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The University of Southampton
Humanities
Email:
yh1@soton.ac.uk

Professor Yannis Hamilakis PhD, MSc. BA

Professor

Professor Yannis Hamilakis's photo

Professor Yannis Hamilakis is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton.

Yannis Hamilakis has studied at the University of Crete (BA History and Archaeology), and the University of Sheffield (MSc and PhD).  He has taught at the University of Wales Lampeter (1996-2000) and the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (2005).  He has been Wiener Lab Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies, Athens (2002-2003), Mary Seeger O'Boyle Fellow at Princeton University (1999), Library Fellow at Princeton University (2000), Margo Tytus Fellow at the University of Cincinnati (2003), Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2005-2006) and Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2012-13).  He was the 2005 Royal Academy of Sweden-funded visiting lecturer to all Swedish Classics Departments, and the 2006 W B Stanford Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, In the last few years he has been an invited keynote speaker at major conferences in Melbourne (Aegean prehistory), Dublin (World Archaeological Congress), Carbondale, IL (Archaeology of the Senses), Providence RI (TAG-USA, and "Engaged Scholarship" workshop), Nottingham (Archaeology of Food), Heidelberg ("Minoan" archaeology), San Felipe in Chile (Theoretical Archaeology in South America) and elsewhere.

Yannis is committed to an anthropologically-informed, critical archaeological engagement with past and present material culture, and to the inter-disciplinary nature of archaeological work.  This position recognises the historically contingent nature of archaeology as a device of western modernity, as well as its potential to enable a critical and reflexive experiential encounter with the material world. He also believes on a politically commited archaeological and academic practice, devoted to social justice.

He was founding member and co-ordinator of the Radical Archaeology Forum, and founding member and first director of the University of Wales Centre for the Study of SE Europe, and chair and co-ordinator of the task-force on 'Archaeologists and War' for the World Archaeological Congress (WAC).  He is currently co-ordinator of the group, Laboratory for Social Zooarchaeology at the University of Southampton.  From 2007 to 2010 he directed the archaeological ethnography project at Kalaureia (Poros) Greece, and since 2010 he co-directs a major new field project, the Koutroulou Magoula Archaeology and Archaeological Ethnography Project, which centres around the excavation of an important Middle Neolithic tell site in Greece.

His main research and teaching interests are the archaeology of the body and of bodily senses, the archaeology of eating and drinking, social zooarchaeology, the socio-politics of the past, archaeology and nationalism, archaeological ethnography, archaeology and photography, and critical pedagogy in archaeology.  Although much of his fieldwork is to do with the prehistoric (Neolithic and Bronze Age) Aegean, many of his projects are multi-temporal.  He has published eleven books and many articles, including:

He serves on the editorial board of the journals:

Many of his articles can be downloaded from academia.edu.

Links:
The Other Acropolis Project
Kalaureia in the present

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Research interests

Yannis' research interests include the socio-politics of archaeology (including the politics of pedagogy), the archaeology of the human body (including the consuming body), bodily senses and bodily memory, social zooarchaeology, and prehistoric Greece.

He has been involved in a number of field projects in Greece (including Theopetra cave, Thessaly, sites in Troizinia, Peloponnese, and sites in Crete) and Britain, with more recent the Nopigeia Archaeological Project in West Crete.

Research group

Classical and historical archaeology

Affiliate research groups

Theory, representation and cultural politics, Social prehistory, Osteoarchaeology, Laboratory for Social Zooarchaeology

Research project(s)

Food, memory and the body in the prehistoric Aegean

This project started as an investigation of the idea of 'Mediterranean polyculture' and its relevance for the study of social 'complexity' in Bronze Age Crete (Hamilakis 1995).

Zooarchaeology: Animals and human societies in the prehistoric and early historic Aegean - Dormant

This project involves the study of animal bones from a number of Aegean sites, such as Zoniana Cave, Zominthos (Crete), Galatas, Ag Konstantinos (Peloponnese), Panakton (Boeotia), and Theopetra Cave (Thessaly). 

Archaeology and national imagination in Greece

This long-term project investigates the meaning and role of antiquities and of archaeological practice for modern Greek society.

Professor Yannis Hamilakis
Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Southampton, Avenue Campus, Southampton. SO17 1BF United Kingdom

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