Overview
Rebecca is the Hirsch Postdoctoral Associate at CIAMS and a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. 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 integrates archaeological and biomolecular approaches to study how food practices changed as a result of large-scale political and economic shifts in the eastern 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. She is also interested in the intersection of archaeological science and archaeological theory and the formation of archaeological datasets, and she develops new experimental methods to map organic residue preservation in the Mediterranean.
Rebecca is the organic residue analysis specialist for the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project, Yeronisos Island Expedition, and Kissonerga-Skalia Excavation in Cyprus and the Lyktos Archaeological Project in Greece. She is a member of the Goldfarb Lab in the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell and collaborates with labs in A&S and CALS. She co-founded the graduate Archaeological Science Group at Cornell and is a former CIAMS Assistant Director. She enjoys outreach in archaeology and STEM to middle and high school students. Rebecca is happy to talk about her experiences in any of these areas.
Publications
Gerdes, Rebecca F. (Forthcoming) Dolia: The Containers That Made Rome an Empire of Wine by Caroline Cheung (Review). American Journal of Philology.
Gerdes, Rebecca F. (2024) 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
