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Department of Archaeology

 

Biography

I completed my BA in Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Oxford, before moving to University College London to undertake an MA in Mediterranean Archaeology. I stayed at UCL for my doctoral studies, receiving my PhD in 2022 with a thesis titled ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea: Landscapes of Settlement, Subsistence and Funerary Practice in Later Bronze Age and Iron Age Crete’. 

From 2022-2024, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. I returned to the UK to join the McDonald Institute in 2024 as a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow.
 

Research

My research to date has focussed on the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Aegean, particularly the island of Crete. In my work, I have made particular use of digitised quantitative and spatial datasets to investigate aspects of settlement patterning, demography, agricultural economy, interregional connections, and burial practices. I am particularly interested in the landscape context of societal trajectories in the Mediterranean region.

In my role as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the McDonald, I will be investigating the development of urban communities in the Iron Age Mediterranean, specifically the southern Aegean, Etruria and Sicily. Integrating analyses of, at the macro-scale, demographic and environmental dynamics, at the meso-scale, regional settlement systems, and at the micro-scale, individual site histories, this project will look to contextualise local developments against wider trends, and offer insights on the nature, variability, causes and implications of urbanisation in the first millennium BCE.
 

Key Publications

Key publications: 
  • Pollard, D. 2023. The history of settlement in Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Crete: a review and synthesis. Journal of Greek Archaeology 8: 103–45.
  • Pollard, D. 2023. From the Ground Up: Modelling Agricultural Landscapes in Early Iron Age East Crete Using Legacy Survey Data and GIS. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 36: 42–70.
  • Pollard, D. 2022. An Icarus’ Eye View? GIS Approaches to the Human Landscape of Early Iron Age Crete. In E. Doğan, M.P.L. Pereira, O. Antczak, M. Lin, P. Thompson & C. Alday (eds), Diversity in Archaeology: Proceedings of the Cambridge Annual Student Archaeology Conference 2020/2021: 319–39. Oxford: Archaeopress.
  • Pollard, D. 2021. All equal in the presence of death? A quantitative analysis of the Early Iron Age cemeteries of Knossos, Crete. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 63: 101320.

Job Titles

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

General Info

Not available for consultancy
Research Expertise / Fields of study: 
Archaeological Theory
Computational and Quantitative Archaeology
Environmental Archaeology, Geoarchaeology, and Landscape studies

Contact Details

dp753[a]cam.ac.uk
The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
Downing Street
Cambridge
CB2 3ER

Affiliations

Person keywords: 
Mediterranean
Urbanism
Iron Age
Landscape
Multi-scalar Analysis
Subjects: 
Archaeology
Themes: 
Environment, Landscapes and Settlement
Rethinking Complexity
Geographical areas: 
Aegean
Europe
Mediterranean
Periods of interest: 
Classical - Roman
Copper/Bronze Age
Iron Age