Oystein S. LaBianca

LaBianca was raised in Norway and immigrated to the United States as a teenager. He attended Andrews University for his undergraduate degrees in behavioral sciences and religion, which he received in 1971. He continued his education completing an M.A. in Anthropology at Loma Linda University in 1975, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology at Brandeis University in 1987.^[2]

LaBianca served as an anthropologist and faunal analyst on the original Heshbon Expedition and was a founding member of the Madaba Plains Project.^[6] He has served as a trustee and vice president of the American Society of Overseas Research^[7] and as a trustee of the American Center for Research in Amman.^[8] Since 1980, he has been a professor at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Institute of Archaeology at Andrews University.^[9] He is also a visiting fellow^[10] at the Oxford Centre for Global History.

LaBianca is known for his application of the food systems research perspective at Tall Hisban, Jordan.^[11] The food systems model opened a more inclusive and integrative approach to interpreting discoveries from all historical periods at Tall Hisban.^[12] The approach explores how the various activities carried out by a group of people in their quest for food, water and security are systemically interrelated as they unfold over time.^[13] Study of animal bone fragments and other artifacts from Tall Hisban allowed documentation of long-term cycles of intensification and abatement in the local food system, which in turn were accompanied by cyclic episodes of sedentarization and nomadization. The intensification-abatement framework has since been adopted by researchers studying long-term historical changes elsewhere in Jordan,^[14] in the Late Antique Southern Levant,^[15] the Mediterranean,^[16] and Europe.^[17]