User:Pjamescowie/old

[[image:jerusalem_july2002.jpg|frame|Paul James Cowie, Captured pre-dig, Albright Institute, Jerusalem, July 2002]]

Greetings and salutations! My name is Paul James Cowie and I was born in Manly, a suburb of Sydney, Australia in May 1968. Roughly thirty years later I moved to London in January 1998, where I reside indefinitely, working and completing my studies, in addition to travelling extensively throughout the world. Will I return to live in Sydney in the (near) future? Don't know: London's a great place, and there's several other places in the world in which I wouldn't mind living for a while (New York, Paris, Berlin, Tel Aviv....)

An archaeologist by training and profession, I am still currently engaged in the task of completing my doctoral dissertation on the relationship between Egypt and Syria-Palestine in the Late Bronze Age. I have excavated extensively in Egypt, Jordan and Israel and had several forays into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, amongst other interesting destinations...

I am the editor of a occasional blog and web portal dedicated to the Ancient Near East and Egypt - for those interested in the ancient history and culture of the Middle East and the Nile Valley, it can be found at: http://www.ancientneareast.net/ . These days, I seem to spend more time editing my own online research database/encyclopaedia/information dump on the same topic: it can be found at http://www.archaeowiki.org/ .

Countries I have visited (and sometimes lived and worked in) during the last decade (not an exhaustive list!): Australia (of course), Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Turkey, and the United States.

Most Recent Overseas Travel:

• August 2006 - big US trip to Nevada (Las Vegas), California and New York.... Highlights were the Grand Canyon and Yosemite national parks
• April 2007 - fortnight sojourn "back home" in Sydney, Australia and a weekend visit to Brussels in Belgium
• July 2007 - the Italian island of Sicily and the French region of Normandy

Current Travel Plans

• October 2007 - driving though most of southern France with my parents (yes, I get to do all the organising, all the driving and all the talking! Amazing how parental roles become reversed as you get older....!)