Dr. Kevin Fisher has been awarded a large SSHRC Insight Grant for “Investigating the Socio-environmental Dynamics of an Ancient Urban Landscape”. The grant will fund five years of excavation and related work at the Late Bronze Age (c. 1650-1100 BCE) city of Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, Cyprus. Recent research suggests that new urban landscapes that were created on the island during this period promoted patterns of social interaction through which a fundamentally different, highly stratified, social organization emerged. The proposed work will collect the high resolution data needed to understand the socio-environmental dynamics of this process—i.e. spatially and chronologically precise data regarding how the built environment was used in daily practice at various scales (from house to urban landscape), how these uses shaped (and were shaped by) social organization, and how they impacted and were constrained by the natural environment. In addition to field work, the grant will fund RAships for student participation in the project, the development of new digital methods for recording, analyzing and visualizing project data, and the dissemination of research results.
Dr. Roger Wilson was also successful in obtaining a three-year SSHRC Insight Grant, for continuing his excavations at Gerace, Sicily, under the title: ‘The Villa of Philippianus: economy and society in Late Roman Sicily.’ This will enable him to extract further information about the site where he has already conducted four excavation campaigns, and where unusually we know the name of the owner in the second half of the fourth century CE. A tile kiln and Philippianus’ bath-house will be further explored this year, including a mosaic floor in the latter with its accompanying inscription, a third of which only was exposed last year. Further geophysical work, which will be carried out in three weeks’ time, may well discover yet more buildings.
