Splendors of Morocco

Alia Kate has lived and worked in half a dozen countries throughout the world, cultivating a career that revolves around social innovation, community development, and experiential education. She is the owner of Kantara, a fair-trade design business that specializes in Moroccan rugs. Through Kantara, Alia works directly with weaving cooperatives in Morocco and is committed to fostering economic development of the women artisans through ethical business practices.  

After two decades of living, working, and traveling in Morocco, Alia has a nuanced understanding of the nation’s history, politics, economy, and customs. Through her in-depth knowledge of the country and its cultural landscape, as well as her language skills (she speaks French, Spanish, English, Arabic, and the Amazigh dialect Tachelhit), she imparts unique insights and a personal perspective with guests.  

Alia joined Smithsonian Journeys in 2019 after a decade of leading educational tours for teens and college students. She holds an executive MBA and is a graduate of Oberlin College, where she studied international relations with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. 

Chloé Capel is a field archaeologist who specializes in the medieval history of North and Saharan Africa. She received her PhD in medieval archaeology from the Sorbonne University in Paris, and served as a lecturer in Islamic arts at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris for 10 years before becoming a full time researcher at the National Center for Scentific Research in France. Chloé is a specialist of the famous caravan city of Sijilmassa –located in southeastern Morocco –she dedicated her PhD dissertation to. For ten years, she has been co-directing one major archaeological excavations of Morocco, located in Aghmat, next to Marrakech, which was a powerful and thriving medieval trade city. More recently she has developped a new archaeological program focusing on a former caravan city lost under the sand of Mauritania, south of Morocco.

Iman is a landscape archaeologist, field researcher, and cultural surveyor with more than 15 years of experience in North Africa, the broader Mediterranean, and Southeast Asia. In her earlier career she focused on settlement archaeology and religious landscapes, working on projects in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia. As her research led her to investigate the movement of ideology and material culture across vast distances, she turned her focus to the prehistoric Sahara in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, studying rock inscriptions and landscape configuration.

More recently, her archaeological work has incorporated coastal landscapes including the Canary and Madeira islands, where she has explored connections to the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa that date back 10,000 years.

Now based at the University of California, Los Angeles, Iman continues to follow her passion for the spectacular landscapes of the prehistoric world, working at sites ranging from the early neolithic to contemporary periods. Her research has been shared widely in international conferences. Iman takes great pleasure in demystifying archaeology, sharing her unique insights from the field, and shedding light on connections between cultures of the deep past.

Dr. Fredrik Hiebert is a field archaeologist and economic historian who has traced ancient trade routes overland and across the seas for more than 30 years, studying ancient trade sites from Morocco to Mongolia. Fred completed his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University and held the Robert H. Dyson Endowed Chair of Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the National Geographic Society in 2003. He currently holds research positions with the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, George Washington University, and is the director of the Anau Archaeological Project in Turkmenistan.

Fred applies economic and geographic models to the past to provide a broad understanding of cultural development and interconnections across continents and coastal areas through time.  He shares his enthusiasm for archaeology through textbooks, lectures, presentations, and films. He has also worked on numerous museum exhibits that have traveled the world, including Treasures from Afghanistan, Peruvian Gold, The Greeks, Ancient Seafarers, and Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology. Among other honors, he holds an honorary PhD from SUNY-Binghamton and the International Sciacca award for Science Communication, awarded at the Vatican.

David Scott Silverberg is an expert in earth sciences, geography, and conservation biology. Born in New York, David has lived most of his life abroad, working in more than 125 countries—including 16 years in Norway, seven years in Germany, 10 years in northern Italy, and four years in Morocco. He is an active mountaineer and has explored the Himalaya, Andes, Atlas, Alps, and beyond.

A fellow of the Explorers Club and the Royal Geographical Society, David is a passionate experiential educator who has designed and taught graduate and undergraduate field programs around the world for numerous universities. He served as executive director of Earthwatch Institute Center for Field Research, and helped launch Americorps as the associate director for environment programs at the White House. David received his PhD from MIT and his post-doc from Harvard University.

With support from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, and the American Alpine Club, David has produced numerous peer-reviewed papers on the formation of the Alps and the Himalaya. His current research investigates the geographic determinants of culture and history as well as the effects of biodiversity loss and changes in climate, land cover, and oceans. He has published many articles and books about the Himalaya, Alps, and Apennines, covering topics ranging from ecology to bridge engineering to wine and cuisine.