Faculty Honored in Harvard's Frontiers of Innovation for Societal Impact Fund
The Department of Anthropology at Harvard University is pleased to share that two members of our faculty—Peter Manuelian, Barbara Bell Professor of Egyptology and director of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, and Jason Ur, Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology—are part of a collaborative team that has received an award through Harvard's newly established Frontiers of Innovation for Societal Impact Fund. They are joined on the project by Matthew Cook, digital scholarship program manager at Harvard Library, and Noah Feldman, Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor and founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law.
Administered by Harvard's Office of the Vice Provost for Research, the fund awarded more than $4 million across 20 faculty projects that bridge cutting-edge scholarship and real-world benefit. The team is among the recipients of an Ascend award, which supports the expansion of projects with existing industry engagement.
Their collaborative project centers on the Harvard Giza Project, an ongoing archaeological initiative focused on the pyramids at Giza. The award will support efforts to transform this long-standing academic archive into an active AI Innovation Hub. Among the initiative's goals is the development of a set of Ethical Guidelines for AI Reconstruction — a framework intended to guide the responsible use of artificial intelligence in heritage and archaeological contexts.
The project will also advance natural language processing research by drawing on a remarkable primary source: 6,500 pages of handwritten Arabic excavation diaries dating from 1913 to 1947. These diaries, rich with historical and archaeological detail, will be linked to Giza excavation images, 3D scans, and other documentation to create a deeply interconnected digital resource.
A planned Heritage-AI Pitch Competition will invite industry partners to engage with complex data challenges arising from the Giza archive, contributing not only to Egyptian archaeology, but to the broader field of international AI research and development.
We congratulate Professors Manuelian and Ur, along with their collaborators, on this well-deserved recognition, and look forward to following the progress of this ambitious and innovative project.