Kara Larson

Kara Larson is an alum of the Applied Anthropology program (Spring 2020) at Mississippi State University and completed her M.A. thesis on the reconstruction of animal management through stable isotopic analyses at the Iron Age site of Khirbet Summeily. She is a current Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan in the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. Her doctoral work will look at the intersection of Early Bronze Age urbanization in the Southern Levant (ca. 3300-2000 BCE) with pastoralism, herd management strategies, dietary subsistence, and prehistoric economies through reconstructing food webs. She has expertise in zooarchaeology and stable isotope analyses and is developing skill sets in proteomics, residue analyses, and aDNA.

Kara’s doctoral work directly involves the AMEC and Cobb-affiliated excavation projects at Tell el-Hesi, Khirbet Summeily, and Tell Halif. She will be co-directing the next phase of excavations at Tell el-Hesi, which will form the primary corpus of her dissertation. She is also conducting zooarchaeological and isotopic analyses on Near Eastern collections from Mesopotamia (Iran) and Nubia (Sudan). Outside of the Southern Levant, Kara is developing a collaborative zooarchaeological and isotopic project in the Southern Caucasus and is a graduate student member on a cross-disciplinary team exploring the Northern frontier of the Mongol Empire. Kara is ecstatic to continue collaborating in an official capacity with the Cobb Institute and providing opportunities to students through her projects across the Near East and Eurasia.