Katie Kearns (Stanford) "The Allure of Topography: Cyprus, Survey and the Iron Age"

Stanford Archaeology Workshop Series presents Dr. Katie Kearns, the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities.

"The Allure of Topography: Cyprus, Survey and the Iron Age"

From Lord H.H. Kitchener’s survey of the island to the interdisciplinary projects of recent decades, the archaeology of Cyprus has long looked to topography as an explanatory framework for understanding social change. This lecture takes a historical look at the development of this topographic focus in the study of the island’s Iron Age periods, and questions how scholars have tilted the narrative of 1st-millennium BCE formation towards the "immutable" features of mountain ranges and coast-lines. Attending to a more holistic analysis of Iron Age landscapes beyond their topography entails the refiguring of questions to consider human-environment relationships, landscape change, and the political and social dimensions of place-making.

Katie Kearns is a classical archaeologist and an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fel-low in the Humanities, and recently finished her PhD in Classics at Cornell University. She has done fieldwork in Italy, Jordan, Armenia, and Cyprus, where she did thesis research as a Fulbright scholar and where she is a mapping and geophysical survey specialist for the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project (KAMBE). Katie’s publications and research interests center on the ancient landscapes of the eastern Mediterranean, both real and imagined. Her current interdisciplinary work examines the human-environment relationships that reproduced new societies during the early Iron Age (1100-700 BCE) on Cyprus. She integrates archaeological and textual material, spatial analysis, and paleoenvironmental data to investigate diachronic settlement practices and salient places.