Sergios Menelaou

Research topic during fellowship: Multifaceted Borders, Human Mobility, and Embodied Identities: Investigating Ceramic Interaction Networks in the Eastern Aegean Seaboard

Sergios Menelaou, currently the Williams Fellow in Ceramic Petrology at the Fitch Laboratory of the British School at Athens (BSA), is an archaeologist specializing in the integrated analysis of pottery from the Aegean and Cyprus. His research focuses primarily on prehistoric Aegean, Anatolian, and Cypriot archaeology, particularly on island societies and their interconnectedness.

Having pursued his undergraduate studies at the University of Cyprus (2008–2012), Sergios earned his MSc in Archaeological Materials from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield in 2013. He completed his PhD at the same institution in 2018, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Koç University ANAMED (Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations) in Istanbul from 2018 to 2019. Between 2020 and 2022, he acted as the Principal Investigator of the project titled "Borderlands as areas of mobility and connectivity during the third millennium BCE: Examining regional ceramic technologies between the east Aegean islands, western Anatolia and Cyprus" at the University of Cyprus.

Working mostly on Bronze Age pottery assemblages, Sergios employs a multifaceted methodology that integrates traditional morphostylistic approaches with laboratory-based analytical techniques, focusing on recovering technological insights into pottery production, usage, and circulation. His current research project at the BSA builds upon his previous work in the eastern Aegean through the investigation of Early Bronze Age ceramic traditions of legacy island sites such as Poliochni on Lemnos, Thermi on Lesbos, and Emporio on Chios. The overarching goal is to reconstruct the shifting mechanisms of interaction networks between these islands and their Anatolian peraiai.