Overview
Rebecca is the Hirsch Postdoctoral Associate at CIAMS. She earned her PhD in Classics concentrating in Classical Archaeology from Cornell in 2024. She holds a B.A. in Classics and Chemistry and an M.Sc. in Archaeological Science. Her work focuses on integrating archaeological and chemical approaches to study ancient food practices in Cyprus and Greece and on developing interdisciplinary methods to understand organic residue preservation in the Mediterranean. She is particularly interested in understanding Late Bronze Age agricultural storage in Cyprus 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.
Rebecca is the organic residue analysis specialist for the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project and the Yeronisos Island Expedition in Cyprus and the Lyktos Archaeological Project in Greece. Rebecca is a member of the Goldfarb Lab in the R.F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell and collaborates with labs in A&S and CALS. She was a co-founder of the Archaeological Science Group at Cornell, a founding member of the CIAMS Anticolonialism and Antiracism Interest Group, and a former CIAMS Assistant Director. She enjoys volunteering for outreach events in archaeology and STEM for middle and high school students. She is happy to talk about her experiences in any of these areas.
Publications
Gerdes, Rebecca F. (2025) Curating the Biomolecular Assemblage: Rethinking Organic Residue Analysis in Mediterranean Archaeology. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 37(2): 222-241. https://doi.org/10.1558/jma.33516
Gerdes, Rebecca F., Hanna Wiandt, Malak Abuhashim, Avery Williams, Bridget Childs, Jillian Goldfarb, Joe M. Regenstein, Despina Pilides, and Sturt W. Manning. (2025) Data from: Assessing the use of organic residue analysis to investigate plant oils in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean: An environmentally and archaeologically contextualized approach (Ph.D. dissertation by Rebecca F. Gerdes). [dataset] Cornell University eCommons Repository. https://doi.org/10.7298/vg43-f202
