Emily Hammer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania. An anthropological archaeologist of the Middle East and the South Caucasus, she has conducted fieldwork in the UAE, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Iraq. Her ongoing research contributes to three fields of inquiry: the archaeology of pastoralism, comparative studies of early urbanism in Mesopotamia and its surrounding highlands, and GIS methodologies for environmental and landscape archaeology.