Kaitlyn Stiles, Ph.D. candidate in anthropology (Mediterranean archaeology and bioarchaeology), was recently offered three highly prestigious awards to fund her doctoral work. She was selected for a Fulbright U.S. Student Award to Greece. From the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), Stiles was awarded the Olivia James Traveling Fellowship as well as the Harriet and Leon Pomerance Fellowship; each are given to only one candidate nationwide each year. Additionally, she was awarded the first alternate position for the Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory for Archaeological Science Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She is now in the enviable position of having to choose between the two grants from the AIA or the Fulbright U.S. Study Award to fund the data collection portion of her dissertation research in Greece.
Stiles’s doctoral project is multidisciplinary, integrating theory and method of Bronze Age Aegean archaeology, classics, and biological anthropology to examine the combined biological and social (i.e., biosocial) manifestation of Mycenaean identities in the Late Helladic IIB-IIIB phases (15-13th centuries BCE) of central Greece. This period covers the late formative period and acme of the Mycenaean palatial civilization.
The project incorporates skeletal and material cultural analyses with social theory in the study of the Mycenaean chamber tomb cemetery at Golemi Agios Georgios in East Lokris, central Greece. Specifically she will be exploring the extent to which presumed aspects of Mycenaean elite culture – high status, wealth, and prowess in war – also characterized the population in this outlying area. East Lokris did not have a palace but appears to have been conquered by an outside Mycenaean palatial state. Stiles’s work may throw light on whether this conquest resulted in voluntary acculturation on the part of East Lokrians, or whether it entailed implantation by outside elites and sub-elites.
Stiles is co-advised by Dr. Aleydis Van de Moortel in the Department of Classics and Dr. Graciela Cabana in the Department of Anthropology.