http://www.latrobe.edu.au/ Professor Steve Falconer studies the rise and collapse of urbanized societies in the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, turning particular attention to the interactions of small agrarian villages with their larger social, political and natural environments. He utilizes settlement pattern, ceramic, faunal and metallurgical data to characterize rural life during the periodic development and abandonment of the region's earliest polities and their regional economies. Professor Falconer has directed excavations at a series of Bronze Age farming and herding settlements in in Jordon and currently co-directs excavations on the island of Cyprus. Before joining La Trobe University in 2012, Steve was Professor of Archaeology at Arizona State University.