Our Partners
Gideon Shelach-Lavi is the Louis Freiberg Professor of East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In recent years he has held various positions at the Hebrew University, including the Chair of the Asian Studies Department, the Chair of the Institute of African and Asian Studies, and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. Prof. Shelach-Lavi received a Ph.D. in archaeology from the University of Pittsburgh (1996) and since 1995 he has conducted archaeological fieldwork in North China and in Mongolia. He has published 9 books and more than 70 papers in leading academic journals. Among his recent books are: The Archaeology of China: From Prehistory to the Han Dynasty (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Animals and Human Society in Asia: Historical, Cultural and Ethical Perspectives (co-editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
Prof. Shelach-Lavi's research has important regional and spatial archaeology components, and he is cooperating with the Spatial Archaeology Laboratory in several research programs as well as in the teaching and guiding advanced students. Among the regional archaeological work that Prof. Shelach-Lavi conducted are large-scale regional surveys in Northeast China: The Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Research Project (a survey of more than 1,000 square km) and the Fuxin Regional Project.
Currently, Prof. Shelach-Lavi is the head of the ERC-funded project The Wall. The project is focused on a wall system located in north China and Mongolia. It was built during the Medieval period (10-13 centuries CE) and is covering a distance of over 3,500 km. The Wall is an interdisciplinary project which combines archaeological, historical, and paleo-climatic research. To address this large system of earthen walls and related structures, the project incorporates multiple research avenues including local and regional surveys, extensive use of remote sensing data, as well as targeted excavations.
Headed by Dr. Nimrod Marom (University of Haifa), the ERC-funded project DEADSEA-ECO (StG no. 802752) aims to explore the effects of human settlement on mammalian community structure, focusing on the phenomenon of trophic cascades in antiquity. The subject is approached using bioarchaeological methods applied to the uniquely-preserved material record from the middle and late Holocene settlement sequence (approximately 8,000 BCE to 2,000 CE) of the Dead Sea Ein Gedi Oasis, and to the contemporary palaeontological assemblages from caves located in the surrounding Judean Desert.
Yair Grinberger is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also heads the geocultural informatics lab. His research focuses on extracting knowledge on human systems, behaviors, societies, and cultures from geo-data. Accordingly, his studies integrate themes and knowledge from the social sciences and geoinformatic frameworks such as GNSS trajectory analysis, geospatial modeling, and analysis of crowdsourced geodatabases.
Established in 2011 by Dr. John K. Hall, Prof. Yigal Erel, and Prof. Amotz Agnon, The Neev Center for Geoinfomatics investigates various research areas in the fields of Geoinfomatics, Bathymetry/Topography, Tectonics, Archaeology, Magmatism and Seismology using geophysical and geological instruments. The center consists of a group of MSc, PhD and Post-doc students supervised by Prof. Amotz Agnon, mapping, processing, analyzing and interpreting using various geophysical instruments and datasets.
The GIS Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, directed by Adi Ben-Nun, provides GIS services to the university community and offers courses and training in spatial analysis and spatial modeling in all faculties.