Alison Betts

Biography

Alison Betts is Edwin Cuthbert Hall Chair of the Archaeology and Mythology of the Ancient Middle East at the University of Sydney. Her work focuses on the archaeology of the lands among the Silk Roads from the Near East to China, the study of nomadic peoples, nomad-state relations, cultural transmissions from Eurasia into China, and the Prehistory of the North Arabian steppe. She currently co-directs two major international collaborative projects: in Uzbekistan, the Karakalpak-Australian Expedition with Professor Vadim N. Yagodin of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences; and in China, together with Dr Jia Weiming, a project on later prehistory of Xinjiang, in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In 1986 she was awarded a British Academy Teaching Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, followed in 1989 by a Research Fellowship at The Queen’s University, Belfast. Alison is fluent in English, French and German, with more basic fluency in Italian, Arabic and Russian.