A. Asa Eger

Education: Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2008; M.A., University of Chicago, 2002; B.A., Rutgers University, 1998. Research Interests: I research and teach the Early and Medieval Mediterranean and Islamic Near East. I am interested in the intersection of archaeology and history and how these two lines of evidence relate and create dialogue that strengthens both fields. Specifically, I am interested in frontiers, landscape archaeology, environmental history, and tribalism. I also work on issues of gender and sexuality in classical and modern Mediterranean cultures. My area of specialization is Anatolia and Syria-Palestine (the Levant) from the Byzantine-Islamic transition in the 6th century through the Early and Middle Islamic periods (7-12th centuries). I have excavated and surveyed in Israel, Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey since 1996 and currently am directing excavations at a site on the coast of Turkey in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean known as Tüpras Field, the 10th century frontier fortress of Hisn al-Tinat.

There are 11 included publications by A. Asa Eger :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Age and Male Sexuality: "Queer Space" in the Roman Bathhouse? 2007 10458 Scholars have conceived of the life-course stages of the boy and adult male by way of a typically dichotomous construction of active/passive male sexuality. This binary scheme, presented uncritically in much modern scholarship, dictates that boys ass...
The Agricultural Landscape of the Umayyad North and the Islamic-Byzantine Frontier 2018 56 The Islamic-Byzantine frontier has become the centre of scholarly attention and, as a result,redefined. Recent archaeological and textual work on the ?ugur or Islamic-Byzantine frontier,supports the presence of settlements, communities, and people tr...
Analysis of Archaeobotanical Material from the Tüpras Field Project of the Kinet Höyük Excavations, Turkey 2015 627 The Tüpras Field project is located near the high mound of Kinet Höyük in the Hatay Province of Turkey. The site was founded in the 8th century and continually occupied until the 12th century CE. Contemporary Arabic writers described the region as ri...
Gaps or Transitions? North Syrian/South Anatolian Ceramics in the Early, Middle, and Late Islamic Periods 2020 220 As Islamic archaeology has matured, it has outgrown several large debates. Scholars now largely agree that no huge decline occurred either after the Islamic conquests in the 7th century1 or when the ‘Abbasids came to power in 7502 , nor was there an ...
High-boron and High-alumina Middle Byzantine (10th–12th Century ce) Glass Bracelets: A Western Anatolian Glass Industry 2017 498 The trace element boron is present in most ancient glasses as an impurity, and high boron(=300 ppm) marks raw material sources that are geologically specific and relatively uncommon. Recent analyses of Byzantine glass with high boron contents suggest...
Hisn al-Tinat on the Islamic-Byzantine Frontier: Synthesis and the 2005-2008 Survey and Excavation on the Cilician Plain (Turkey) 2010 488 Cilicia on the Islamic-Byzantine frontier, or al-thughur, in southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria has been traditionally viewed as an isolated, embattled buffer zone. Yet, it was also the main transportation corridor linking Islamic and Byzantine...
Islamic Frontiers, Real and Imagined. 2005 2641 Beginning in the ninth century, Muslim historians,jurists, and geographers frequently discussed the Islamic-Byzantine frontier or al-thughur and al-'awasim provinces primarily as a militarized region, daral-harb. Warriors of the faith, in their view,...
Review of Early Islamic Syria by Alan Walmsley. 2011 958 The field of Islamic archaeology over the last thirty years has come into its own, largely as a subfield of Near Eastern archaeology. In the last decade alone, there has been a sharp increase in the number of excavations targeting Islamic sites o...
Review of Excavations at Tall Jawa, Jordan. Vol. 4. The Early Islamic House by P.M. Michèle Daviau. 2013 1154 Central Transjordan in the Early Islamic period has received steady attention from archaeologists, who have filled in much-needed information on its cities, palaces, waystations {qusur), and Christian churches. Surveys and excavations at 'Amman, ...
Settlement and Landscape Transformations in the Amuq Valley, Hatay: A Long-Term Perspective. 2008 4412 A decace of regional survey between 1995 and 2005 in the Amuq Valley in the Hatay province of southern Turkey (fig. 1), following seminal work done in the 1930s (Braidwood 1937), has produced extensive datasets to study the history of human occupatio...
The Swamps of Home: Marsh Formation and Settlement in the Early Medieval Near East 2011 8573 In studies of settlement and landscape archaeology in the Near East, marshes have only recently featured in discussions, having often been relegated to the liminalized frontiers of settlement: the uninhabitable wildernesses occupying the edges of...