I received my MSc in Archaeological Materials (2013) and my PhD (2018) from the Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield. My research interests concern prehistoric Aegean and Anatolian archaeology, particularly in the Final Neolithic-Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age periods. I am particularly interested in the application of an integrated methodology that combines the traditional study of ceramics and the application of scientific analytical techniques (ceramic petrography, scanning electron microscopy, chemistry), with a special concern for recovering technological information of pottery production, usage, and circulation. I have been a member of the project “The Prehistoric Settlement at Heraion on Samos (Sacred Road)” since 2009, led by the University of Cyprus (Dr O. Kouka) and the German Archaeological Institute at Athens, where my research was focused on the multi-scalar analysis of Early Bronze Age pottery from the new and older excavations at the same site. Before the Fitch Bursary Award, I held a nine-month ANAMED Post-doctoral fellowship at Koç University in Istanbul (Turkey), where I extended my previous research towards the contextualisation of Samos and the east Aegean within Early Bronze Age western Anatolian ceramic developments based on a technological mobility and connectivity conceptual approach.
Project
During my research stay at the Fitch Laboratory I will be able to work on the petrographic analysis of ceramic thin sections from the Neolithic-Chalcolithic site of Kastro-Tigani, located on the southeast coast of Samos and in a short distance from the Chalcolithic-Early Bronze Age site at Heraion. The examination and full petrographic description of the Tigani samples will be integrated with the relevant data from Heraion and the raw material (clay samples) thin sections from southern Samos. Ultimately, the consideration of chemical data (WD-XRF) from the analysis of selected samples from both sites, will allow the investigation of the earliest ceramic technology and the reconstruction of a diachronic picture of technology and provenance of pottery on the island.
