Dr Carol Palmer is the Director of CBRL, based in Amman.
Dr Palmer has a long association with CBRL, starting with her PhD research on traditional agriculture in northern Jordan and held a CBRL Post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Leicester from 1999-2002 where she conducted ethnoarchaeological research for the Wadi Faynan Project directed by Prof. Graeme Barker (Cambridge University). She became the Director of the Amman Institute in 2009 and the overall Director of CBRL in 2020. She also previously served as a CBRL Trustee for five years, including as Editor of the CBRL Bulletin, a role she continued until 2014.
Dr Palmer is an anthropologist, environmental archaeologist, and ethnobotanist. Her research interests concentrate on recording rural life in its many forms, the contemporary and past use of plants among agriculturalists and pastoralists, cultivation, gathering, consumption, and grazing. Ultimately, she is concerned with changes in food production practices and their effects on the landscape and society.
Dr Palmer is currently completing a book on peasant agriculture in the hills around Jerusalem based on the 1940s observations of the Polish ethnographer, Lucjan Turkowski (1905-1976), to be published by the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) in their annual monograph series. She holds an Honorary Fellowship at Bournemouth University, developing on from her involvement in the INEA (Identifying activity areas in Neolithic sites through Ethnographic Analysis of phytoliths and geochemical residues) project led by Dr Emma Jenkins funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
In 2022, Dr Palmer and the Amman team oversaw the move of the Institute from Tla Al Ali to the more centrally located Jabal Al-Lweibdeh.
Selected Publications | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4612-5426
C. Palmer (2023). From archaeology to cultural heritage: one hundred years of British activity in Jordan and Palestine. In Hayajneh, H. (ed.) Cultural Heritage: At the Intersection of the Humanities and the Sciences, 675-694. Zürich, Lit Verlag.
Smithies, P. Flohr, F. Bala’awi, S. Idwan, C. Palmer, A. Esposito, S. Mubaideen, S. Rababeh (2022) MaDiH (مديح): a transnational approach to building digital cultural heritage capacity. ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage.
Burtenshaw, B. Finlayson, O. El-Abed, C. Palmer (2019) The DEEPSAL Project: using the past for local community futures in Jordan. Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites 21,69-9.
Elliott, C. Palmer, S. L. Allcock & E. Jenkins(2017)Examining Neolithic building and activity areas through historic cultural heritage in Jordan: a combined ethnographic, phytolith and geochemical investigation. Bulletin of the Council for British Research in the Levant 12, 21-28.
C. Palmer (2013) Biogeography. In M. Ababsa (ed) Atlas of Jordan. Histories, Territories, and Society, 77-87. Beirut: Institut français de proche orient.
C. Palmer, S. Colledge, A. Bevan & J. Conolly(2010)Vegetation recolonisation of abandoned agricultural terraces on Antikythera, Greece. Environmental Archaeology, 15:1, 64-80.
C. Palmer, D. Gilbertson, H. el-Rishi, C. Hunt, J. Grattan, S. McLaren, and B. Pyatt (2007) The Wadi Faynan today: landscape, environment, people. In D. Gilbertson, G. Barker, and D. Mattingly (eds) Archaeology and Desertification: The Wadi Faynan Landscape Survey, Southern Jordan, 25–58. CBRL and Oxbow Books.
C. Palmer and P. Daly (2005) Jouma’s Tent: Bedouin and digital archaeology. In T.L. Evans and P. Daly (eds) Digital Archaeology: Bridging Method and Theory, 97– 127. Routledge.
C. Palmer (2008) Al-Falahin wa al-Bedu fi al-Urdun: Dirasa ethnoghrafiyya fi al-hawiyya al-ghidha’iyya [Fellahin and Bedouin in Jordan: an ethnographic study in food identity]. Translated by Afaf Ziadeh. Amman, Al-Ahli Bank. Originally published as “Milk and Cereals” in Levant (2002).
C. Palmer (1999) Whose land is it anyway? An historical examination of land tenure and agriculture in northern Jordan. In C. Gosden and J. Hather (eds), The Prehistory of Food, 288-305. Routledge.
C. Palmer (1998) ‘Following the plough’: the agricultural environment of northern Jordan. Levant 30, 129-165.
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