Rate My Professor Mark Schwartz

Mark Schwartz serves as Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Grand Valley State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Northwestern University, with his doctoral research concentrating on inter-regional trade between the early city-states of Mesopotamia and emerging complex societies in Anatolia during the fourth millennium B.C. Throughout his career, Schwartz has participated in numerous excavations across the Middle East. Notably, he acted as assistant director of the Hirbemerdon Tepe Archaeological Project in Diyarbakir, Turkey, where he integrated Grand Valley State University students into the research process and is presently overseeing the production of the project's final publications.

In addition to his fieldwork abroad, Schwartz engages in collaborative interdisciplinary research employing remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to explore shipwrecks in the Great Lakes region. At Grand Valley State University, he instructs courses on the archaeology of the Near East alongside introductory classes in anthropology and archaeology. His scholarly contributions encompass significant publications such as "Annealing, distilling, reheating and recycling: bitumen processing in the Ancient Near East" published in Paléorient (2000), "Reconstructing Mesopotamian Exchange Networks in the 4th Millennium BC: Geochemical and Archaeological Analyses of Bitumen Artifacts from Hacinebi Tepe, Turkey" in Paléorient (1999), "The Uruk expansion as dynamic process: A reconstruction of Middle to Late Uruk exchange patterns from bulk stable isotope analyses of bitumen artifacts" in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2016), "Ritual and identity in rural Mesopotamia: Hirbemerdon Tepe and the Upper Tigris river valley in the Middle Bronze Age" in the American Journal of Archaeology (2015), and several preliminary reports on the Hirbemerdon Tepe excavations in Anatolica (2006-2009). These works have advanced understandings of ancient economic patterns, bitumen use, and Bronze Age rural societies in the Upper Tigris valley.