Ann Merkle
Graduate Student of Archaeology
Research Interests
Material culture of mobile pastoralist societies of the steppes, mountains, and deserts of Central and Eastern Eurasia; pastoralist empires of the early Islamic period in Central Asia, between ~800-1200 AD; questions of social and economic interaction between regional populations across Eurasia during the Islamic and immediate pre-Islamic period; using material culture traces to track migrations of mobile populations over time and across geography; utilizing and improving methods to identify mobile pastoralist archaeological sites; ceramics, metals, textiles, the Silk Routes, craft production, archaeology of mountain and steppe environments, paleoethnobotany, technological change and transfer.
