Sophia Aharonovich Postdoc Fellow appointed Lectureship at ACU

CACHE is delighted to celebrate that Dr Sophia Aharonovich, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel (2020 – 2022), has been appointed to a lectureship position at the Australian Catholic University in Faculty of Education & Arts.

Sophia Aharonovich received her BSc in Biochemical Engineering in 2010 from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. She then completed her MA at the University of Haifa, Israel, using pollen grains and phytoliths as proxy data for environmental reconstructions in the Middle Palaeolithic period. During her candidature, Sophia was involved in over 25 excavations in Israel, dealing with environmental and anthropogenic aspects of archaeological material from the Middle Palaeolithic to the time of the Crusaders. Sophia then came to Macquarie University to undertake her PhD on global paleoenvironmental reconstructions based on geological biomarkers during the Miocene Period (23–5 million years ago), which she completed in 2019.

Since 2019, Sophia worked as a scientific archaeologist for the Khirbet el-Rai excavation project run by Macquarie University's former Ancient Israel Program in partnership with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israel Antiquities Authority. With the financial support of the Wakil family, Sophia developed a unique onsite laboratory for Macquarie University students to work on the analysis of organic residue, pollen, and phytoliths from the Iron Age site.

In 2020, Sophia took up a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel in the Department of History and Archaeology and the Centre of Ancient Cultural Heritage and Environment at Macquarie University, financially supported by the Education Heritage Foundation. During her time as a Research Fellow, Sophia has done some amazing work, not only based on her research on material from the excavations at Khirbet el-Rai, but also in collaboration on other projects such as Giza pottery with Karin Sawada and Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Beer Sheva Pottery with Macquarie University History Museum; Barangaroo Boat with Sydney Metro; and Jericho pottery with the Chau Check Wing Museum. She also played an important role mentoring students who were interested in scientific archaeology, and formed an important part of our collaboration with colleagues in the Faculty of Science and Engineering. Stay tuned for the upcoming publications from these research projects.

Please join us as we congratulate Sophia and wish her the all the best in this new role. You can visit her online profiles on LinkedIn, Academia, and Twitter for further information about her work.

Photo credit: Joanne Stephan, Macquarie University.