Biography

University of Toronto St. George Campus - Anthropology

Professor at University of Toronto
Higher Education
Ted
Banning
Toronto, Canada Area
Ted Banning's research on the beginnings of village life and political-economic inequality in southwest Asia concentrates on the southern Levant. He has been on the staff of excavations at Neolithic 'Ain Ghazal in Jordan, and directs the Wadi Ziqlab Project and Wadi Qusayba Project, both in northern Jordan. These last two projects have involved survey and excavation at several Epipalaeolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age sites.
He also conducts research on the methods and theory of archaeological survey (search for archaeological sites and artifacts). The goal of this research is to make surveys more efficient, and to make the results of surveys more reliable and easily interpretable. Most recently, through survey "experiments" in Canada and abroad as well as prehistoric survey in Jordan, he has been working on Bayesian optimization of survey effort and the use of sweep widths to estimate survey coverage.

Specialties: • spatial organization of the built environment in the prehistoric Near East
• changes in agricultural economy and society from the Neolithic onward
• early development of specialized pastoral economy in the Near East
• Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon dating evidence
• Neolithic pottery and chronology
• measurement theory, sampling
• archaeological survey (survey detection functions and evaluation of survey results)