Lucy Wadeson

I am a classical archaeologist specialised in the material culture of the Greco-Roman Near East with a particular focus on the Nabataean kingdom and its principal city of Petra. My academic career began at the University of Canterbury in my hometown of Christchurch, New Zealand, where I completed a BA (Hons) in Classics, much inspired by the Department’s Logie Collection of Antiquities. I then earned my MPhil (2005) and DPhil (2010) in Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Based on months of fieldwork in Petra, my dissertation made the first ever study of the insides of Petra’s renowned rock-cut façade tombs, elucidating their chronology and Nabataean funerary practices for the first time.

I have held several research and teaching positions in Jordan (Council for British Research in the Levant), Belgium (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and the United Kingdom (University of Oxford, University of Nottingham, University of Edinburgh). While living in Jordan between 2010-2014, I established two excavation projects in and around Petra. The “International al-Khubthah Tombs Project” involves the study and excavation of two monumental façade tombs in Petra’s elusive ‘royal’ necropolis, while the “Petra Hinterland Tombs Project” surveys and excavates subterranean Nabataean family tombs in the hinterland, in collaboration with Hussein Bin Talal University in Jordan. I have also excavated in the Forum in Rome, Jerash in Jordan, and undertaken fieldwork on rock-cut tombs and funerary portraiture in Turkey, Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Between 2023 and 2025, I was also working for the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) as an archaeological research consultant focused on the Nabataean city of Hegra in the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.