About

Catherine Kearns is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and the College at the University of Chicago. Her research examines the intersections between social and environmental change in Mediterranean landscapes, with a focus on Bronze-Iron Age social, cultural, and political history. She analyzes land-use practices, rural economies, and experiences with changing climates, particularly through her first book project, The Rural Landscapes of Archaic Cyprus: An Archaeology of Environmental and Social Change, published by Cambridge in 2023. Her work emphasizes the political and social dimensions of landscape change and explores how modern conversations on human-environment relationships can engage with historical evidence. Kearns is engaged in a current project on environmental histories of sustainability, conducting comparative analyses of ancient Mediterranean households from the first millennium BCE to examine histories of precarity and practices of livability. In addition to survey archaeology, she studies environmental history, urbanism and ruralism, gender, and concepts of space, place, and geography in antiquity. She teaches courses in archaeological theory, the cultural, political, and socioeconomic history of the ancient Mediterranean, and in the texts of Strabo and Pausanias. Her fieldwork includes co-directing the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project in Cyprus, utilizing geophysics, survey, excavation, and geospatial analysis to identify Iron Age rural settlements. She has been awarded grants from ACLS, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and her university for her archaeological work. Kearns also serves as co-editor of the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology and as a National Lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Archaeology
• Geography
• History
• Civil engineering
• Engineering
• Ethnology
• Ancient history

