Deirdre G. Barrett is the Lamp curator at the Semitic Museum, Harvard University, and is currently cataloguing ancient oil lamps from Khirbet et-Tannur, Jordan, and the Cesnola Collection from Cyprus. From 1995-2006 she worked as both excavator and cataloguer at the Great Temple, Petra, Jordan, under the auspices of its Director, Martha Sharp Joukowsky, Professor Emerita of the Department of Anthropology and Institute of Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. She received a PhD in Anthropology from that institution in 2005.