Catherine Kearns

Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and the College
Classics 23
Ph.D., Cornell University, 2015
Research Interests: Classical archaeology; Bronze-Iron Age social, cultural, political history; landscape and environments; archaeological method and theory; spatiality

Catherine Kearns’ research examines the intersections between social and environmental change in Mediterranean landscapes during the Iron Age period. In her first book project, The Rural Landscapes of Archaic Cyprus: An Archaeology of Environmental and Social Change (Cambridge, 2022) she analyzes the emergence of Iron Age communities on the island of Cyprus through their land-use practices, rural economies, and experiences with changing climates. She is particularly interested in the political and social dimensions of landscape change and how modern conversations on human-environment relationships can engage with historical evidence. In addition to her work in landscape archaeology, she also studies environmental history, urbanism and ruralism, and concepts of space, place, and geography in antiquity. These themes recur throughout her course offerings, such as “The Greek Countryside,” which explores textual and material evidence for social and economic practices in the rural domains of the classical polis. In recent years she has co-directed fieldwork on Cyprus through the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project, using geophysics, field survey, excavation and geospatial analysis to identify Iron Age rural settlements, for which she has been awarded ACLS, Loeb Classical Library Foundation and university grants.

Recent Publications

  • Kearns, C. (2022) The Rural Landscapes of Archaic Cyprus: An Archaeology of Environmental and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Kearns, C. (2022) “Cypriot Iron Age Communities in Time and Place: Considering Amathus in a Regional Context.” In S.W. Manning (ed.), Critical Approaches to the Archaeology of Cyprus and the Wider Mediterranean, 64-84. Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology 16. London: Equinox.
  • Kearns, C. (2022) “Mediterranean Interconnections Beyond the City: Rural Consumption and Trade in Archaic Cyprus.” In J. Hall and J. Osborne (eds.), The Connected Iron Age: Interregional Networks in the Eastern Mediterranean, 900-600 BCE. University of Chicago Press.
  • Kearns, C. and A. Georgiadou (2021). “Rural Complexities: Comparative Investigations of Small Iron Age Sites in South-Central Cyprus.” Journal of Field Archaeology 46.7: 461-479.
  • Kearns, C. and S.W. Manning, eds. (2019) New Directions in Cypriot Archaeology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  • Kearns, C. (2019) “Discerning ‘favorable’ climates: science, survey archaeology, and the Cypriot Iron Age.” In C. Kearns and S.W. Manning (eds.), New Directions in Cypriot Archaeology, 266-294. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  • Kearns, C. (2018) "Cyprus in the surging sea: spatial imaginations of the eastern Mediterranean." TAPA 148.1: 45-74.
  • Kearns, C. (2017) "Mediterranean archeology and environmental histories in the spotlight of the Anthropocene." History Compass 15.10: 15 pp.
  • Manning, S.W., C. Kearns and B. Lorentzen (2017) "Dating the end of the Late Bronze Age with radiocarbon: some observations, concerns, and revisiting the dating of Late Cypriot IIC to IIIA.” In B. Fischer and T. Bürge (eds.), The Sea Peoples Up-To-Date: New Research on Transformations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 13th-11th Centuries BCE, 95-110. Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
  • Kearns, C. and A. Georgiadou (2021). “Rural Complexities: Comparative Investigations of Small Iron Age Sites in South-Central Cyprus.” Journal of Field Archaeology 46.7: 461-479.