Rate My Professor Emily Hammer

Emily Hammer is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities, Archaeology and Anthropology of the Ancient World in the Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures department at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an anthropological archaeologist of the Middle East and South Caucasia whose research applies spatial analyses to material culture to investigate the territorial organization of ancient polities, the development of early cities, and long-term changes in the interactions between culture and environment. Hammer uses geographic information science methods, archaeology, and archival research, including declassified military intelligence imagery, to recover the experiences of mobile pastoralists and other communities in agriculturally marginal environments such as deserts and highlands.

She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University (2012) and a BA in Mathematics and Classical & Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College (2006). Prior to her appointment at Penn, Hammer taught at the University of Chicago (2014–2017), where she directed the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes, and at New York University (2012–2014). Her fieldwork spans Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, and Iraq, with current projects including surveys at Ur in southern Iraq and in Naxçıvan, Azerbaijan, as well as laboratory research on desert kites in Jordan and fortification patterns in Afghanistan. She participates in the LandCover6K project to reconstruct land use over the last 6,000 years. In 2025, she published her book The Archaeology of Pastoralism, Mobility, and Society: Beyond the Grass Paradigm with Cambridge University Press.