Susan Alcock

She was trained, at Yale and at the University of Cambridge, in the field of classical archaeology — that is the archaeology of the circum-Mediterranean world. Her research interests chiefly target the material culture of the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia, particularly in Hellenistic and Roman times. She has also worked on the long-term history of Messenia (southern Greece), the homeland of the famed 'helots' of antiquity. Much of her research to date has revolved around themes of landscape, imperialism, sacred space, and memory. Her work attempts to straddle the usual divide of 'historian' and 'archaeologist.'

For most of her career, her fieldwork was located in Greece, and typically has taken the form of regional investigations. She is a proponent of the relatively new methodology of systematic pedestrian survey, and has pioneered the employment of this type of archaeological evidence to answer historical questions. Her fieldwork includes the urban survey of Phlius in the northeast Peloponnese (as part of the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project) and co-directorship of the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project (in Messenia, southwestern Greece).

Most recently, she has moved in new directions, establishing in 2005 the Vorotan Project, an international collaborative effort in southern Armenia. Co-directors include John Cherry (Brown University) and Mkrtich Zardarian and Armen Tonikian (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Yerevan). The goals of the project include exploring the topography and long-term trajectory of the Vorotan River watershed; archaeological techniques deployed include satellite analysis, excavation, regional survey, mortuary analyses and lithic studies.