“I think of it as a laboratory for pedagogy as well as research,” says Mehrnoush Soroush of the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes (CAMEL), which she has directed since 2022. In this role, Soroush, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, builds on a rich legacy of integrating advanced technology into the study of the landscape to reveal how ancient people lived. One of her main goals is to bring the lab’s graduate student research assistants—who hail from programs including Middle Eastern Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities—more fully into the lab’s work.
Founded in 1998 by Tony Wilkinson, who worked at the University in the 1990s and early 2000s as a research associate and associate professor, CAMEL has been at the forefront of landscape archaeology research, using technology such as geographic information systems (GIS) to understand how humans interacted with their environment millennia ago. Today the lab focuses on facilitating access to its existing datasets, expanding its public resources, and developing new tool kits and platforms—especially at the intersection of digital archaeology and artificial intelligence—to expedite and scale ancient landscape studies. The lab supports academic researchers from UChicago and other institutions, as well as nonacademics, by helping them visualize and analyze their spatial data and generate maps for publication.
Graduate students have helped cultivate an environment of dynamic exchange at the center, says Soroush. “When you teach something in the classroom, you have a specific set of teaching goals.” But with research, there is a “back-and-forth between me and the students,” she says.
The research assistants learn new techniques and tools as they contribute to the lab’s ongoing projects and pursue their own lines of inquiry. A question that unites their work is what landscape archaeology can tell us about how people lived in the past. Textual sources, which may have been written by elites with a certain agenda or by people who did not belong to the group they were describing, can lead to a limited or skewed vision of everyday lives of ordinary people. By reading the landscape, these scholars hope to gain a more nuanced sense of the past.
Xueyan Lyu, a doctoral student in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, studies a mountainous region in the Shaanxi province of northern China during the Bronze Age. Most official records from the time were written by the royal family, she says. As a result, “in previous studies, this region was just viewed as a marginal zone of a traditional dynasty.” But she sees the area as “a dynamic interactional landscape.” Precious objects such as bronze vessels show that, in fact, this was a crossroads linking several other regions, and that it was heavily influenced by cultural exchange.
To better understand how these people settled and how goods moved throughout this region, she decided to use GIS software to map the sites where precious vessels have been discovered. She took Ancient Landscapes—a two-quarter course sequence taught by Soroush—to master this technology and jumped at the opportunity to further develop her skills through a research assistant position at CAMEL. In the lab, she gained experience working with declassified Cold War satellite imagery of preindustrial landscapes in Iran in a collaboration with digital humanities scholars. Lyu realized she could use other declassified aerial photography to chart preindustrial settlement patterns in northern China.
Olivia Fiser, a student in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, also combines landscape archaeology with close study of materials. She studies shells recovered from sites in present-day Jordan. The ways they were modified, for example through drilled holes, suggest they were used for jewelry and adornment. Fiser is interested in the clues these shells hold about how ancient people expressed their individuality. “How can we synthesize the material culture to understand them as people, rather than as a part of a larger picture?” she asks.
Fiser’s work before getting involved with CAMEL had been very site specific, “but when you incorporate the landscape, you are able to visualize so much more,” she says. With skills she learned in Ancient Landscapes and guidance from her mentors at CAMEL, she has used GIS technology and other resources, such as Paleolithic climatology reports, to identify the likely sources of the shells and map the least costly transportation routes, charting potential paths of exchange between historic settlement sites in the region. From two other CAMEL research assistants, Harrison Morin, AM’20, and Xiayoxuan “Coco” Yang, AM’25, she learned how she could incorporate a study of hydrological features, including qanats, an underground irrigation technology, into her research. Such features can offer a more comprehensive view of how interactions with the natural world shaped daily life in the communities she studies.
Çağlayan Bal, AM’22, a doctoral student in Middle Eastern Studies, is an expert on Iron Age Anatolia (today part of Turkey). She became skeptical of official accounts, often written by Greeks, of a unified Phrygian kingdom with a strong central state. “I want to challenge this narrative, and especially the prioritization of textual sources, by using archaeological data from the ground,” she says. She is using the same GIS techniques she gained experience with at CAMEL to examine large survey datasets so she can study the spatial distribution of settlements. Settlements built around several different seats of power, for example, could serve as evidence of a more complex and distributed hierarchy than textual sources suggest.
Bal has also contributed to CAMEL’s AI-Assisted Archaeological Remains Detection (A3RD) project, which uses artificial intelligence to track hydrologic features, such as qanats, which arose in the first millennium BCE and continue to sustain communities in the Middle East today. The team at CAMEL trained an AI model to more quickly and accurately process vast datasets by identifying the telltale holes used to maintain the underground tunnels that transported water. The team plans to make this AI model available to the public so others can use it and even train it for their own needs. Tracing these water systems, says Bal, can offer insights into how settlement patterns and the environment have changed through the ages.
“I do learn from them all the time,” says Soroush of the research assistants, emphasizing that on “technical topics, a lot of them are way ahead of me.” And with their expertise in different regions and time periods, the students have taken research collaborations in directions Soroush did not anticipate. Though Soroush notes that declining graduate admissions and the current pause in new enrollments have posed challenges to the graduate research assistant program, being part of this dynamic environment has enabled the students and Soroush herself to expand their research scope and tools, while developing resources that will allow the public and the next generation of scholars to connect with the landscape in new ways. “Even now,” says Fiser, “our landscape, our surroundings—they’re everything to our understanding of culture and human interaction.”