Katina Lillios
Associate Professor
Office: 127B Macbride Hall/127 Macbride Hall
Phone: (319) 335-3023/335-0109
katina-lillios@uiowa.edu
- Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Background:
I am an anthropological archaeologist interested in the ways
people used (and use) material culture and the remains of the dead to create, enhance, and challenge sociopolitical difference and inequality. My research has concentrated on the histories of the people who lived in Portugal and Spain from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age (4000-1000 BC), a dynamic period characterized by episodes of political centralization and devolution. In this research,
I bring together a concern for memory and object biographies with insights gained through geochemistry, geographic information systems, and bioarchaeology to understand the ways that people of the past used objects and monuments of their own past, such as heirlooms and ancestral burials.
As a way of exploring this question with other Europeanist colleagues, Vasilis Tsamis and I recently coedited Material Mnemonics: Everyday Memory in Prehistoric Europe (Oxbow Books). Like heirlooms and burial monuments, the stories that archaeologists tell about the past can also serve as political resources, and so I am also interested in when and how archaeological narratives become entangled with other political narratives. Linking together a concern with archaeological epistemologies and the dynamics of middle-range societies, I co-directed (with William Graves) the 2006 Obermann Summer Seminar Comparative Archaeologies. At this semester, a group of fifteen North American and European scholars working in the American Southwest (AD 900-1600) and the Iberian Peninsula (3000-1500 BC) met for nine days to discuss the topics of histories, landscapes, bodies, gender, and art. I edited the book based on the proceedings of this seminar, Comparative Archaeologies: The American Southwest (AD 900-1600) and the Iberian Peninsula (3000-1500 BC) (Oxbow Books, forthcoming).
Current Research:
I am currently involved in two research projects:
1) Excavations at the Neolithic-Early Bronze Age Rockshelter Burial of Bolores (Torres Vedras, Portugal). In order to better understand how Neolithic social and cultural practices impacted the lives of individual people, I have been directing excavations at the Neolithic-Early Bronze Age mortuary site of Bolores. Our project is interdisciplinary and international. I collaborate with University of Iowa colleague Joe Artz-Office of the State Archaeologist (GIS and geoarchaeology), Portuguesue archaeologist Leonel Trindade, and UI graduate and undergraduate students. I also work closely with Dr. Michael Kunst (German Archaeological Institute-Madrid), who directs the excavations at the contemporary settlement of Zambujal, 2 km from Bolores. Two UI undergraduates have written their honors theses on the Bolores materials, and many students have volunteered in my laboratory to help with cataloguing and identifying the skeletal remains from Bolores.
To learn more about this research, you can read the preliminary reports from our 2007 and 2008 excavations at Bolores and our 2008 survey in the Sizandro Valley (where Bolores is located) here:
•2007 Bolóres excavation report
•2008 Bolóres excavation report
•2008 Sizandro Valley survey report
2) Disciplinarians, Docents, Diggers, and Dusters: Museum Guards and the Early History of the Museu Etnográfico Português (1893-1929). In this project, I am exploring the role of museum guards in shaping the history of archaeology and ethnography. Since museum guards are charged with mediating public behavior toward museum objects, I suggest that they occupy an important position between official state bureaucracies, the public, and the treasured remains of a nation’s past. For this project, I am studying archival documents housed in the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, Lisbon, which include letters written between museum guards and the first director of the Museum, Sr. José Leite de Vasconcellos (1893-1929).
Ongoing Research:
I continue work on the engraved stone plaques of Neolithic Portugal and Spain. For this research, I produced ESPRIT (the Engraved Stone Plaques Registry and Inquiry Tool), an on-line catalogue that illustrates and describes the 1300+ plaques discovered in burial sites through southwest Iberia. I update the database when new information on plaques becomes available. Based on formal and spatial patterning among the plaques, I argue they recorded the social affiliation and genealogy of a special class of the dead and can be considered a form of writing. I discuss the technical, stylistic, political, and historiographic aspects of the plaques in my book Heraldry for the Dead: Memory, Identity, and the Engraved Stone Plaques of Neolithic Iberia (2008, University of Texas Press).
Courses Taught: 113:012 Introduction to Prehistory 113:130 Archaeology of the Iberian Peninsula 113:146 Anthropology of Death 113:150 Tribes and Chiefdoms of Ancient Europe 113:193 Archaeological Approaches to Social Change 113:268 Seminar: Archaeological Theory and Method 113:269 Seminar: Politics of the Archaeological Past
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Affiliations & Links European Association of Archaeologists Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, Lisbon Archaeological Institute of America
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