Edward Banning

Professor
AP 518B (Main), AP 518 (Lab)
(416) 978-2315

Campus

Fields of Study

Areas of Interest

Research Keywords: Archaeology, Middle Eastern prehistory, Neolithic to Early Bronze, archaeological method and theory, archaeological survey

Research Region: Jordan, Levant

Biography

Ted Banning’s research on the beginnings of village life and political-economic inequality in southwest Asia concentrates on the southern Levant. He has been on the staff of excavations at Neolithic ‘Ain Ghazal in Jordan, and directed the Wadi Ziqlab Project and Wadi Quseiba Project in northern Jordan, which both involved survey and excavation at several Epipalaeolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age sites.

His research interests include ways that the spatial organization of the built environment can inform us about changes in Neolithic and Chalcolithic social systems, the evolution of the agricultural economy from the Neolithic onward, and theoretical aspects of archaeological survey and evaluation of survey results. He also focuses on method and theory related to archaeological laboratory analyses, including measurement theory, sampling, micro-archaeology, experimental archaeology, and dating methods.

Education

University of Toronto, 1985

Publications

2021    Sampled to death? The rise and fall of probability sampling in archaeologyAmerican Antiquity 86(1): 43-60.

2020    The Archaeologist’s Laboratory, The Analysis of Archaeological Evidence, 2nd ed. New York: Springer.

2020    Spatial sampling. In Archaeological Spatial Analysis. CRC Press (Taylor & Francis Group).

2019    The archaeological impacts of metal detectingOpen Archaeology 5: 180-186.

2016    Quality Assurance in Archaeological Survey.  The Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory (DOI 10.1007/s10816-016-9274-2) (E.B. Banning, A.L. Hawkins, S.T. Stewart, P. Hitchings and S. Edwards)

2015    Modernizing Spatial Micro-Refuse Analysis: New Methods for Collecting, Analyzing, and Interpreting the Spatial Patterning of Micro-Refuse from House-Floor ContextsJournal of Archaeological Method and Theory 22(4): 1238-1262 (Ullah, I.I., P.R. Duffy and E.B. Banning).

2015    Settlement shifts and site visibility. Where are the Neolithic sites? In Bill Finlayson and C. Makarewicz (eds.), Settlement, Survey, and Stone: Essays on Near Eastern Prehistory in Honour of Gary Rollefson, 91-99. Berlin: ex oriente.

2011    So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East. Current Anthropology 52(5):619-660.

2011    Oasis or mirage? Assessing the role of abrupt climate change in the prehistory of the southern Levant. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 21: 1-30 (Lisa Maher, M. Chazan and E. B. Banning).

2010    Houses, households, and changing society in the Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic of the southern LevantPaléorient 36(1): 45-83.

2007    Wadi Rabah and related assemblages in the southern Levant: Interpreting the radiocarbon evidence. Paléorient 33(1): 77-101.

2006    Detection functions for archaeological surveyAmerican Antiquity 71(4): 723-742 (with Alicia Hawkins and S. T. Stewart).

2006    Domesticating Space: Construction, Community, and Cosmology in the Late Prehistoric Near East. ex oriente, Berlin (co-editor, with Michael Chazan).

2002    Archaeological Survey. New York: Springer.

Graduate Students