Dr. Melissa Cradic

"Funerary Practices and Ancestor Commemoration in the Bronze Age Levant"

Dr. Cradic will be joining our Stanford AIA Chapter on Friday, March 8, 2019 at 8:00pm, Packard Bldg., Room 101
Reception to follow.
Lecture is free and open to the public.


Dr. Cradic received her B.A. summa cum laude in Archaeology (special honors) and Classical Humanities in 2010 from The George Washington University and was then awarded the GWU Bender Scholarship to the University of Cambridge, where she completed an MPhil with distinction in Archaeology (Mesopotamia option) at Emmanuel College in 2011. Her MPhil thesis, "Continuity and Change in the Middle Bronze Age to Late Bronze Age Southern Levant: Burial Evidence" investigated social and ritual relationships between communities of the living and the dead.

Dr. Cradic came to U.C. Berkeley in 2011, where she continued studing archaeology and languages of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East with interests in funerary practices, household archaeology, and ritual texts. Her dissertation, "Transformations in Death: Funerary Practices and Personhood in the Bronze Age Levant" uses archaeological and textual evidence to investigate the roles of ancestor veneration in the performance of diverse funerary rituals of the 2nd millennium B.C.E. Levant. A chapter from her dissertation, "An Archaeological Model for Funerary Religion at Canaanite Megiddo," won the 2016 Joan B. Gruen essay prize.

Her research has been funded by numerous grants, fellowships, and awards, recently including the 2016 Phi Beta Kappa Graduate Fellowship, 2016 Hellman Graduate Award, 2016 Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion Summer Research Grant, and the Archaeological Research Facility's Stahl Grant in 2015 and 2016. She completed her dissertation at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeology in Jerusalem as a 2016-2017 Educational and Cultural Affairs Research Fellow.

At the UNESCO World Heritage site of Tel Megiddo (Israel), Dr. Cradic supervises excavation of a Late Bronze Age building in Area H. She also serve as Field Archaeologist and Educational Program Director at the Jezreel Valley Regional Project, where she has been involved in survey and excavation projects spanning the Bronze Age through Roman periods.

From 2012-2014, Dr. Cradic was Collections Manager and Assistant Curator at the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. She also volunteered at the Harvard Semitic Museum while based at Harvard University as Fellow in the Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (2014-2016). In spring 2016, she was appointed Lecturer in Boston University's Dept. of History of Art and Architecture, where she taught an undergraduate course on the material culture of ancient Greece.

For more information on Dr. Cradic:

Dr Cradic's University site, University of California, Berkeley