Benjamin Porter, Assistant professor of Near Eastern archaeology

Benjamin Porter is an assistant professor of Near Eastern archaeology in the University of California, Berkeley’s Near Eastern Studies Department, and a curator of Near Eastern archaeology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. He received his PhD in 2007 from the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Anthropology.

Porter co-directs the Dhiban Excavation and Development Project in Jordan, an archaeological field project investigating how agricultural communities dominated by imperial systems use technologies to organize agricultural and craft production in semi-arid, resource-scarce environments. He also co-directs the Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project with Sonoma State University’s Alexis Boutin. This project is researching and publishing skeletal evidence and artifacts from Peter B. Cornwall’s 1941 expedition to Bahrain and Eastern Saudi Arabia.