Amanda Gaggioli

human-environment relationships, resilience archaeology, archaeological science, geoarchaeology, soil micromorphology, archaeoseismology, resilience archaeology, the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age transition in the eastern Mediterranean

Amanda is a Ph.D candidate on the Classical Archaeology track. She received a B.A. with honors in both Archaeology and Classics with a minor in Near Eastern Studies from Cornell University. She also completed an MA in Anthropology at Stanford. Amanda’s research includes interdisciplinary approaches that combine ancient textual, archaeological, and natural scientific approaches to past human-geological environmental relationships, in particular earthquakes and associated seismic phenomena, in the eastern Mediterranean. Her research interests include human-enviornment relationships, resilience archaeology, archaeological science, geoarchaeology, soil micromorphology, archaeoseismology, resilience archaeology, traditional environmental knowledge, and the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age transition in the eastern Mediterranean. Her PhD research includes archaeological fieldwork in Cyprus, Turkey, and Greece, spanning the third millennium BCE to fifth century CE, that aims at understanding how people were impacted by and responded to earthquakes and associated seismic hazards over both the short- and long-terms. She analyzes ancient textual sources that document earthquakes together with the material and geological residues of earthquakes from the archaeological record. She applies the techniques and approaches of archaeoseismology and soil micromorphology on targeted samples of architectural and geomorphological remains in order to determine relationships between humans, geological environmental change, and disaster both in the context of ‘collapse’ during the Late Bronze Age and also across temporal and spatial scales.

Amanda currently holds a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, National Geographic Early Career Grant, and a Multi-Country Fellowship with the Council of American Overseas Research Centers in support of her interdisciplinary dissertation research and fieldwork in Greece and Cyprus and her memberships with the American School of Classical Studies and the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute.