Starting with today, our team is further strengthened: Jördis Vieth has signed her contract for the next three years as researcher of AcrossBorders. She is well known to those who have followed our blog during the fieldwork in January to March – being one of the heroines fighting nimiti, wind & more!

I am very happy to have managed to bring Jördis in – not only as temporary field staff member but now enlarging the core team of my project! Being acquainted with her since 2006, I had plenty of time to get to know her as a person, both in the class room and on excavations in Egypt (Abydos), and as a very promising and highly motivated young colleague.

It was in particular her MA thesis which impressed me much: She wrote about “Egyptian Palace architecture in the New Kingdom” (original title: “Ägyptische Palastarchitektur des Neuen Reichs”) – a very difficult topic which she re-assessed meticulously and with new ideas, challenging some of the established terminology for settlement architecture in Egypt. With this excellent thesis, which received the highest grade at Humboldt University Berlin, Jördis is perfectly qualified to join AcrossBorders. She will primarily focus on the character of the fortified town of Sai Island, including the site into her envisaged PhD thesis about the so-called temple towns of Nubia in the New Kingdom. Jördis will conduct her PhD at Humboldt University Berlin and I am proud and honored acting as one of her supervisors to-be. Lots of aspects of settlement archaeology and the character of the Egyptian sites in Nubia during the New Kingdom are still little understood – with the ongoing fieldwork at Sai Island (and neighboring sites) and AcrossBorders’ focus on reconstructing the material world and its parameters, there is much potential: a study like Jördis is going to undertake seems timely and important.