Gwen Bennett

Gwen Bennett is an assistant professor in the departments of East Asian Studies and Anthropology at McGill University, Canada, where she was hired to start a program in East Asian historical archaeology. She has studied, worked, and done research in China for many years, and is currently Principal Investigator of the ‘Khitan-Liao Archaeologial Survey and History Project’ (KLASH) in southeastern Inner Mongolia, which looks at the rise of the Liao Empire by integrating new data from archaeological fieldwork with historical data; and the ‘Chengdu Plains Archaeological Survey Project’ (CPAS) in Sichuan, which has finished fieldwork and is now in the writing up stage. She is also the Co-Principal Investigator and Director of Fieldwork for the ‘Understanding Cities in the Premodern History of Northeast Asia (c. 200-1200) Project’, being done in tandem with KLASH and which uses geophysical methods to examine the three walled Liao period settlements in the project area.