Francesca Simi
DIUM
La sola cosa invincibile in natura è la curiosità.
F.M. Stark
Francesca Simi
Archeologia e storia dell’arte del vicino oriente antico (L-OR/05)
- Research fellow
- Email: francesca.simi@uniud.it
- Link: https://uniud.academia.edu/FrancescaSimi
Francesca Simi
Archeologia e storia dell’arte del vicino oriente antico (L-OR/05)
- Research fellow
- Email: francesca.simi@uniud.it
- Link: https://uniud.academia.edu/FrancescaSimi
La sola cosa invincibile in natura è la curiosità.
F.M. Stark
My educational background starts at the University of Pisa, where I graduated in Archaeology of Ancient Near East in 2012. During those years as a student I took part to numerous projects, participating in excavations and archaeological surveys in Syria, Turkey and Italy. Later, in 2014, I specialised at the Interuniversity Post-Graduate School in Archaeological Heritage (Universities of Trieste, Udine and Venice). In this period I became a member of the Archaeological Project Land of Niniveh, and I started developing an interest in Landscape Archaeology. In 2019 I obtained my PhD in Archaeology of Ancient Near East at the University Ca' Foscari of Venice under the supervision of Prof. Morandi Bonacossi, in co-supervision with Prof. Pfälzner (University of Tübingen). In the course of my doctoral studies I carried out the Tell Gomel Archaeological Survey (TGAS), an intensive survey of the Navkur Plain (Iraqi Kurdistan): the results of such activity, presented in my thesis, contributed to the diachronic reconstruction of the human settlement in said plain, as well as to the understanding of the ways in which this fertile territory was exploited throughout the millennia and to shed light on the importance of the archaeological site of Gomel within the region.
As a PhD Student I was granted a DAAD scholarship in order to carry out research at the Institut für die Kulturen des Alten Orients (IANES) of the University of Tübingen. In this period in Germany I had the opportunity to take part in various projects; in particular, in 2019 I was research assistant (GIS management, photointerpretation and remote sensing) in the project Eastern Ḫabur Archaeological Survey (EHAS).
In the same years I obtained a post-doctoral position as a Research Assistant at the University of Oxford within the project “Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa - EAMENA”. This opportunity allowed me to perfect my knowledge of GIS and photointerpretation, and to become interested in the field of protection and monitoring of the endangered cultural heritage. Besides, thanks to the project EAMENA I gained experience in training archaeologists from Europe and the MENA countries on the GIS techniques, Landscape Archaeology and photointerpretation.
Since February 2020 I am a Research Fellow at the Department of Humanities and Cultural Heritage of the University of Udine.
Currently my field work focuses on the Region of Iraqi Kurdistan. I am vice-director of the Archaeological Project Land of Niniveh and of the Kurdistan-Italian Faida Archaeological Project. I am mainly involved in Landscape Archaeology and Archaeology of Ancient Near East, but my research interests also cover Public Archaeology and the preservation of the endangered cultural heritage.
Publications
Ethical considerations for remote sensing and open data in relation to the endangered archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa project
Archaeological Prospection 28/3 (2021) 279–292 (con M. Fisher, M. Fradley, P. Flohr, B. Rouhani)
Social Lives of Monumental Walls: Hunting along the Upper Tigris
Journal of Field Archaeology 46/3 (2021) 153–171 (con P. Sconzo, A. Ahmadpour)
Remote Survey of Desert Kites in Northern Arabia
The IASA Bullettin 26 (2021) 43–44 (con M. Fradley)
Settlement Dynamics on the Banks of the Upper Tigris, Iraq: The Mosul Dam Reservoir Survey (1980)
Journal of Open Archaeology Data 8 (2020) 3 (con P. Sconzo)
Archaeological Sites and Villages of the Mosul Dam Reservoir Survey (1980)
Harvard Dataverse V2 (2020) (con P. Sconzo)
The Tell Gomel archaeological survey. Preliminary results of the 2015-2016 campaigns
in: C. Coppini, F. Simi (curr.), Interactions and New Directions in Near Eastern Archaeology. Volume 3. Proceedings of the 5th “Broadening Horizons” Conference (Udine 5-8 June 2017), Trieste 2020, 279–292
Interactions and New Directions in Near Eastern Archaeology. Volume 3. Proceedings of the 5th “Broadening Horizons” Conference (Udine 5-8 June 2017)
Trieste 2020 (a cura di C. Coppini, F. Simi)
The Northern Lebanon Project: Archaeological Survey of the Plain of Koura and the Province of Tripoli. First Season Report
BAAL 19 (2019) 147–172 (con M. Iamoni, M. Haider, L. Turri)