Professor Alessandro Launaro
- Professor of Roman Archaeology
- Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Gonville & Caius College
Location
- Faculty of Classics, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA, al506@cam.ac.uk
About
I was educated at the University of Pisa, where I studied Classical Archaeology (specialising in ancient topography and landscape archaeology) and then pursued a PhD in Ancient History (with a project on the demography of Roman Italy). My very close engagement with British academia effectively started as an ERASMUS undergraduate student at the University of Leicester, and further developed as a visiting postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge. I joined the Faculty of Classics in 2009, first as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, then as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, and I was elected to a University Lectureship in 2013, becoming Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in 2018 and Professor of Roman Archaeology in 2024.
Research
I am a classical archaeologist with an expertise in Roman archaeology, landscape archaeology and ancient topography. I have a specific research interest in the archaeology and history of Roman Italy, cast against the long-term political, cultural, social and economic transformations of the broader Mediterranean world, from the Hellenistic/Republican period to Late Antiquity. I am especially fascinated by the dynamics of local continuity and change in response to broader historical processes, whether political, cultural or economic.
Much of my research lies at the intersection of archaeology and history (a reflection of my undergraduate and postgraduate studies), as I am indeed eager to combine material and textual evidence into an interpretive synthesis of higher level, as I have done for my research on the demography of Roman Italy and my current fieldwork project at the Roman town of Interamna Lirenas (Central Italy). In line with my strong interdisciplinary inclinations, I have since developed a most fruitful collaboration with colleagues from applied mathematics and computer science aimed at unleashing the immense processing power of computer-aided image analysis to the study and classification of archaeological objects and features.
I am also an active field archaeologist, with over 20 years of experience in the application of a whole range of methods and techniques, ranging from excavation to field survey, from geophysical prospection to digital recording and modelling of buildings and objects. Having engaged with very different archaeological and environmental contexts across Italy – from the uplands of Liguria to coastal Tuscany, from the hills of Marche to the lowlands of Latium – I am thoroughly aware of how meaningful the relationship between human groups and their environment may be, an aspect which my fieldwork is specifically aimed at exploring in both its urban and rural dimensions.
At postgraduate level I have been supervising students working on different aspects of Roman archaeology and history, including (but not limited to) Roman Mediterranean ports at the intersection of political and technological power dynamics, the nature of immigrant communities in Rome, the spread of religious cults across the Roman Mediterranean, the transformations of pre-Roman landscapes in Etruria and Samnium, settlement patterns and tenure arrangements in the countryside of Roman Italy, spatial analysis of the road-system of Roman Britain, and the transformations of Roman foodways as indicated by distribution and development of table- and cooking-ware pottery in Italy.
A significant part of my teaching and supervision is delivered through fieldwork activities taking place over the summer, which are open to the participation of both undergraduate and postgraduate students of the Faculty of Classics.
Teaching and supervision
As part of my undergraduate teaching I deliver lectures and modules about archaeological methods and techniques, the integration of material and textual evidence, the archaeology of Rome, Italy and the Mediterranean (with specific emphasis on urbanism and architecture, rural landscapes, the economy and material culture). I routinely supervise on topics in Roman art and archaeology (and sometimes Roman history), and I have supervised dissertations on Roman topics including (but not limited to) the phenomenology of the Athenian acropolis in the Roman period, votive anatomical terracottas in Hellenistic Italy, technical treatises on poliorcetics and the fortresses in Greek Sicily, the technology and development of roofed theatres in the Roman world, the archaeology of Roman time-keeping, the social role of marbles in elite benefactions, and divergent urban landscapes in Roman Judaea.