Dr Matthew Fitzjohn BA, MPhil., PhD.

Personal Statement

My research is primarily focused on the Iron Age of the western Mediterranean and Classical archaeology. There are a number of key interconnecting themes that have been the focus of my research and publications in the last fifteen years. These themes include landscape, the archaeology of households, identity and cultural translation, and economies. My research experience extends beyond these themes touching on sub-disciplines outside traditional Classical archaeology including computational modeling (GIS and solid state modeling), anthropology and human geography.

My work investigates the relations between people and the places that they inhabit by developing historical geographies of everyday life at a range of scales (in domestic spaces, city and countryside). These relations are examined in a number of my published articles and my book, Building, Dwelling, and Living in Ancient Greece, which provides a detailed study of ancient Greek domestic architecture and articulates my ideas on embodied learning and the role of habitual bodily practices on identity formation across the Greek world. A second strand of my research explores the relationships between people and things; how people's interactions with the material world have shaped and transformed them.

An important part of my approach to these issues is the integration of innovative theoretical methodologies to practical fieldwork (predominantly archaeological field survey) and the application of digital technologies (including Geographical Information Systems) to investigate material and ideas. My publications on GIS have resulted in knowledge exchange activities in Italy and with European Union funded heritage research.