AARON BURKE

Aaron Burke is Prof. of Near Eastern Archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, and the Kershaw Chair of Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern archaeology from The University of Chicago in 2004. Since 1997 he has participated in excavations in Israel, Egypt, and Turkey. Since 2007 he is joint director of the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project, a multi-disciplinary archaeological research project focused on the exploration of pre-modern Jaffa in Israel, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.His research interests include the archaeology of ancient Israel, Bronze Age Levantine societies, and the archaeology of warfare. His present line of research focuses on the cultural and institutional foundations of ancient Israelite society, in particular through the exploration of the culture and institutions of the Amorites during the second millennium BC.