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KEVIN D. FISHER

Digital Institute for Archaeology Fellow
Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST)

& Department of Anthropology

JBHT 304
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR 72701
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Kevin is an anthropologically-trained archaeologist interested in the relationship

between people and places. He received a PhD in Anthropology from the University

of Toronto (2007) and has since held postdoctoral fellowships at Cornell University

and Brown University. His research broadly focuses on the emergence of complex

societies in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, urbanism, and the social dynamics

of built environments. He has developed an approach to studying past built environments

that integrates theory and method from a variety of disciplines and acknowledges the

agency of both social actors and the material world they inhabit. It uses access and

visibility analyses to examine how architecture structures daily practice and interaction

and encodes and communicatesmeanings. Its aim is to re-populate and “flesh out” the

contexts in which past social interactions took place and understand the role of these

interactions in social reproduction. Kevin is currently exploring ways of integrating laser

scanning and visualization in order to better understand some of the experiential aspects

of people-built environment relationships. 

  

His field experience includes in numerous survey and excavation projects in Cyprus,
Greece, and Jordan, ranging from the Neolithic through Roman periods. At the
same time, he worked as a consulting archaeologist in southern Ontario, Canada,
supervising survey and excavation projects ranging from Archaic campsites to
historic cemeteries. He is currently co-director of the Kalavasos and Maroni Built
Environments (KAMBE) Project, an interdisciplinary project funded by the National Science
Foundation that is using archaeological geophysics, terrestrial LiDAR, visualization, and
spatial analysis to investigate the important role of urban landscapes in the profound
social transformations that took place in Late Bronze Age Cyprus (c. 1650-1100 BCE).
The project has completed three seasons of archaeogeophysical survey at the sites
of Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios and Maroni-Vournes/Tsaroukkas, urban centers in
neighboring river valleys in south-central Cyprus that flourished in the 14th and 13th
centuries BCE. CAST recently collaborated on laser scanning monumental buildings
at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios and the rapidly-eroding shoreline of the site of Tochni-
Lakksia.

 

Kevin has also worked with CAST on other projects, including a UCLA Cotsen Institute-

CAST project undertaking the the digital recording, visualization and GIS-based analysis

of the urban landscapes of the Inka centers of Cusco and Machu Picchu in Peru. In 2011

he joined a CAST team on the Brown University project at the Maya site of El Zotz,

Guatemala, to record a series of monumental stucco masks covering the facade of an

Early Classic Maya temple in the Diablo Group using structured light scanning and

photogrammetry. He is also currently working on the Digital Pompeii Project.  Kevin will

be teaching ANTH 4903/HUMN 3923H Archaeology of Built Environments in Spring 2011.

 

Recent Academic Positions

Postdoctoral Fellow in Archaeology, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the
Ancient World, cross-appointed to Dept. of Anthropology, Brown University (2010-11)

 

Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Lecturer, Department of Classics, cross-appointed to

Intercollege Archaeology Program, Cornell University (2008-2010)

 

Creekmore, A. and K.D. Fisher (eds.) Making Ancient Cities: Studies of the Production
of Space in Early Urban Environments (manuscript currently under review by Cambridge

University Press).

 

Fisher, K.D. Monumentality, Place and Social Interaction in Late Bronze Age Cyprus.
Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology Vol. 14. (Under contract to Equinox Press,
London UK; to be submitted Fall 2011).

 

Fisher, K.D. In press, 2012. Rethinking the Late Cypriot built environment: households
and communities as places of social transformation. In The Cambridge Prehistory of
the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean, A.B. Knapp and P. van Dommelen (eds.).

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Fisher, K.D., J.F. Leon, S.W. Manning, M. Rogers and D. Sewell. In press, 2011. The
Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project: introduction and preliminary report
on the 2008 and 2010 field seasons. Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus.

 

Fisher, K.D. In press. Investigating monumental social space in Late Bronze Age
Cyprus: an integrative approach. In Spatial analysis and social spaces: Interdisciplinary
Approaches to the Interpretation of Historic and Prehistoric Built Environments. E. Paliou,
U. Lieberwirth and S. Polla (eds.). Berlin: De Gruyter.

 

Fisher, K.D. 2009. Placing social interaction: an integrative approach to analyzing past
built environments. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 28: 439-57.

 

Fisher, K.D. 2009. Elite place-making and social interaction in the Late Cypriot Bronze
Age. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 22.2: 183-209.

 

Fisher, K.D. 2008. The aegeanization of Cyprus at the end of the Bronze Age: an
architectural perspective. In Cyprus, the Sea Peoples and the Eastern Mediterranean:
Regional Perspectives of Continuity and Change. T.P. Harrison (ed.). Special Issue of
Scripta Mediterranea XVII-XVIII: 81-103.

 

Fisher, K.D. 2006. Messages in stone: constructing sociopolitical inequality in Late

Bronze Age Cyprus. In Space and Spatial Analysis in Archaeology. E.C. Robertson,
J.W. Seibert, D.C. Fernandez and M.U. Zender (eds). Calgary: University of Calgary
Press and University of New Mexico Press. Pp. 123-32.

 

National Science Foundation Senior Research Grant for the Kalavasos and Maroni Built
Environments Project; Co-PI (2009-12; Award # BCS-0917732)

 

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) Postdoctoral Fellowship
(2008-10)

 

Society for American Archaeology Dissertation Award (2008)

 

Archaeological Institute of America Harriet and Leon Pomerance Fellowship (2004-
2005)

 

Full CV