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Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies

University of Arkansas

Kevin Fisher

Home » Education » Digital Institute for Archaeology » Kevin Fisher

Postdoctoral Researcher
Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) & Department of Anthropology
JBHT 304
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR 72701
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Kevin is an anthropological archaeologist interested in the relationship between people and their built environments, urbanism and the social dynamics of ancient cities, and the application of digital technologies for recording, analyzing and visualizing archaeological phenomena. 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 complex societies in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East and specifically on the island of Cyprus. Kevin 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 communicates meanings. 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 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 taught ANTH 4903/HUMN 3923H Archaeology of Built Environments in Spring 2012 and co-directed the University of Arkansas/CAST Archaeological Field School (ANTH 4256) in Summer 2012 in Cyprus.


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)


Recent Publications
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 2012).

Fisher, K.D. In press 2013. 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.

Rogers, M., J.F. Leon, K.D. Fisher, S.W. Manning and D. Sewell. In press, 2012. Comparing similar ground-penetrating radar surveys under different soil moisture conditions at Kalavasos-Ayios-Dhimitrios, Cyprus. Archaeological Prospection 19(4).

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, 2011-12. 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. 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.

Selected Awards and Grants

National Endowment for the Humanities Grant for Mapping Ancient Cultural Landscapes Using Aerial Thermography; Co-PI w. Jesse Casana (2012-14; Award # HD-51590-12)

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)