Marta D’Andrea is Associate Professor in Archaeology and history of art of the ancient Western Asia and Eastern Mediterranean - STAA-01/E (ex-L-OR/05, Archaeology and art history of the Ancient Near East. From Sapienza University she also obtained her BA degree in Archaeological Sciences, her MA degree in Archaeology, and her PhD degree in Archaeology. She has been a post-doctoral fellow at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome, and, subsequently, a research fellow and subsequently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Sapienza University.
She collaborates with many international projects on the study of ancient pottery from several Levantine sites, has participated in numerous Italian and international excavation projects in the Levantine area (Jericho in Palestine; Khirbat al-Batrawy, Jabal al-Mutawwaq, Barqa Landscape Project, and Khirbat Iskandar in Jordan; Ebla in Syria), and in 2019 has taken part to the Lebanese-Italian Survey in the regions of Shawakeer and Ras el-Ain in Lebanon. She is a senior staff member of the Italian Archaeological Expedition to Ebla of Sapienza University, and of the Ebla Project, for which she also serves as responsible for publications. Since 2015 she has co-directed the Madaba Regional Archaeological Museum Project (MRAMP) in Jordan and she is a co-director of the Archaeological Expedition to Khirbat Iskandar also in Jordan. Since 2021, she is a co-director of the Lebanese-Italian Archaeological Project in the Region of Tyre in Lebanon.
Her scientific publications include 76 articles and book chapters as author and co-author, two edited books (Ebla and Beyond, 2018; Pearls of the Past, 2019) and a two-volume book that is the publication of her PhD dissertation on the southern Levantine Early Bronze IV period (Contributi e Materiali di Archeologia Orientale XVII [2014], 2015). She is a member of the editorial board of the journals Studia Eblaitica and Contributi e Materiali di Archeologia Orientale, of the Scientific board of the journal Vicino Oriente, and of the scientific committee of the series Materiali e Studi Archeologici di Ebla. She has taken part in the organization of exhibitions (Syria Splendor and Drama, Rome, Palazzo Venezia, 2014; Rising from Destruction. Ebla, Nimrud, Palmyra, Rome, Colosseum, 2017) and congresses (Archeologia del Culto e del Sacro – Giornata di Studio su Ebla e la Siria, Accademia dei Lincei, 2013; Ebla and Beyond, Sapienza University of Rome, 2014), and she has been a Co-Chair of the Standing Session of the ASOR Annual Meeting “Archaeology of Jordan” (terms 2017-2019 and 2020-2022), and is a co-chair of the member-organized workshop “Preserving the Cultural Heritage of the Madaba Region of Jordan” (2019-2022, 2023-2025).
She has given invited seminars at the Cotsen Institute for Archaeology of the UCLA in Los Angeles, the Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée in Lyon, the Institut für die Kulturen des Alten Orients of the Eberhard Karls Universität in Tübingen, the IULM in MIlan and the University of Milan La Statale, Charles University in Prague, as well as invited lectures at ACOR in Amman, CNR in Rome, and the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, and the International Association for the Archaeology of Western & Central Asia (ARWA).
Her research interests include the processes of formation, crisis or collapse and regeneration of urbanization in the Levant in the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, material culture studies, Levantine pottery, ancient technology, interconnectivity, interculturality, construction of social identities, trade and exchange in antiquity, and, more recently, public archaeology and cultural heritage safeguarding strategies. She leads the Sapienza research units for the projects PRIN 2022 "The Price of Progress. A Multidisciplinary Research on Human-Environment Interactions in the Levant at the Dawn of Urbanism (3500-2000 BCE)" and PRIN 2022 PNRR "Cultural Itineraries in Lebanon (CIL). Community Engagement, archaeological site and the accessibility to the cultural landscape in Northern and Southern Lebanon".