Tag Archives: Franklin

Spring PhDs from ArAGATS: Kathryn Franklin and Maureen Marshall

This spring welcomed two new PhDs to Project ArAGATS.

Kate Franklin completed her dissertation in the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago entitled “This World is an Inn: Cosmopolitanism and Caravan Trade in late Medieval Armenia”.

Kate Franklin surveying research at the Medieval site of Arai

Kate Franklin surveying research at the Medieval site of Arai

The work examines the intersections of global trade and social life as constituted along the highways between late medieval (AD 12-15th c) towns and cities. Based on her excavations at the caravanatun at Arai, Franklin’s dissertation explores how medieval subjects (traders, princes, villagers, city dwellers) negotiated multiple, frequently contradictory, models of the world as they traveled.

Maureen Marshall’s dissertation, entitled “Subject(ed) Bodies: A Bioarchaeological Investigation of Late Bronze – Iron 1 (1500-800 BC) Armenia,” was also completed in the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago.

Maureen Marshall excavating a Late Bronze Age tomb on the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia

Maureen Marshall excavating a Late Bronze Age tomb on the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia

The dissertation provides the first bioarchaeological investigation of Late Bronze and Iron 1 period mortuary complexes in the South Caucasus.  While her original fieldwork centered on excavations in a tomb complex adjacent to the fortress of Tsaghkahovit, in Armenia’s Tsaghkahovit Plain, her dissertation ranges far more broadly in both its engagement with data and its wider intellectual concerns.  Part reflection on traditions of skeletal studies in Armenia, part biographies of recovered lives from the Late Bronze Age, Marshall’s dissertation provides our most intimate portrait to date of lives lived in the region’s ancient landscapes.

Congratulations to both Kate and Maureen!