Amy Karoll is a Ph.D. candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles and an ACOR-CAORC Pre-doctoral Fellow in spring 2019. Prior to arrival at Amman, she was at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem as an ECA Predoctoral Fellow in fall 2018. Her research focuses on landscapes of change and mobility during the transition from the Early to Middle Bronze Age.
Amy’s dissertation, in its broadest sense, focuses on human reactions to changing environments. The primary aim of her project is to address the interrelationship between Early Bronze IV (EB IV) settlement locations and environmental niches to understand the types of agro-pastoralism available in antiquity. Her first aim was to amass a database as no single one had integrated settlement information for the entire southern Levant. She intends to compare the locations of settlements with the maximal extent of agricultural, pastoral, horticultural, and forested lands to determine if there is a shift in settlement location in relation to land use types. She utilizes Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and statistical analyses to quantify shifts in settlement patterns to analyze their underlying patterns.
Amy’s work in Jordan focuses on the eastern sites in her dissertation. She intends to study the landscape and the environmental niches of Jordan in order to better understand the movements she has observed in her initial analysis of the site locations on maps.
Amy received her M.A. in 2011 from the University of Arkansas in Anthropology, and her thesis looked at the transition from the Early to Middle Bronze Age in the Orontes Valley of Syria. She got her B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in Archaeological Studies in 2009. She has excavated and surveyed in various places across the globe, including: Bolivia, Syria, Israel, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Arkansas, and California.
