“Tall Hisban/Madaba Plains Project”
Lawrence T. Geraty Travel Scholarship, 2021–2022
University of Bonn; Bonn (Germany)
Islamic Archaeology
Trained in journalism and Hispanic studies at the University of Leipzig, Britta Wagner has always also had a keen interest in archaeology and the Arab world, so it was only logical for her to pursue a degree in Islamic archaeology and prehistoric/early historic archaeology while working as a freelance science journalist. As an undergraduate, Britta served as a research assistant in the Islamic Archaeology Research Unit at the University of Bonn, where she is now pursuing her MA. Wagner loves any kind of language (from her mother tongue, German, to Latin, Turkish, Arabic, and programming languages such as Python) and feels at home in polyglot teams. She eagerly anticipates returning to Jordan, which she first got to know in 2013 during an internship as a language teacher at the German-Jordanian University.
Britta Wagner will join the Tall Hisban Field School for its next excavation season as soon as the pandemic allows. Her research on the Islamic pottery of the site through household and computational archaeology expands the topic of her BA thesis, which concerned the quantification of pottery in middens, features that garbologists only half mockingly praise as the “happiest of finds.” While Wagner is looking forward to a hands-on experience with the pottery “in situ” at Tall Hisban, she also plans to further apply the benefits of computational archaeology to the time-consuming tasks of pottery analysis. She aims to enhance the data-recording system of the project, facilitating better data visualization in the field.
