Petra M. Creamer (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is an assistant professor in the Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies department at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. She is an archaeologist of the ancient Near Eastern world who researches the genesis and growth of empires and the impact of these empires on their subjects. She is director of the excavation and remote sensing project Rural Landscapes of Iron Age Imperial Mesopotamia in Iraqi Kurdistan, where her ongoing fieldwork addresses long-term settlement patterns and lifeways in the ancient Assyrian imperial core (c. 1350-600 BCE). Her current book project, Imperial Impact, ties together multiple scales of Assyrian imperial power—from broad landscape management down to individual burials—to understand the degree of control Assyrian elites held over those under imperial hegemony.
