Lynne Rouse received her Ph.D. from Washington University in 2015 after successfully defending her dissertation, titled "A Line in the Sand: Mobile Pastoralists, Sedentary Communities, and Local Production Systems in Bronze Age Turkmenistan". Her work and research interests have centered around social and economic interactions across the Old World during the pivotal Bronze Age period, when cities, states, and complex inter-regional exchange networks emerged. Using a landscape approach to understanding the entanglement of social and natural factors in past societies, she investigates how choices made by local populations affect changes on regional scales. Most recently, she has been involved in projects in southern Jordan examining technology and production in marginal landscapes, and in directing a project in Turkmenistan looking at various aspects of interaction between pastoral and urban populations.
Lynne continued to support the Department of Anthropology at Washington University as a lecturer for several courses in the Fall 2015 semester and has recently been selected as a Volkswagen Fellow at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, where she will be continuing research based on her new archaeological project in Turkmenistan, “The Project for the Ancient Murghab”. The Department of Anthropology is excited to see Lynne move into this new phase of her career.
