Ramblas & Rivieras

Aaron A. Burke is Professor of the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and the Levant, and the Kershaw Chair of the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The University of California, Los Angeles. He is also a member of UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, serving as its editor-in-chief since 2016. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Archaeology from The University of Chicago in 2004. Since 1994, he has excavated in Israel but also Egypt and Turkey, and travelled extensively throughout the Levant from Syria to Lebanon, Jordan, Cyprus, and in Greece, collaborating in field research at Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Tel Dan. He directs The Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project since 2007 and has co-edited three volumes resulting from research in Jaffa, Israel. Expanding upon this research, in 2017 he inaugurated Turning Points, an initiative aimed at exploring the context out of which ancient Israel emerged during the Early Iron Age in the southern Levant, ca. 1200–1000 B.C. Burke’s research focuses on the social history of the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze and Iron Ages with a particular interest in identity transformations surrounding warfare, forced migration, and long-distance exchange. His first monograph, “Walled Up to Heaven”: The Evolution of Middle Bronze Age Fortification Strategies in the Levant, addressed warfare during a period of Amorite political hegemony. He is also author of The Amorites and the Bronze Age Near East (CUP 2021), which seeks to reconstruct a social history of the Amorites from 2500 to 1500 BC. Since 2021, he is also the series editor for Elements in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel by Cambridge University Press.