Events Calendar – British School at Athens

BSA Friends’ lecture

Dr Evangelia Kiriatzi (BSA), ‘Making Connections: People, Pots and Landscapes in Aegean Prehistory’

Abstract:

The prehistoric Aegean was a world of islands, coastlines and mountains, increasingly connected through the movement of people, objects, materials and ideas. How can archaeology reconstruct these connections, and what can everyday objects such as pottery tell us about mobility, interaction and the transmission of knowledge?
This lecture draws on several decades of research at the Fitch Laboratory of the British School at Athens, a centre with a long tradition in archaeological science and, in particular, the study of ceramic technology. The approach developed there combines macroscopic study, petrography, chemical analysis, geological survey, experimental work and ethnoarchaeology in order to understand not simply where pottery was made, but how technological traditions were learned, reproduced and transformed.
Using examples from mainland Greece and the Aegean islands, the lecture will explore changing patterns of settlement, seafaring and interaction from the later Neolithic into the Bronze Age. Particular attention will be given to how technological practices can reveal connections between communities that are not always visible through pottery styles alone.
Seen in this way, Aegean prehistory emerges not as a mosaic of isolated regions, but as a dynamic landscape of movement, learning, continuity and change.

Bio: Evangelia Kiriatzi is an archaeologist and archaeological scientist specialising in ceramic analysis. She holds a BA and PhD from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and has held academic positions at University College London, the Universities of Cambridge and Sheffield, the University of Cincinnati, and UCL Qatar.
Since 2001, she has been Director of the Marc and Ismene Fitch Laboratory for Archaeological Science at the British School at Athens. Her research has focused on developping methodological approaches to the study of ceramic material culture, combining archaeological science with landscape-based and multiscalar perspectives to investigate technological practices, human mobility, interaction, and the transmission of knowledge.
She has coordinated numerous interdisciplinary research projects and published over 100 works, including monographs and articles in leading peer-reviewed journals. Her research spans the Neolithic to the early modern Mediterranean, with a primary focus on the Bronze Age Aegean.

Online only.