Rate My Professor Dan Lawrence

Professor Dan Lawrence is a Professor in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University. He completed his PhD at Durham University in 2013, having previously studied at University College London and the University of Cambridge. Following his doctorate, he was a post-doctoral researcher on the ERC-funded Persia and its Neighbours project and spent a semester as a fellow at the Digital Institute for Archaeology in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Technology, University of Arkansas. He joined the department as Lecturer in October 2015, directing the Durham Archaeology Informatics Laboratory, a research hub dedicated to landscape archaeology, GIS, remote sensing, and computational approaches to the archaeological record. He serves as Durham Co-Investigator on the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project and the Computational Research in the Ancient Near East II (CRANE II) project. From 2017 to 2019, he was Deputy and Reviews Editor of the journal Antiquity.

Lawrence is a landscape archaeologist focusing on Southwest and Central Asia during the Holocene. He directs the Climate, Landscapes, Settlement and Society (CLaSS) project, funded by an ERC Starting Grant since January 2019, examining relationships between complex human societies and climate change over the last 8,000 years. His research uses satellite imagery, including declassified CORONA spy photography, to compare settlement patterns, subsistence strategies, and land cover, identifying causal links between social and political organization and environmental conditions. He has studied city emergence in Northern Mesopotamia during the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, and the Final Bronze Age site of Semiyarka in Eastern Kazakhstan. Additional interests encompass inequality and urbanism, empire impacts on landscapes, and heritage management. Lawrence has directed landscape surveys in Georgia, Oman, Iran, and Azerbaijan, with forthcoming monographs. Key publications include the edited volume New Agendas in Remote Sensing and Landscape Archaeology in the Near East: Studies in Honour of Tony J. Wilkinson (2020), 'Climate change and early urbanism in Southwest Asia: A review' (Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2022), 'Collapse and continuity: A multi-proxy reconstruction of settlement organization and population trajectories in the Northern Fertile Crescent during the 4.2kya Rapid Climate Change event' (PLoS ONE, 2021), and 'Long term population, city size and climate trends in the Fertile Crescent: a first approximation' (PLoS ONE, 2016).