Rebecca Gerdes

Overview

Rebecca is the Hirsch Postdoctoral Associate at CIAMS and a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. She holds a PhD in Classics from Cornell (2024), a B.A. in Classics and Chemistry, and an M.Sc. in Archaeological Science. Her work integrates archaeological and biomolecular approaches to study how food practices changed as a result of large-scale political and economic shifts in the eastern Mediterranean. She leads the Cypriot Bronze Age Storage Practices Project (CBASPP) and is also involved in projects investigating the role of food and organic products in funerary practices in Archaic Crete and Hellenistic and Roman Cyprus. She also investigates the interplay between archaeological science and archaeological theory as well as how scholars transform archaeological datasets into narratives about the human past, and she draws from food chemistry, soil and crop sciences, and chemical engineering to develop new experimental archaeology methods for understanding the preservation of ancient biomolecules in the Mediterranean. 

Rebecca is the organic residue analysis specialist for the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project, Yeronisos Island Expedition, and Kissonerga-Skalia Excavation in Cyprus and the Lyktos Archaeological Project in Greece. She serves as the Lab Safety Officer and GC-MS instrument manager for the Goldfarb Lab and collaborates with labs in A&S and CALS. She co-founded the graduate Archaeological Science Group at Cornell and is a former CIAMS Assistant Director. She enjoys outreach in archaeology and STEM to middle and high school students. Rebecca is happy to talk about her experiences in any of these areas.