Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World

Rachel received her B.A. with highest honors in Anthropology and Classical Civilizations from the University of Florida in 2015. As an undergraduate, she worked intermittently at the Florida Museum of Natural History in research and collections, and her honors thesis focused on funerary customs during the Middle Bronze Age at Megiddo, Israel. In 2017, she received her M.A. in Human Skeletal Biology from NYU, with a thesis examining dental microwear of teeth from an Iron Age Philistine population in Ashkelon, Israel. Rachel has worked at St. Johns’ River, Florida (2012), and Tel Kabri, Israel (2013), but now primarily works as a bioarchaeologist in Israel at Tel Megiddo (2014-), Tel Ashkelon (2015-), and Tel Shimron (2017-). She additionally consults and analyzes skeletal material from Horvat Tevet (2018-). Outside of the field, she has experience at forensic (C.A. Pound Human Identification Lab), archaeology (UF Southeastern Archaeological Laboratory) and microscopy (NYU Hard Tissue Research Unit) labs. As of 2019, she is pursuing a Sc.M. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology through the Open Graduate Education Program at Brown University. She plans to use this degree to assist in her current research interests, which involve investigating reproductive physiology through bone histology to understand how fertility factored into the treatment of women in the ancient world.