SENIOR SPECIALISTS
Hélène Maloigne has been a team member of the Tell Atchana/ancient Alalakh excavations project since 2012 and the finds registrar since 2014. She gained her PhD at the Department of History at University College London (UCL) with a thesis on the history of archaeology in the Middle East in the early 20th century. She has a BA in archaeology and ancient languages and an MA in archaeology and art history from the University of Bern in Switzerland. In 2012 she completed a MA in Museum Studies at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL. Her thesis on C. Leonard Woolley’s Tell Atchana archive was the basis of the exhibition The Forgotten Kingdom. Archaeology and Photography at Ancient Alalakh (September to December 2014, Koç University, ANAMED, Istanbul), which she co-curated with Murat Akar.
Hélène’s research centres on the history and practice of archaeology in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on the interconnection between the creation of archaeology as a discipline, imperialism, gender performativity, friendship and popular culture. She works on contextualising the historical dependence of archaeology on power structures and how the discipline as a whole and we as individual archaeologists can acknowledge and understand our past and move forward to a more inclusive and diverse future. She is currently studying the small finds for the forthcoming Volume III of the final excavation reports.
As the unofficial historian of Tell Atchana, Hélène has written about the excavations in a range of formats:
Maloigne, Hélène. 2020. ‘Making use of the Past. The Possibilities of Archaeological Archives’ in Alalakh and its Neighbors: Proceedings of the 15th Anniversary Symposium at the New Hatay Archaeology Museum, June 10–12, 2015, ed. by K.A. Yener and T. Ingman, Leiden: Peeters.
––––– 2017. ‘How Idrimi came to London: Diplomacy and the division of archaeological finds in the 1930s’, Museum History Journal, 10.2, pp. 200–216.
Murat Akar and Hélène Maloigne (eds.), 2014. The Forgotten Kingdom. Archaeology and Photography at Ancient Alalakh. Koç University Press, Istanbul.
You can find some of Hélène’s work online:
Maloigne, Hélène. 2020. ‘Archaeology as Friendship’, History Workshop Online: https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/friendship-and-fieldwork/
––––– ‘Aslıhan Yener’, Trowelblazers:
https://trowelblazers.com/aslihan-yener/
––––– ‘Following Footsteps’, Histories of Archaeology Network (HARN): https://harngroup.wordpress.com/
@hmaloigne
Mariacarmela Montesanto completed her PhD in 2018 at the University of Liverpool on the Iron Age pottery material from Alalakh/Tell Atchana in Turkey. She has been a member of the Tell Atchana excavation team since 2014 and she is currently working on the analysis of the Late Bronze Age I pottery from Area 3.
She worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Durham University within the project “Death and Demographics: Comparing Settlement and Burial Records in the Ancient Near East”, comparing burial trends across the Levant and Northern Mesopotamia from the 4th millennium BC to the 1st millennium BC.
She is currently working as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Durham University as part of the project “Did British tin sources and trade make Bronze Age Europe?”, where she is in charge of building the GIS database of metals, settlements and tin sources from Cornwall and Devon and to perform remote sensing, spatial and density analyses to identify patterns and possible sources of tin in South-West England.
Her research expertise spans from pottery analysis and the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age in the Northern Levant to GIS modelling, spatial analyses, archaeological databases and legacy data, material culture and landscapes of the ancient Near East and Europe.
Rula Shafiq
Bioarchaeology is the study of human skeletal remains from archaeological contexts, and it is considered today to represent the basis from which information about past populations can be reconstructed. The use of different types of evidence is essential for the bioarchaeologist to understand and reconstruct what actually had occurred in the lives of past people. This research at Tell Atchana, Alalakh, is directed towards the analyses of the large assemblage of human skeletal remains. The main objective is to answer questions concerning the diachronic shifts in diet, health and population affinities in relation to the different complexities of social, economic and political settings that characterized the Middle and Late Bronze Ages in Anatolia. Several publication have addressed these issues including “Come and Hear My Story. The ‘Well Lady’ Of Alalakh”, that deals with the skeletal remains of an adult female who was found at the bottom of a well, in which the position of the body is proposed to be homicide. “Laid To Rest: LB II Burials” deals with the skeletal remains of two individuals, an adult female who suffered from case of ‘generalized osteoarthritis’, and an infant who suffered from a chronic case of scurvy. And “Evidence of a possible Elite Cemetery at Alalakh / Tell Atchana”, deals with the intramural cemetery that have a selected collection of what appears to be an extended family graves with possible elite craftsmanship specialization.