Jérôme KAHL

I am an archaeologist and PhD candidate at the Department of Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology, University of Vienna. I am interested in exploring the dimensions of identity to sketch the trajectory of mortuary behavior and practices in northwest Arabia. For that, I am integrating various fields in an interdisciplinary manner, while specializing in archaeometallurgy with a focus on alloying practices, manufacturing techniques, and lead- isotope-based provenance studies.

My dissertation project “Forging Identity: Metallurgy and Visual Culture in the Construction of the Self in Ancient Arabia” investigates different facets of identity through an interdisciplinary analysis of multiple proxies throughout the Bronze Age in northwestern Arabia. In this interdisciplinary and bottom-up approach I combine the four approaches: 1. Funerary archaeology, 2. Archaeometallurgy, 3. Visual culture, and 4. Isotope-based mobility studies of both of humans and metal artifacts.

The case study verges on the findings in the North Arabian oasis of Qurayyah, a site that provides a unique diachronic sequence of funerary activities. By combining multiple proxies, the aim of the project is to understand how ancient people forged and expressed different facets of identities through time.

I am a member of the Qurayyah Joint Archaeological Project, and the dissertation project is supervised by an international supervisory team: Prof. Marta Luciani (HEAS Team leader) from the University of Vienna, Prof. Nima Nezafati from Ruhr University Bochum and the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum, and Prof. Graham Philip from Durham University.