I study the archaeology and history of the Middle East and North Africa from the Bronze Age to today. My interests include the strategy of empires throughout history, ancient Israel and Judaism, Phoenicians and Carthage, and Semitic languages. I fuse archaeological evidence with historical texts and inscriptions ranging from the Old Testament to the Greek and Roman Classics to Viking sources. A particular focus of mine has been on the evolution of democracy and how the United States has drawn from the governmental heritage of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. This is explored in my book The Other Democracy: Phoenicia, Carthage, and Popular Government in the Pre-Classical Mediterranean (forthcoming with Oxford University Press). As a field archaeologist, I have directed or supervised excavations in Tunisia, China, Italy, Israel, and New York.

Engineering and design are some of my other specialties. I am fascinated by technological innovation and how society supports this essential aspect of humanity. As an archaeometallurgist, I use materials science methods to study metal artifacts and ancient industry. I have shown that people adopted bronze in part for its fuel efficiency, and have developed archaeological models to track urban collapse. I see archaeology as a wonderful method for understanding the long-term human-environment relationship and how people manage natural resources.

In tandem, I work in the field of contextual engineering. I develop ethnographic methods that help engineers better connect with and understand the clients they are serving. Some of the communities I have been privileged to work with are the Kenyan Maasai and the Navajo Nation in Arizona.

Preserving the integrity of the classroom is a mission I care deeply about. Standing up for students and providing them with the best education possible is essential to my mission as a professor. American higher education and the Western liberal democratic values on which it was built are at risk. Academic freedom is often abused by faculty who spread misinformation or inject personal beliefs into the classroom that have nothing to do with educating our students. Students pay for education, not indoctrination. I maintain an active research and advocacy profile to confront these problems.

My research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Getty Research Institute. I received a BA from Brandeis University, and a MA and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Prior to joining UIUC, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, and a faculty appointment at the University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB). I am the Managing Editor of the journal Advances in Archaeomaterials.

Selected publications. You can find PDFs here:

2024 Kaufman, Brett. Ancient Historians Embrace Debunked Conspiracy Theories Denying that Jews are Indigenous to Israel. In Responses to October 7: Universities, eds. Rosa Freedman and David Hirsh. Routledge and the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, pp. 95-101.

2024 Nelson, Cary and Brett Kaufman. “Faculty for Academic Freedom and Against Antisemitism”. Fathom, February 2024.

2024 Cerezo-Román, Jessica I., Brett Kaufman, Glenys McGowan, Ali Drine, Thomas R. Fenn, Hans Barnard, Rayed Khedher, Sami Ben Tahar, Stacy Edington, Elyssa Jerray, Megan Daniels. “The Life and Death of Cremated Infants and Children from the Neo-Punic Tophet at Zita, Tunisia”. Antiquity 98(400): 936-953.

2023 Sun, Zhenfei, Siran Liu, Ji Zhang, Kunlong Chen, Brett Kaufman. “Resolving the Complex Mixing History of Ancient Chinese Bronzes by Manifold Learning and a Bayesian Mixing Model”. Journal of Archaeological Science 151: 1-9.

2021 Kaufman, Brett, Hans Barnard, Ali Drine, Rayed Khedher, Alan Farahani, Sami Ben Tahar, Elyssa Jerray, Brian N. Damiata, Megan Daniels, Thomas Fenn, Victoria Moses. "Quantifying Surplus and Sustainability in the Archaeological Record at the Carthaginian-Roman Urban Mound of Zita, Tripolitania". Current Anthropology 62(4): 484-497.

2021 Chattopadhyay, Abhiroop, and Brett Kaufman. “Archimedean Principles and Mathematical Heritage: A Synthesis”. Axiomathes 31: 145-155.

2019 Kaufman, Brett, Roald Docter, David A. Scott, Fethi Chelbi, Boutheina Maraoui Telmini. "Differential Access to Metal Wealth from Colony to Capital to Collapse at Phoenician and Punic Carthage: Non-Ferrous Alloys and Minerals from the Bir Massouda Site". Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 11: 4075-4101.

2019 Johnston, Philip Andrew, and Brett Kaufman. "Metallurgy and Other Technologies". In The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean, eds. Carolina López-Ruiz and Brian R. Doak. Oxford University Press, pp. 401-422.

2018 Kaufman, Brett. "Anthropology of Metallurgical Design: A Survey of Metallurgical Traditions from Hominin Evolution to the Industrial Revolution". In Metallurgical Design and Industry: Prehistory to the Space Age, eds. Clyde Briant and Brett Kaufman. Springer, pp. 1-70.

2018 Kaufman, Brett, Chris Kelly, and Richard S. Vachula. "Paleoenvironment and Archaeology Serve as Cautionary Tales for Climate Policymakers". Geographical Bulletin 59(1): 5-24.

2018 Kaufman, Brett, Davide Zori, Aaron A. Burke, Martin Peilstöcker. "Archaeometallurgical Analysis of Maritime Steel Nails from Crusader Jaffa, ca. 13^th Century AD". Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 18(2): 67-86.

2017 Kaufman, Brett. "Political Economy of Carthage: The Carthaginian Constitution as Reconstructed through Archaeology, Historical Texts, and Epigraphy". In Bridging Times and Spaces: Papers in Ancient Near Eastern, Mediterranean, and Armenian Studies, Festschrift in Honour of Gregory E. Areshian on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, eds. Pavel S. Avetisyan and Yervand H. Grekyan. Archaeopress, Oxford, pp. 201-213.

2016 Kaufman, Brett, Roald Docter, Christian Fischer, Fethi Chelbi, Boutheina Maraoui Telmini. "Ferrous Metallurgy from the Bir Massouda Metallurgical Precinct at Phoenician and Punic Carthage and the Beginning of the North African Iron Age". Journal of Archaeological Science 71: 33-50.

2015 Kaufman, Brett, and David A. Scott. "Fuel Efficiency of Ancient Copper Alloys: Theoretical Melting Thermodynamics of Copper, Tin, and Arsenical Copper and Timber Conservation in the Bronze Age Levant". Archaeometry 57(6): 1009-1024.

2013 Kaufman, Brett. "Copper Alloys from the ‘Enot Shuni Cemetery and the Origins of Bronze Metallurgy in the Levant". Archaeometry 55(4): 663-690.

2011 Kaufman, Brett. "Metallurgy and Ecological Change in the Ancient Near East". Backdirt: Annual Review of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA: 86-92.

2009 Kaufman, Brett. "A Citizen of Tyre in Sabratha: Colonial Identity in Punic North Africa". MAARAV: A Journal for the Study of the Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures 16(1): 39-48.