From October 1, 2025, to March 31, 2026, Bethany Walker will work on her book project, marking the conclusion of the DFG-funded project she led as Principal Investigator (PI). The three-year research project, "Reading Ancient Landscapes: Peasant Decision-Making and Terraced Agriculture in Central Palestine over the Longue Durée” (TERRSOC), is a multidisciplinary study of rural communities that practice terraced agriculture. It focuses on Mamluk and Ottoman Palestine, as well as Transjordan, and peasant decision-making. The project combines settlement and landscape archaeology with a broad spectrum of natural science research, computer modeling, and text analysis.

Bethany Walker is Professor of Islamic Archaeology at the University of Bonn, Germany. A historically trained archaeologist and ceramicist, Walker has been doing fieldwork in Jordan for three decades. Among her monographs are Jordan in the Late Middle Ages: Transformation of the Mamluk Frontier (Chicago, 2011), her co-edited Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology (2020), and the forthcoming Life on the Farm in Late Medieval Jerusalem: The Village of Beit Mazmil (Sheffield, 2025). She is the senior and founding editor of the Journal of Islamic Archaeology. Her research focuses on peasant society, land use and tenure, and landscape transformation.