Biography
I completed my BA in Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Oxford, before moving to University College London to undertake an MA in Mediterranean Archaeology. I stayed at UCL for my doctoral studies, receiving my PhD in 2022 with a thesis titled ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea: Landscapes of Settlement, Subsistence and Funerary Practice in Later Bronze Age and Iron Age Crete’.
From 2022-2024, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. I returned to the UK to join the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge in 2024 as a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow.
Research
My research to date has focussed on the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Aegean, particularly the island of Crete. In my work, I have made particular use of digitised quantitative and spatial datasets to investigate aspects of settlement patterning, demography, agricultural economy, interregional connections, and burial practices. I am particularly interested in the landscape context of societal trajectories in the Mediterranean region.
In my role as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, I will be investigating the development of urban communities in the Iron Age Mediterranean, specifically the southern Aegean, Etruria and Sicily. Integrating analyses of, at the macro-scale, demographic and environmental dynamics, at the meso-scale, regional settlement systems, and at the micro-scale, individual site histories, this project will look to contextualise local developments against wider trends, and offer insights on the nature, variability, causes and implications of urbanisation in the first millennium BCE.
Publications
Pollard, D. 2023. The history of settlement in Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Crete: a review and synthesis. Journal of Greek Archaeology 8: 103–45.
Pollard, D. 2023. From the Ground Up: Modelling Agricultural Landscapes in Early Iron Age East Crete Using Legacy Survey Data and GIS. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 36: 42–70.
Pollard, D. 2022. An Icarus’ Eye View? GIS Approaches to the Human Landscape of Early Iron Age Crete. In E. Doğan, M.P.L. Pereira, O. Antczak, M. Lin, P. Thompson & C. Alday (eds), Diversity in Archaeology: Proceedings of the Cambridge Annual Student Archaeology Conference 2020/2021: 319–39. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Pollard, D. 2021. All equal in the presence of death? A quantitative analysis of the Early Iron Age cemeteries of Knossos, Crete. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 63: 101320.
