We are pleased to inform you that the new academic year find us stronger, and with more Fellows. Maria Chountasi, Theodoros Giannopoulos, Artemis Karnava, Anastasia Papathanasiou and Vassilis Petrakis have now joined the main team of Aegeus. We thank them warmly for accepting our invitation.

CVs of the new Fellows:

Maria Chountasi

Maria Chountasi holds a Ph.D. in Archaeology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and an M.A. in Archaeology and Prehistory from the University of Sheffield. She also holds a B.A. in History and Archaeology from the University of Ioannina. Her research interests are mainly focused on multidisciplinary approaches of prehistoric material culture, with a special emphasis on the interpretation of prehistoric architecture under the prism of phenomenological anthropological perspective. Furthermore, she explores the concept of religion in Late Bronze Age societies through the study and analysis of ritual practices and performances. She has worked for many years in Ephorates of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities in Greece and she has participated in numerous excavations in Crete, Thebes and Athens. Moreover, she has participated in archaeological projects, as well as projects on various issues of contemporary art. She has a significant number of scientific publications and presentations in Greek and international scientific conferences.

Theodoros Giannopoulos

Theodoros G. Giannopoulos was born in Thessaloniki in 1979 and grew up in Patras. He graduated from the Department of History, Archaeology and History of Art of the University of Athens (2000) and received his PhD degree in Prehistory and Protohistory from the University of Heidelberg (2007). His Phd thesis entitled The Last Elite of the Mycenaean World. Achaea in the Mycenaean Age and the Phenomenon of Warrior Burials in the 12th-11th Century B.C. was published in 2008 in German (Dr. Rudolf Habelt, Bonn). Upon completion of the Phd he turned to the post-doctoral research, the product of which was the monograph „The Greeks: Whence and When?“ The Mainstream Scientific Responses and the Present State of Research on the First Beginning of the Greek Civilization (Crete University Press, Herakleion 2012, 2013 Award of the Greek Academy of Sciences). The book was very positively received by the scientific community, the broader readership and the Greek media. Theodoros Giannopoulos is currently working as an Adjunct Tutor and Module Coordinator in the Programme of Study “Studies in Hellenic Culture” at the Open University of Cyprus, while he is actively engaged in research, writing and translation work. His research interests include the Aegean Bronze Age, the Indo-European problem and the prehistory of languages as well as aspects of archaeological theory, epistemology and cultural anthropology of past and present societies.

Artemis Karnava

Artemis Karnava is a researcher at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, where she is one of the editors of the corpus of Cypriot syllabic inscriptions of the 1^st mill. BC for the series Inscriptiones Graecae. She has a BA from the Department of History and Archaeology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (1993), an MA from the Department of Archaeology of the University of Sheffield, UK (1995) and a PhD, with a thesis on the Cretan Hieroglyphic script of the 2^nd mill. BC, from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium (2000). Her research interests include archaeology and epigraphy of the eastern Mediterranean from the 3^rd to the 1^st mill. BC. She has excavated extensively in different sites in Greece as a contract employee of the Greek Ministry of Culture, she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Crete and has done post-doctoral research at the universities of Cambridge and Vienna.

Anastasia Papathanasiou

Anastasia Papathanasiou (first degree in archaeology, University of Athens, 1988 and Ph.D. in physical anthropology, University of Iowa, 1999) is an archaeologist of the Greek Ministry of Culture in the Ephorate of Paleoanthropology and Speleology. Her research interests focus on the areas of bioarchaeology, paleopathology, paleodiet, stables isotope analysis, mortuary practices, and prehistoric archaeology. She conducts physical anthropological and archaeological research in Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in Greece. Her publications include over 50 papers and three books: “A bioarchaeological analysis of Neolithic Alepotrypa Cave, Greece” (Monograph in British Archaeological Reports, 2001), a co-edited a volume Archaeodiet in the Greek World: Dietary Reconstruction from Stable Isotope Analysis (Hesperia Supplement 49; Occasional Wiener Laboratory Series 2, 2015) and another co-edited a volume “Neolithic Alepotrypa Cave in the Mani, Greece: in honor of George Papathanassopoulos” (Oxbow Books, 2018).

Vassilis Petrakis

Vassilis Petrakis received his PhD from the University of Athens in 2010. Since 2007 he teaches courses on language, literature and history in Middle Education. His research interests focus on the study of Aegean political economies of the 2^nd millennium BC from a variety of perspectives, anthropological, archaeological or epigraphic. The study of Aegean scripts and the administrations they served is the principal part of his research activity, presentations and publications. He has offered undergraduate and graduate seminars on these topics at the University of Athens, the International Hellenic University and the University of Texas at Austin (Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory). He participates in excavation and study projects at the Bronze Age settlements of Koukonisi on Lemnos, the Mycenaean settlement of Iklaina in Messenia, the Minoan palace of Zakros in East Crete and the Mycenaean palatial centre of Ayios Vasileios in Lakonia. In Zakros he organizes the restudy and final publication of the Minoan inscriptions and administrative documents, whose preliminary part was supported by the Michael Ventris Memorial Award by the London Institute of Classical Studies in 2011-2012. In Ayios Vasileios he is involved in the study and final publication of Linear B inscriptions and other administrative documents.