Dr. Ortal Harush completed her doctorate in the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University in 2021. Her main scholarly interests are the understanding of past populations while integrating field work and material culture analysis by advanced tools. Her dissertation explored the significance of variability and assessed whether collective and individual signatures are observable through advanced shape analysis of ceramic vessels. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University and established the Computational Archaeology Laboratory in Tel Aviv University (2021-2022).
Her research project, ‘Think Globally Act Locally’, as a Mandel Scholion fellow, strives to recognize the mutual impact of large systems (empires/cities) and small-scale systems (periphery/villages). This project seeks to explore whether the existence of a central system affects the level of local production. The importance of this question reflects the relationship between the center and the periphery and the diffusion of ideas between them, both important elements for studying long-term cultural change mechanisms. Her project uses the example of the Roman Empire and compares between two local centers under its power: Cambridgeshire and Jerusalem.