Evgenia Tsafou

Research topic during fellowship: Archaeology of Mediterranean Cuisine: Cooking Traditions from the 2nd Millennium BCE in the Aegean

Evgenia Tsafou studied History and Archaeology and obtained her Master’s degree in Prehistoric Archaeology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She completed her PhD on Minoan cooking pottery from the Middle and Late Bronze Age, at the Université catholique de Louvain. In her doctoral research, she implemented an innovative interdisciplinary methodology for the study of the function and use of the Minoan cooking vessels in Minoan Crete, combining morphological, technological, and use-wear analysis, organic residue analysis, and contextualization, which led to several publications (AAS, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports). During her doctoral research, she was a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and the Institute of Archaeology and the Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory for Archaeological Science at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, where she carried out the organic residue (microbotanical) analysis on cooking vessels. The Andrew Sherratt Fund from the University of Sheffield has also funded her to develop and implement a new methodology for the study of traces of use and the identification of different uses of ceramic vessels. She has worked on several archaeological projects in Macedonia and Crete and is currently investigating cooking practices in Crete and the Cyclades during the Bronze Age. Her current research focuses on Minoan cooking traditions, intending to reconstruct the socio-cultural aspects of cooking practices on the island of Crete and in the Aegean during the second millennium BCE and, ultimately, to better understand the origins of Mediterranean cuisine in the prehistoric Aegean.