Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Near Eastern Archaeology
Areas of Interest
- Human-environment interaction, complex socio-ecological systems, agent-based modelling, climate modelling, land use, agricultural productivity
- Isotopic analysis (strontium, carbon, oxygen), mobility, migration, herding practices, landscape exploitation
- Archaeological data analysis and visualization, GIS, spatial analysis
- Petrographic analysis of ceramics
- Rise of urbanism and social complexity
- The Levant and Anatolia in the Chalcolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages
- State formation in the Horn of Africa
Biography
Professor Welton received her PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology from the University of Toronto, and has twenty years of field experience, having worked in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and Ethiopia. Geographically, she focuses primarily on the Levant and Anatolia, especially on the Late Chalcolithic, Early Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, having published extensively on materials from the Amuq Plain in southern Turkey as part of her long-term involvement with the Tayinat Archaeological Project. During her recently completed Marie Curie fellowship at Durham University, she used isotopic analysis of animal skeletal remains to investigate the role of pastoral mobility in the rise of complex societies in the Jordan Valley and western Syria during the 5th-3rd millennia BCE.
Lynn’s recent work as part of the CRANE Project reconstructs human-environment interaction using a combination of agent-based modelling and climate modelling. Consequently, she has been collaborating with researchers in the Physics Department to implement global climate models and dynamically downscaled regional climate models to examine past climate variability. In addition to ongoing research into agricultural productivity and land use in the ancient Near East, she uses agent-based modelling to evaluate agricultural strategies and decision-making as responses to climate change.
Education
Publications
- Tell Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP): Seasons 2017–2019 (The Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies Journal : 2022)
- Mapping past human land use using archaeological data: a new classification for global land use synthesis and data harmonization (PLoS ONE 16(4): e0246662. : 2021)
- Landscapes, Climate and Choice: Examining Patterns in Animal Provisioning Across the Near East, c. 13,000-0 BCE (International Union for Quaternary Research : 2021)
- Beyond megadrought and collapse in the Northern Levant: the chronology of Tell Tayinat and two historical inflection episodes, around 4.2ka BP and following 3.2ka BP (PLoS ONE 15(10): e0240799 : 2020)
- Northern Levantine Spheres of Interaction: The Role of the Amuq in the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age (Sydney University Press : 2020)
- The Amuq in the Early Bronze Age III-IV from a Levantine Perspective (Eisenbrauns : 2020)
- The Iron Age I in the Levant: The View from the North (Part 2) (Lebanese British Friends of the British Museum, Beirut : 2020)
- Urban Built Environments of the Early First Millennium BCE: Results of the Tayinat Archaeological Project, 2004-2012 (The University of Chicago Press : 2019)
- Shifting Networks and Community Identity at Tell Tayinat in the Iron I (ca. 12th to mid-10th Cent. BCE) ( : 2019)
- The Iron Age I in the Levant: The View from the North (Part 1) (Lebanese British Friends of the British Museum, Beirut : 2019)
- EBIV Ceramic Production in the Orontes Watershed: Petrography from the Amuq and Beyond ( : 2018)
- Reforging Connections: The Black Sea Coast of Anatolia in the 4th-3rd Millennia BC ( : 2017)
- Gap or Transition? Characterizing the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age I in the Amuq ( : 2017)