Dr Rachael Sparks is an archaeologist who specialises in the Bronze and Iron Age material culture of the Southern Levant.
She has worked as an object registrar/field excavator at a number of sites across the Middle East and Africa, including Pella, Teleilat Ghassul, Petra, Gharandal in Jordan, and Auxum in Ethiopia. She has also designed databases for a number of archaeological field and research projects.
Since completing her doctorate at the University of Sydney in 1998 (on the stone vessel industries of the Bronze Age Levant), she has worked in the UK as Curator of the Petrie Palestinian Collection at University College London (UCL), and as a researcher on the ‘Recovering the material and visual cultures of the Southern Sudan’ project at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. She is currently an Associate Professor and Keeper of Collections at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL.
Her research interests include the material culture of the Southern Levant in the Bronze and Iron Ages; cultural interaction between Egypt and the Levant; the materiality and social contexts of ancient writing systems; and the history of archaeology in British Mandate and mid-20th century Palestine and Transjordan.
Dr Sparks was elected as a CBRL trustee in December 2019, serves on the editorial board of CBRL’s journal, Levant, and is a member of the research sub-committee. She is also currently a member of the British Association of Near East Archaeology steering committee, a trustee of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, and Associate Editor of the journal Strata.