Research interests
Research Themes
I am currently undertaking research in Pakistan and Iran. My areas of interest include transhumance, ideology and social organisation, and I am increasingly interested in working in the recent past and combining different approaches to explore different ways of understanding the past.
Archaeological Investigations and their link to Heritage Management in district Chitral, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan
The chief aims of this project are to systematically explore the archaeology of the Chitral Valley, NWFP, Pakistan and to develop ways of presenting and managing this unique heritage. Chitral is one of the most remote areas in all Pakistan, and primarily known to foreign and domestic visitors for natural beauty, mountaineering, hiking and wild life. Preliminary investigations show that Chitral has a wealth of cultural history, which is poorly understood. If this cultural history can be identified, excavated and recorded, it would not only help scholars and residents of the valleys to understand the past in this area, but it could also be used to develop sustainable cultural tourism here. Through fieldwork, workshops and lectures by individuals and groups from both partners we will also be able to facilitate training and exchange of knowledge.
This is a collaborative project drawing on staff and students from the Universities of Leicester (UK), Hazara (Pakistan) and Mardan (Pakistan). It is funded by the British Council INSPIRE programme.
Landlord villages of the Tehran Plain, Iran
Landlord villages represented the social and economic order for a large segment of the Iranian population over many centuries prior to land reform in the 1960s and 1970s and their abandonment is closely linked to the ‘White Revolution’. Today, as abandoned, self-contained elements of an earlier subsistence and social structure they provide a perfect opportunity for archaeological study through detailed planning, interviews of people closely connected to the villages when they were inhabited, and excavation, in order to understand the use of space in terms of function, social hierarchies of residents, and change over time. This project is carried out in collaboration with Dr Hassan Fazeli, University of Tehran, Tehran, and is funded by the British Institute of Persian Studies.

Topics available for PhD supervision
- The archaeology of South Asia and Iran, particularly Historical periods
- Ideology and material culture
- Ethnoarchaeology
- Transhumance
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