Mehrnoush Soroush

Professor Mehrnoush Soroush is the director of the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes (CAMEL) Lab and a landscape archaeologist who examines the intersection between urban and water history in the Ancient Near East. Her research explores the extent to which the resilience of ancient cities was tied to their ability to adapt to environmental changes and socio-political developments through adopting new hydraulic strategies and technologies. She is particularly interested in examining the water history of Asia in the first millennium CE when the socioeconomic history was transformed through a combination of large scale political changes, environmental changes, and technological changes in water management strategies.

 

Her interdisciplinary approach draws on archaeological fieldwork, textual and archival research, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing, computational methods and Artificial Intelligence (Deep Learning). She has conducted research projects in Iran and Iraq (Kurdistan Governorate) and Oman, examining the intertwined history of surface and underground water provision strategies in these arid environments.