Petra CreamerAssistant Professor

Petra M. Creamer is an archaeologist of the ancient Near Eastern world who researches the genesis and growth of empires and the impact of these empires on their subjects. Before starting at Emory, she obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania's Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World program (2021) and her B.A. in Anthropology at The Ohio State University (2014). Between 2021-2022, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College focusing on remote sensing the Anthropology department.

At Emory, she teaches classes on the ancient Middle East, archaeological methods, and digital analysis. She is director of the excavation project Rural Landscapes of Iron Age Imperial Mesopotamia, where her ongoing fieldwork addresses long-term settlement patterns and lifeways in the ancient Assyrian imperial core (c. 1350-600 BCE). She employs a variety of remote sensing applications (such as magnetometry and satellite/UAV imagery) to further understand the infrastructure and urbanism of the broader Assyrian landscape. She has conducted fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan, Iraq, Turkiye, Oman, Italy, Azerbaijan, Greece, and the U.S.A. Her current book project, Imperial Impact, ties together multiple scales of Assyrian imperial power - from broad landscape management down to individual burials - to understand the degree of control Assyrian elites held over those under imperial hegemony.

Education/Degrees

• Ph.D., Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, University of Pennsylvania
• B.A., Anthropology, Ohio State University

Teaching/Research Areas

• Ancient Near Eastern archaeology
• Mesopotamia
• Assyrian Empire
• Archaeologies of colonialism
• Landscape archaeology
• Remote sensing and digital archaeology