Juris Zarins

Who is Juris Zarins?

Juris Zarins is an American-Latvian archaeologist and professor at Missouri State University, who specializes in the Middle East.

Zarins is ethnically Latvian, but was born in Germany at the end of the Second World War. His parents emigrated to the United States soon after he was born. He graduated from high school in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1963 and earned a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Nebraska in 1967. He served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam before completing his Ph.D. in Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Archaeology at the University of Chicago in 1974. He then served as archaeological adviser to the Department of Antiquities of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia before coming to Missouri State in 1978.

Zarins has extensive experience in archaeological fieldwork in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Oman, and is now involved in a new project in Yemen. He was chief archaeologist for the Transarabia Expedition which made the famous discovery of the ancient city of Ubar in 1992. This made the headline of the New York Times, and it was also named one of the ten most important discoveries of the year by Discover, Time, and Newsweek magazines.