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Mara T. Horowitz

Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies

Mara Horowitz is an anthropological archaeologist teaching worldwide ancient history and archaeology. With a professional focus on the Mediterranean Bronze Age (Cyprus, Anatolia, Syria), she is also committed to public outreach, museum studies, and interdisciplinary studies with materials sciences, philology, art history, zooarchaeology, and geology. In addition to twenty years of fieldwork in the Mediterranean, she is now founder and director of the Albion Experimental Archaeology Studio in Danbury, CT (https://www.facebook.com/AlbionExperimental/).

Research Interests

  • Connectivity, cultural hybridity, and international material culture style
  • Foodways and their interrelationship with material culture, environmental conditions, and resource
  • Nucleation, diffusion, and agency in craft production (ceramics)
  • Household archaeology
  • Landscapes and cultural conceptions of space and place
  • Secondary development and intermediate forms of social complexity
  • Assimilation, resistance, and identity in the borderlands of states and empires

Representative Courses

Ancient Greece and Rome

The Ancient Middle East

Archaeology of Empires: The Ancient World

New World Archaeology

Publications

 

Overturning Certainties in Near Eastern Archaeology

 

Maner, Çiğdem, Mara T. Horowitz, and Allan S. Gilbert (eds).  2018.  Overturning Certainties in Near Eastern Archaeology: A Festschrift in Honor of K. Aslıhan Yener.  Leiden/Boston: Brill.

Horowitz, Mara T., and Canan Çakirlar.  2018.  Novel Uses of Wild Fauna in the MB/LB Transition at Tell Atchana/Alalakh.  In Overturning Certainties in Near Eastern Archaeology: A Festschrift in Honor of K. Aslıhan Yener, eds. Ç. Maner, M. T. Horowitz, and S. Gilbert.  Leiden/Boston: Brill.

 

 

Morrison, Jerolyn, and Mara T. Horowitz.  2016.  Field-Based Experiments Replicating Ceramic Fabrics: Late Bronze Age Cookwares from Two Mediterranean Sites.  In Integrative Approaches in Ceramic Petrography, eds. M. Ownby, I. Druc, and M. Massuci.  University of Utah Press.

Horowitz, Mara T.  2016.  The Early-Middle Bronze Age Pottery.  In Vasilikos Valley Project 10, ed. I. A. Todd.  SIMA vol. LXXI: 10.

Horowitz, Mara T.  2015.  The Evolution of Plain Ware Ceramics at the Regional Capital of Alalakh in the Second Millennium BC.  In C. Glatz (ed), Plain Pottery Traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East: Production, Use, and Social Significance. Series: University College London Institute of Archaeology Publications. Left Coast Press: Walnut Creek, CA.

Presentations / Conferences

You Are How You Eat: Changes in Dining Style and Society at Late Bronze Alalakh.  2017 Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archaeology, Vancouver, BC

A Drink Among Friends: The Crater Across 1,000 Years at Tell Atchana - Alalakh.  2015 American Schools of Oriental Research Annual Meeting, Atlanta

New Horizons: The Iron Age Sequence at Tell Atchana - Alalakh.  2015 American Schools of Oriental Research Annual Meeting, Atlanta. Co-authored with M. Pucci and R. Koehl

Stepping Up to the Plate: Changes in Dining Style as a Hallmark of the MB/LB Transition at Atchana - Alalakh.  2013 American Schools of Oriental Research Annual Meeting, Baltimore

History in a Cookpot: New Approaches to Local Pottery at Middle Late Bronze Age Tell Atchana - Alalakh.  2012: 113th Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, Philadelphia

Exhibitions / Performances

Invited Lectures:

Chronology, Sequence, and Society: Approaches to the Temporal Dimensions of Alalakh.  June 10-12, 2015.  Celebrating Alalakh, The 15th Anniversary of Excavations: Alalakh and its Neighbors, Antakya Museum, Hatay.

New Cultural Features in the Late Bronze I Ceramics of Alalakh.  June 10-12, 2015. Celebrating Alalakh, The 15th Anniversary of Excavations: Alalakh and its Neighbors, Antakya Museum, Hatay.

Local Ceramics in the Battleground of Empires.  January 14-16, 2015: Late Bronze Age Ceramic Identities, University of Florence, Italy.

Representing Alalakh: Excavation and Curation Amid Modern Conflict at Bronze Age Tell Atchana, Turkey.  January 14th, 2014: Invitation of the Long Island Society of the Archaeological Institute of America.  Hofstra University, Hempstead NY.

Museum Installations:

Hatay Archaeology Museum, Antakya, Turkey.  Tell Atchana, Ancient Alalakh (permanent exhibition, installed 2015).

Cyprus Museum, Lefkosia, Cyprus. Settlement and Sanctuary: The Phlamoudhi Archaeological Project.  Visiting exhibit at the Cyprus Museum, June 2009; curator J. S. Smith.