Tara Steimer-Herbet

As an archaeologist, I acquired my educational background from French universities, where I focused on Methodological approaches to Middle Eastern archaeology and megalithism. I have specialized in cultural and funerary practices of pastoral groups in arid and semi-arid areas of the Levant and western Arabia during the 4th and 3rd millennium BC. A postdoctoral fellowship in Damascus (2004-2008) enabled me to organize fieldwork with special focus on the settlements close to or associated with megalithic tombs. Based on this work I have created a typology of domestic structures linked to homogeneous groups of people. Mapping domestic and funerary architecture with GIS software has revealed a broad range of societies whose features depended on surrounding and natural resources. From the west to east of the Levant I identified two main groups of farmers and pastoralists. In 2005 I broadened the scope of my research after excavating an open sanctuary in Hadramawt (Yemen) where I found an anthropomorphic statue in situ and statues-menhirs in a nearby area. These discoveries opened a new field in knowledge of the cultural practices in Arabian societies around the 4th millennium.
Since 2010 my research focuses on megaliths in Indonesia. This recent megalithism is particularly interested by the great diversity of shapes and follows the immense variety of human groups in the Archipelago. However their fate is linked to the Indo-Buddhist kingdoms whereas in Java, in Sumatra (central and south) and in Sulawesi (central: Lore Lindu) building of megalithic monuments ceased as soon as the kingdoms showed signs of extinction. But the later arrival of European traders and missionaries in the islands of Sumba, Flores, Nias, North Sumatra (Toba) and Central Sulawesi (Toraja) triggered a similar phenomenon. Today, despite massive conversions to Catholicism and Protestantism in Nias, Sumba, Flores and Toraja, this tradition is still alive. Ethno-anthropological studies of these three regions (stone pulling, construction of monuments, treatment of the deceased and funeral ceremonies) is a unique chance to complement the archaeological perspective on megalithic monuments abandoned for several centuries in the rest of the Archipelago. This Indonesian experience give me also a new point of view on Middle-East megaliths.