Catherine Keane is a late antique and Byzantine archaeologist and art historian. She completed her PhD on the archaeology of the economic activity of late antique churches in Cyprus (4th-9th centuries). This was published in a monograph in 2024 with Brill (More than a Church: Late Antique Ecclesiastical Complexes in Cyprus), with another chapter of the dissertation published as an article in 2021. 

Qualifications:

• PhD: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (Late antique and Byzantine art history; Classical Archaeology)
• M.Sc.: University of Edinburgh (Mediterranean Archaeology)
• BA: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Anthropology; Classical Archaeology)

Her postdoctoral research has taken place in:

• Nicosia (Cyprus) at the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute,
• Istanbul (Türkiye) at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED),
• Marburg (Germany) at Philipps-Universität Marburg,
• Tübingen (Germany) in the DFG-funded project Migrations and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages at the Eberhart Karls Universität Tübingen,
• Münster (Germany) at the Cyprus Institute of the Universität Münster, and
• Sydney (Australia) at Macquarie University.

During these positions she has researched late antique crisis on the south coast of Anatolia, resilience theory, the archaeology of domestic and industrial workshops, chemical analysis of metal workshops in Nea Paphos, conceptual approaches to sacred landscapes, olive oil production, the early church’s administration of mines and quarries, applications of New Institutional Economics, and textual sources of Byzantine ecclesiastical economies (to be added to her database of archaeological material across the Eastern Mediterranean). Among her research project and research network participation are: Life at the Furnace Copper smelting ecosystems in the north-western Troodos (Copenhagen University), Our Daily Bread: Christian Economies in the Early Medieval West (600-900 CE), Socio-Ecological Approaches to the History and Archaeology of Anatolia (DAI, ANAMED, CCHRI), Liquid Gold: Olive Oil in Antiquity (University of Warsaw), and Nea Paphos and the gap centuries of late antiquity.

Dr Keane has excavated in Wisconsin (US), Yorkshire (UK), Carnuntum (Austria), Katalymmata ton Plakoton (Cyprus), and Nea Paphos (Cyprus), among others, and is planning future fieldwork in the Eastern Mediterranean. She is also a co-director of the excavations of the Paphos Theatre Archaeological Project.

Her current project focuses on water management and crisis in late antiquity and the Byzantine period.

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Prior publications