Dr. Petra Creamer

Petra M. Creamer is an archaeologist of the ancient Near Eastern world who researches the impact of empires on their subjects. She is an assistant professor in the Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies department at Emory University, and she obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania's Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World program (2021) and her B.A. in Anthropology at The Ohio State University (2014). Petra is the director of the Rural Landscapes of Iron Age Imperial Mesopotamia project, where her ongoing fieldwork addresses long-term settlement patterns and lifeways in the ancient Assyrian imperial core (c. 1350-600 BCE). She employs a variety of remote sensing applications (such as magnetometry and satellite/UAV imagery) to further understand the infrastructure and urbanism of the broader Assyrian landscape. She has conducted fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan, Iraq, Turkiye, Oman, Italy, Azerbaijan, Greece, and the U.S.A. Her current book project, Imperial Impact, ties together multiple scales of Assyrian imperial power - from broad landscape management down to individual burials - to understand the degree of control Assyrian elites held over those under imperial hegemony.