“Animal Lives at Petra: Analysis of the Zooarchaeological Remains from the Temple of the Winged Lions and the Petra North Ridge Project”
ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2021–2022
North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC (U.S.A.)
Anthropology
Kathryn Grossman is assistant professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. She is an archaeologist and zooarchaeologist with expertise in the complex societies of the Near East and eastern Mediterranean. She earned her BA in archaeology from Tufts University and her PhD in Near Eastern art and archaeology from the University of Chicago. Her current research focuses on resistance to state-making, the biographies of early cities, and human/non-human animal relationships in early complex societies. She directs the Makounta-Voules Archaeological Project in Cyprus and has been a senior staff member on archaeological projects in Syria, Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. She is currently coediting the final report on excavations at Tell Qarqur, Syria, where she worked from 2006 to 2010.
Through “Animal Lives at Petra: Analysis of the Zooarchaeological Remains from the Temple of the Winged Lions and the Petra North Ridge Project,” Dr. Grossman draws together important new zooarchaeological data sets from two localities at Petra, Jordan—the Petra North Ridge Project and the Temple of the Winged Lions—in order to explore human-animal relations at the site. Her analysis will answer two zooarchaeological questions: First, what was the nature of the animal economy at Petra during the 1st through 6th centuries AD? Second, what can a close examination of animal lives reveal about the inner workings of a multispecies community at Petra? By examining archaeologically recovered animal remains from these two localities at Petra, she will construct an account that considers not only how humans used animals as economic resources but also how humans and animals were entangled in a web of mutually impactful relationships.
