Katina Lillios
Associate Professor
Office: 127B Macbride Hall/127 Macbride Hall
Phone: (319) 335-3023/335-0109
katina-lillios@uiowa.edu
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Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Background:
I am an anthropological archaeologist interested in the ways
that 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 are co-editing Material Mnemonics: Everyday Memory in Prehistoric Europe (Oxbow, forthcoming). 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, in which North American and European scholars working in the American Southwest (AD 900-1600) and in the Iberian Peninsula (3000-1500 BC) met for nine days to discuss the topics of histories, landscapes, bodies, gender, and art. An edited volume based on the proceedings of this seminar is forthcoming.
I am currently involved in two new research projects:
1) Excavations at the Neolithic rockshelter burial of Bolóres (Torres Vedras, Portugal). In order to better understand how Neolithic social and cultural practices impacted the lives of individual people, I began excavations at Bolóres in 2007 and plan for field seasons in 2008 and 2009. I work with University of Iowa colleagues (Joe Artz-Office of the State Archaeologist, Art Bettis-Dept of Geoscience) and students (Anna Waterman, Jonathan T. Thomas, Bryan Kendall, John Willman), Sr. Leonel Trindade (who excavated at the site in 1986), and Dr. Michael Kunst (German Archaeological Institute-Madrid). Dr. Kunst directs the excavations at the contemporary settlement of Zambujal, 2 km from Bolóres. You can read the Preliminary Report for the 2007 season of fieldwork at Bolóres here.
2) Portuguese archaeology and its colonial legacy. I am developing a new study of Portuguese archaeology and its intersection with the Portuguese colonial legacy. This work follows up on research I published on the relationship between archaeology of the Portuguese Copper Age and nationalism under the Salazar regime.
I also 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 continue to update the database when new information on plaques becomes available. Based on their formal and spatial patterning, I have suggested that the plaques recorded information about the social affiliation and genealogy of select members of society and propose they were a form of writing. I have recently completed a book on this research, entitled Heraldry for the Dead: Memory, Identity, and the Engraved Stone Plaques of Neolithic Iberia (forthcoming, 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
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Affiliations & Links European Association of Archaeologists Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, Lisbon
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