Dor Heimberg completed his B.A. and M.A. studies at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His B.A. included training in the archaeology of the Classical and Islamic periods in the southern Levant, Egyptology, and Asian Studies. His master’s thesis in Chinese Archaeology focused on riverine transportation and mobility in pre-imperial Southwestern China, with an emphasis on the Warring States period. Alongside his coursework, he has gained extensive fieldwork experience in multiple projects, including several seasons with the ERC-funded “The Wall: People and Ecology in Medieval China and Mongolia” project, focusing on the long wall systems of the Liao and Jin dynasties, conducting excavations and field surveys in Mongolia. His research draws on spatial analysis, landscape archaeology, art history, and phenomenology.
As a PhD student at ISAW, Dor plans to expand his M.A. work on riverine landscapes into a multitemporal study of the river communities, boat-people, and boat-trackers who navigated and labored along the Upper Yangtze throughout the imperial era. Combining archaeological evidence, historical sources, and phenomenological spatial analysis, he aims to reconstruct the material culture, bodily experience, and social organization of marginalized communities who played a pivotal role in imperial economic systems. His methods include GIS-based modeling, archaeoacoustics, and spatial surveys.
Dor's broader approach to archaeology is shaped by a commitment to multivocal, bottom-up histories, exploring the tensions between hegemony and local identities, anarchist theories, and the power dynamics of mobility, landscape, trade, resistance, and identity in ancient China and beyond. He is deeply interested in community-engaged archaeology, decolonized approaches to heritage, and the instrumentalization of archaeology in national movements and conflicts.