Research Description: My research focuses on hunter-gatherer societies in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, with the aim of reconstructing human-environment interactions during the Late Pleistocene. I am interested in the 10,000-20,000 years leading up to farming, when dramatic changes in human social organization, economy, technological innovation, and ideology first appear in the archaeological record in the form of intensified and novel relationships with plants and animals, increased sedentism and population aggregations, architecture, complex site organization, far-reaching social interaction networks, and elaborate mortuary practices. I explore these significant shifts in human behavior through the study of material culture and the interactions of people and the landscapes they live in.
Profile: I joined Anthropology at Berkeley in 2012, where I run the Geoarchaeology and Southwest Asia Prehistory Laboratory and teach on topics of geoarchaeology, lithic analysis, Old World prehistory, human evolution, archaeological sciences, archaeological method and theory, archaeological approaches to technology, and human palaeoecology. I am the Curator of Lithic Collections at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley, and affiliate of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Center for European Studies. I am also a research associate at the Archaeology Center of the University of Toronto and I am an adjunct member of the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology at Toronto. I have several active excavation projects at Epipalaeolithic sites in northern and eastern Jordan, and with colleagues at The University of Tulsa, University of Toronto and UNLV, recently initiated a project in Cyprus exploring the island’s earliest hunter-gatherer inhabitants. Beyond my own research projects in Jordan and Cyprus, I conduct geoarchaeological work for other projects in the region, such as at the Upper Palaeolithic sites of the Jebel Qalkha in southern Jordan, Natufian site of Wadi Mataha in Jordan, Neolithic Asiab in Iran, and Assyrian irrigations systems in the Erbil area of Kurdistan. I am also starting geoarchaeological work on a pre-colonial site in Ohau, Hawaii.
(http://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/lisa-maher (link is external), https://kharaneh.wordpress.com/ (link is external)).
