About
Miriam Belmaker, Ph.D., is a Paleolithic archaeologist and paleoanthropologist. Her research focuses on environmental change in the past 2 million years and how it affected hominid biological and cultural evolution. She is an Associate Professor at The University of Tulsa and holds a position as associate curator at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv, Israel.
She earned a BA in prehistoric archaeology and ecology from Haifa University, Israel, and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Evolution and Ecology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Following a postdoc at Harvard and a visiting position at the College of William & Mary, she moved to TU in 2012. Belmaker has conducted archaeological fieldwork at sites dating from 2 million years ago in Israel, Jordan, the Caucasus, and Central and East Asia. She is co-director of the renewed excavation in the early Pleistocene site of ‘Ubeidiya Israel with Omry Barzilai.
She analyzes fossil faunal remains obtained from archaeological and paleontological sites to reconstruct ancient environments through space and time and to ask questions about human evolution. She uses zooarchaeological, paleontological, and ecological methods to track climate change through space and time. She founded and is the director of The University of Tulsa’s comparative vertebrate collection.
Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Leakey, Wenner-Gren, and Irene Levy Sala CARE foundations. Her work has been published in Scientific Reports, Journal of Human Evolution, Quaternary Science Reviews, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, and Journal of Archaeological Sciences.
Education
- Ph.D., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
- M.Sc., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
- B.A., Haifa University, Israel
Research interests and areas of expertise
- Human Evolution
- Paleoanthropology
- Archaeology
- Paleoecology
- Vertebrate Paleontology
- Taphonomy
- Zooarchaeology