu in World Archaeology 2023).