Catherine Kearns

In 2011, writing from the Department of Classics at Cornell, Kearns published a study of the fifth-century BC monumental complex at Vouni in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology^1,12. She argued that ancient buildings are "often still viewed as blueprints of ethnic style", and that postcolonial arguments for hybridization "can still associate built forms with essentialized signatures"¹. Kearns reports that Einar Gjerstad took the styles of the complex's two building phases as stereotypes of "'Oriental/Asiatic' and 'Greek'" ethnicities¹. In their place she proposed an approach built on the social lives of buildings and the chaîne opératoire of their construction, and treated Vouni as a place where social boundaries were made and power relations reorganised¹. She applied access analysis to the complex¹. Vouni lies in the north, under Turkish occupation since the Turkish invasion of 1974; she wrote that "due to post-1974 political circumstances on the island" she had examined only the Swedish Cyprus Expedition reports and had not visited the site¹. Anna Cannavò lists the article as a "recent, post-colonial interpretation of the Vouni palace"¹⁶.

Kearns has worked with the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) Project since 2010, and her CV lists her among its directors with Manning, K. D. Fisher, G. M. Andreou, A. Georgiou and C. Atkins¹². In 2012 she also worked with Maria Iacovou's Palaepaphos Urban Landscape Project and, drawing maps, with Ian Todd's Vasilikos Valley Project¹². That year she held a Fulbright U.S. Student Grant to Cyprus¹². She spent a year at CAARI and joined the geomorphology trips of Zomenia Zomeni¹⁴.

From 2012 to 2015 she re-surveyed previously identified sites in a 150 km² area 20 km east of Amathus, with GIS analysis and palaeoenvironmental work⁴. About 90 sites were mapped digitally and 10 were targeted to investigate landscape continuity and connections between sites⁴. Her carbon isotope analysis of archaeological charcoal gave preliminary results indicating "wet conditions with the onset of the eighth-seventh centuries BC"⁴.

In 2016 and 2017 KAMBE carried out geophysical survey at Kalavasos-Vounaritashi and southeast of Maroni-Vournes⁸. Renewed survey collected roughly 240 pottery fragments at Vounaritashi and 990 at Maroni-Vournes, while extensive survey around Vounaritashi in 2017 found little or no material⁸. Three test trenches were opened at Vounaritashi and backfilled at the end of the 2019 season⁸. They found at least one room of a well-built stone building, Building I, which "may have been modified over more than one phase"⁸. Kearns and Anna Georgiadou wrote in 2021 that it was "too early to call this a farmhouse", and that the dating "may potentially record later permanent occupation" at a site with Cypro-Archaic activity⁸. The KAMBE season reports for 2016 to 2023, which she co-wrote with Manning, Fisher, Andreou and Atkins, were submitted to the Department of Antiquities¹².

With Manning she edited New Directions in Cypriot Archaeology (2019), from a conference held at Cornell in spring 2014^6,17. In her chapter she questioned "the moral underbelly" of words such as "favorable" and "deleterious" climates, used "front to back" re-survey, and reported significant drops in settlement numbers in the early Cypro-Geometric period⁷. The sources date that period differently: her chapter gives the twelfth to ninth centuries BCE, while Nathan Meyer and A. Bernard Knapp, summarising it, give the eleventh to ninth^7,18. Néhémie Strupler wrote that, "despite her disruptive claims", she framed the chapter in a traditional way, first presenting isotope data on water and then survey data from the Maroni Valley¹⁷. Meyer and Knapp wrote that her isotope work "demonstrated" a drop in rainfall in the Vasilikos and Maroni region around 1200 BC, with wetter conditions returning only between 800 and 600 BC¹⁸.

Her monograph, The Rural Landscapes of Archaic Cyprus, was first published by Cambridge University Press in 2023¹⁴. She writes that it grew from years of fieldwork in the Vasilikos and Maroni valleys, and she finished it with Loeb Classical Library and ACLS fellowships, which her CV dates to 2019^12,14. It argues that new patterns of urban and rural settlement drove social change, and covers roughly the ninth to early fifth centuries BCE¹⁴. In it she argues that in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE people on Cyprus managed expanded forests and more reliable fresh water¹⁴.

In an essay in a 2024 Chicago volume edited by Kathryn R. Morgan, Kearns turned to the small Archaic-Classical shrine of Kalavasos Skouries, which Morgan says she places at the "industrial edges" of the state rather than calling it merely rural¹⁹. Kearns judged it "unlikely that urban dwellers were making a pilgrimage to the mines" for ritual¹⁹. In 2021 Erin Walcek Averett said that Kearns and Georgiadou's work had "revealed the dynamic use of rural areas on the island in the Iron Age"²⁰.

Kearns has been Associate Editor of Classical Philology since 2016¹². After a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford in 2015 and 2016, she was assistant professor of Classics and of the Committee on the Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at Chicago from 2016 to 2024, and became associate professor in 2025^12,15.