Catherine Kearns

Catherine Kearns’ research examines the intersections between social and environmental change in Mediterranean landscapes. In her first book project, The Rural Landscapes of Archaic Cyprus: An Archaeology of Environmental and Social Change (Cambridge, 2023) she analyzed 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 her current project on environmental histories of sustainability, she aims to conduct comparative analyses of ancient Mediterranean households from the first millennium BCE to examine histories of precarity and practices of livability. 

In addition to her work in survey archaeology, she also studies environmental history, urbanism and ruralism, gender, and concepts of space, place, and geography in antiquity. Kearns teaches a range of courses in archaeological theory, in the cultural, political, and socioeconomic history of the ancient Mediterranean, and in the texts of Strabo and Pausanias. 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. She also serves as co-editor of the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology and as a National Lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America.