Emily Hammer

Emily Hammer is an archaeologist and Assistant Professor in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department. She has worked in Turkey, Azerbaijan, the UAE, Afghanistan, and Iraq on both archaeology and cultural heritage projects. Her archaeological projects investigate the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and South Caucasia, the history of mobile pastoralism in Southwest Asia, and long-term environmental change caused by thousands of years of human activities in arid and semi-arid regions. Methodologically, she has expertise in the use of spatial analysis, digital map-making, satellite imagery, and archival aerial photographs for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing historical, archaeological, ethnographic, and cultural heritage data. In a recent collaborative project, she has produced an open-access spatial index of declassified U2 spy plane photographs of the Middle East, captured 1958-1960, in order to make these photographs accessible to other researchers.

She teaches a number of thematic courses that count for the Middle East Studies major/minor, including NELC 111/ANTH 110 Water in the Middle East, NELC 325/ANTH 325 Who Owns the Past?: Archaeology and Politics in the Middle East, and NELC 106 Pastoral Nomadism.

Hammer holds a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University and a BA both in Mathematics and Classical & Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College. Prior to coming to Penn, she taught at the University of Chicago (2014-2017) and New York University (2012-2014).