ANDREW SHAPLAND

Sir Arthur Evans Curator of Bronze Age and Classical Greece

Andrew Shapland

Contact

Email: andrew.shapland@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
ORCID: 0000-0001-6537-9179
academia.edu

University of Oxford webpages
Classics faculty
Fellow of Jesus College

Biography

Andrew Shapland read Archaeology and Anthropology at Peterhouse, Cambridge before moving to the UCL Institute of Archaeology for postgraduate studies.

In 2009 he received his PhD (Over the Horizon: Human-Animal Relations in Bronze Age Crete) and was appointed Greek Bronze Age Curator at the British Museum.

In 2018 he moved to the Ashmolean Museum as Sir Arthur Evans Curator of Bronze Age and Classical Greece.

He was co-curator of the 2019 British Museum exhibition 'Troy: Myth and Reality' and curator of the 2023 Ashmolean exhibition 'Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality'.

He is a Supernumerary Fellow in Archaeology at Jesus College, Oxford.

Andrew's research focuses on the material culture of Bronze Age Crete. He is particularly interested in depictions of animals, the subject of his 2022 monograph Human-Animal Relations in Bronze Age Crete: A History through Objects (CUP). He has been involved in fieldwork on Crete since 2005, first as a member of the Knossos Urban Landscape Project and since 2020 as co-director of excavations at Palaikastro.

Another research interest is the history of Aegean Bronze Age archaeology. Andrew is currently working on digitising the Ashmolean Museum’s Sir Arthur Evans Archive. He has also worked on the archaeological discoveries made in Macedonia by participants in the First World War Salonika Campaign.

Undergraduate: Homeric Archaeology, Archaeology of Minoan Crete, site/museum report supervision.

 

 

He has co-supervised two AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award projects:

  • British Museum/Cambridge: Rhodes and the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean world (student: Jan Sienkiewicz). Completed 2024
  • Ashmolean Museum/Bristol: Archival Fault Lines: Analysing Sir Arthur Evans’s theories of earthquake destruction and the ‘New Era’ at Knossos through archival archaeology (student: Renée Trepagnier). Ongoing

Andrew is happy to supervise in the following areas: Aegean Bronze Age archaeology, particularly Minoan Crete and the history of the discipline; approaches to human-animal relations through material culture/iconography; topics involving the Ashmolean Museum's Greek collections (Bronze Age-Classical).

Professional activities

Academic committee (research)

Editorial board

Honorary (academic) position

  • 2021 up to now, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

Other role or appointment

Archaeology; Greece; Historical Studies

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