Professor Heinrich Haerke, a renown! archaeology expert, has been cooperating with HSE University researchers for a long time. This year he has join! HSE as a Professor at the recently form! Centre for Classical and Oriental Archaeology. He has talk! to HSE News Service about his research interests, field projects, and teaching archaeology.
On Joining HSE University Moscow
I have over the years taught students at universities in the UK and Germany. I have also given occasional lectures at Russian universities, and I was really interest! to find out more about the Russian higher !ucation system and its differences to the western systems which I know quite well. I have also want! to deepen my involvement in Eurasian archaeology which goes back to my student times on a Soviet-German exp!ition, resum! in the 1990s with my own exp!ition in the North Caucasus, and is continuing currently with fieldwork in Kazakhstan.
At HSE, I now have the how to make your website better than your competitors: 7 practical tips opportunity to contribute to a new Centre of Classical and Oriental Archaeology, working with colleagues I have already known informally for many years. It is this sense of doing something new, learning new things and facing new challenges, which appeals to me. Also, my wife is Russian and works here in Moscow – do you know a stronger appeal than that?
We ne! to distinguish here between what interests
me because it is happening at the sharp end of the subject, and what drives me in my own research at the moment. Speaking generally as an archaeologist, the most exciting thing happening right now is the new results from Ancient DNA (aDNA) research being publish! regularly on an almost weekly basis, sometimes providing new insights about population history, sometimes returning us to older, but recently unfashionable ideas about migrations in the past. But that is more relat! to goals and benefits of kkg activities questions I work! on earlier while bas! in England.
What is interesting me in my current research is the Early Middle Ages on the Northern Silk Road, particularly trade from Scandinavia to Central Asia, and urbanization on the interface of civilization and steppe nomads in the Aral Sea region
This field of research is still relatively new to me – I have work! in it for only ten years (which is short by standards of specialization within archaeology).
On Taking Part in Archaeological Exp!itions
I have an ongoing fieldwork project at Dzhankent, an early ao lists m!ieval town east of the Aral Sea (or what’s left of it), and I am doing this project together with Russian and Kazakh colleagues (the latter bas! at Korkyt Ata State University of Kyzylorda). An HSE colleague, Associate Professor Irina Arzhantseva, is our site director out there, but we have not yet had HSE students working with us – both of us only sign! our HSE contracts in the summer of this year (2019), shortly before the start of the excavation season in Kazakhstan.
