Congratulations Maria on successfully completing your PhD at the University of Southampton!

Maria started her PhD with a scholarship from the Foundation in January 2018 at the University of Southampton, under the supervision of Dr. Julian Whitewright, Dr. Anna Collar, and Dr. Jaco Weinstock. Her PhD thesis entitled “To fish or not to fish? The case study of fishing activity in Cyprus” attempts for the first time to gather all the available evidence for fishing (e.g. harpoons or spears, fish hooks, stone, clay, bronze or lead weights for net or line and traps) in Cyprus in a single body of evidence in order to interpret correctly the archaeologically neglected aspect of the fishery.

Maria’s thesis attempts to understand the relationship between fishers and their maritime environment and how this relationship affected the technological and ideological development of fishing activity in Cyprus in the past. To achieve these objectives, a unique multi-disciplinary approach was adopted, in which maritime archaeo-ichthyologic data, ancient textual sources, iconographical representations, and geospatial analysis are applied. Environmental, marine biological, and ethnographic data is combined with the archaeo-ichthyologic evidence in order to illuminate aspects that are invisible in archaeological records and help further the understanding of fishers’ mental maps.

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