Bethany Walker

Bethany Walker is a Professor of Islamic Archaeology at the University of Bonn and a Visiting Fellow in Department III of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin. Her research focuses on medieval agrarian societies, environmental history, and peasant studies, with a specialization in the Mamluk and Ottoman periods in Palestine, Jordan, and Syria. She has directed archaeological projects in Israel and Jordan, including the Medieval Jerusalem Hinterland Project examining Khirbet Beit Mazmil’s terraced landscapes. Walker holds a PhD from the University of Toronto (1998) and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Royal Ontario Museum and the American Research Center in Egypt. She serves on editorial boards for journals like Mamluk Studies Review and is completing a monograph on late medieval peasant life in Jerusalem’s hinterland. Her work integrates material culture, textual analysis, and environmental science to explore rural resilience, land use, and state-society dynamics.

• Education: PhD in Islamic Archaeology, University of Toronto (1998)
• Affiliations: Visiting Fellow at MPIWG, German-Israeli Foundation-funded projects.

Research Interests: She studies peasant strategies, agricultural terracing, and the socio-economic impact of political transitions. Key sites include Khirbet Beit Mazmil, Tall Hisban, and Tawahin es-Sukkar. Her recent projects highlight rural revival in late medieval Palestine despite regional decline.

Publications: Over 50 articles and books on Mamluk ceramics, Ottoman rural life, and medieval terracing. Notable works include Life on the Farm in Late Medieval Jerusalem (in press) and Jordan in the Late Middle Ages (2011).