Selected publications

• Climate the Antagonist

  American Anthropologist · 2025-07-15 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Some days I think that if we lose the climate battle, it'll be due in no small part to this defeatism among the comfortable in the global north, while people in frontline communities continue to fight like hell for survival. Pugilistic or militaristic metaphors are everywhere in conversations on environmental crises, not least in the perceived trenches of climate change. The “fight like hell” that Solnit incites belongs to a broader semantic field of agonistic conflict and “war talk” on the rise in public discourse about impending climate-related changes and political decision-making (e.g., Mangat and Dalby 2018).1 This battle rhetoric is provocative, but often elliptical: whom or what is the fight against? Whose battles? Many who deploy this language in relation to climate change mitigation, like Solnit, are really depicting a fight against fossil fuel company executives and agents, neoliberal leaders, private equity firms, and capitalist institutions who block progressive policies for reducing global carbon emissions to the mystical “net-zero.” War talk like this thus often targets the figures or apparatus responsible for anthropogenic climate change (Moore and Antonacci 2023; see e.g., Mann 2021) (Figure 1). But for many publics, it slips into a fight against climate, pitting the survival of humanity against material phenomena like weather events or quantified CO2 levels, and aims to marshal a range of tactics—from reducing everyday meat consumption to lobbying for renewable energies. In doing so, the language converts what many might rightly recognize as a multiscalar and political problem, like climate or climate change, into a reified, singular antagonist. Such metaphors are deemed important for rallying publics to the cause of fighting for present and future conditions, and for regrouping people away from the ranks of defeatism or doomism. At another more historical register, they belong to a wider “renaturing” turn toward biopolitics and environmental determinism by those who would see human history as a series of human-nature conflicts driving civilizational rise and fall (on determinism and renaturing, see e.g., González-Ruibal 2018; Arponen et al. 2019). With all due disrespect to Jared Diamond (2005). If climate or climate change is akin to an oppositional battle “out there,” it can be compartmentalized and categorized in distinction from other kinds of agency. Such a move reinforces our long-lived, persistent Western binary of nature versus culture. That rhetorical division is not just intellectually insufficient but has real material effects, as policymakers can claim that they are tackling the “climate problem” reified and quantified as carbon emissions, not the neoliberal capitalist relations and problems of social and environmental justice that oppress many communities, especially in the Global South (Sultana 2022). That move also implies that we all agree on what “climate” is and how to quantify it, as if it is a universal, a familiar linguistic trick of the Global North. But universality is constructed and created with the authority of some—standard Anglophone definitions of climate, for instance, refer to an average of temperature and precipitation over a region, usually based on meteorological records.2 As others note, such universality tends to obscure the scalar complexities and grounded particularities that condition how humans engage with the world around them, from local experiences to varied and structurally uneven encounters with regional, global, and even planetary systems (see Masco 2010; and the ideas of Gilheany, Barnett, Stewart, and Hunter in this forum). Is climate, in the way this sort of rhetoric normatively conceptualizes it, a universal construction? Is it transhistorical? Is it rather a blend of folk concepts, science, and political frameworks? And for some of the questions posed by this forum—how should archaeologists write and talk about climate? Do deep histories of something we could call climate matter, in these fraught conversations and in an age of deepening anxiety, of risk, of insecurity, in which the militarization of nature has already shaped our understandings of planetary crisis (Masco 2010)? They do matter, but we ought to be aware of the momentum of agonistic rhetoric in conversations that offer deeper histories as relevant material for our current experiences or desires for mitigation. We are in an age of grand narratives, macroscalar and nearly always masculinist projections of human history as a progressivist story of winning or losing against climate. Recent calls for thinking with planetary scales of history or “earth systems humanities” contribute to this wave of abstraction, reinvoking debates on the merits of smaller or larger scales of historiography (e.g., Chakrabarty 2021). We are seeing a return to systems thinking, for example, in the increasingly varied and often vague use of terms like resilience and sustainability (e.g., Jacobson 2022). Agonistic histories thus find audiences. They promote normative values of climate change in the past: “Bad” climate changes collided with human practices and created Malthusian tipping points that fueled or triggered societal collapse. That green arithmetic not only poorly constrains our historiographical lens to only look for crisis and catastrophe in the past, but equally has tended to reinforce a myopia of climate crisis as we strain to predict and imagine presents and futures (Hulme 2011; see also Hunter in this forum). Archaeologists have been working diligently to call out macroscalar determinism and functionalism for their inherent weaknesses in explaining historical processes and in accounting for the messiness and diversity of human agency. Take, for example, many of the wonderful critiques of the historiographical problem of the proposed (and now voted-down) Anthropocene epoch: Archaeologists rightly point out the dimensionality of human-environment relationships across millennia, the complex and unexpected scales of exploitation and extraction of resources associated with empires and colonialism in the shift toward industrialization, and the political and cultural variability of decision-making in settlement and land use practices (e.g., Morrison 2018). A billion Black anthropocenes or none, as Kathryn Yusoff (2019) has put it. And we are positioned well to highlight the incredible particularism and contingencies of these interrelationships as well as their unevenness and fitfulness: how choices in what and how to consume, produce, or discard are made by some at the expense of others; how human-environment relationships are imagined and made, and equally make complex societies at varying interrelated scales (see Stewart Gilheany this forum). While there has been growing pushback to the flatness of the Anthropocene, climate change remains, in the rhetoric of the Global North, reified. We can also see this in archaeological applications that aim to study how climate changes triggered economic and political developments (e.g., Weiberg and Finné 2018) or in newly branded fields, like the “history of climate and society” (Degroot et al. 2021). Climate changes—from wet to dry or from hot to cool—populate these histories as the antagonists or oppositional structures to human societal action. There are several trajectories behind formulations like this, especially something like the bias toward (or the real preference for) the seemingly objective, scientific reconstruction of ancient climates done by paleoclimate scientists who use regional proxies to describe material conditions. What is also at stake is the reification of natural records as climate, rather than as proxies for particular phenomena—lake sediment formation, pollen accumulation, subsurface hydrologies—records that are made via all sorts of methodological compromises and statistical estimations. What results is only, at best, a sketch of trends, not climate. The reification of past climates works to create an abstraction that can be measured according to certain agreed-upon standards between various kinds of disciplines, all of which are up for debate, and relevant and valid for certain kinds of research. But in the context of relentless economic growth and progressivist stories of accumulation and capitalism, we have also started to fetishize a modern, Western, scientifically identifiable climate (Moore and Antonacci 2023). This kind of reification obscures the political and social relations that generate, reproduce, or alter environmental changes as well as further instantiates the idea of universal climate change (Sultana 2022; Whyte 2020). Climate is a complex construct that mediates human-environment relationships, with historically contingent politics and cultural dynamics, in often uneven ways (Kearns 2023). It, in other words, has sociohistorical structures that form through material and immaterial relations, a mediation emerging from engagements with the world that come to structure how humans think about weather and environments through norms, habits, and practices. When we turn to trying to understand diverse human-environment dynamics, we should not take those relations for granted but should make them the primary focus of analysis through the lens of political ecology (e.g., Morehart et al. 2018): How did those relations reproduce social difference? Whose climate relations are we telling or historicizing, and whose are omitted? Archaeologists could intervene in discourses that aim to galvanize diverse publics precisely through our investigations on the uneven relations and scalar formations that forge environmental and climate changes, such as the relentlessly deteriorating crises enacted through capitalism and progressivist fundamentalism. As archaeologists and historians, we are responsible for revealing the messiness, variability, and dimensionality of human-environment relationships throughout Earth's history, especially those prior to or outside capitalism; by fracturing Western binaries or convenient rise and fall histories; by resisting the universality imposed on normative concepts like climate; by bearing witness to histories of structural inequalities (see Hauser et al. 2018). Archaeologists are well suited not only to attend to the material mediations of human relations with nonhuman worlds and to introduce theoretical challenges to the reification of past phenomena but also to help others examine the past on its own terms (e.g., Cabral and Gaggioli this forum). That move entails raising caution about the nostalgia of past climates and an abstracted “danger” of future ones. We can contribute not just to building better models of the present and future by drawing on rich archaeologies of land use history (e.g., the LandCover6K project, Morrison et al. 2021 and this forum), but also by using multiscalar investigations to weaken assumptions about how prevailing regional climatic conditions would have antagonized human groups. In my own fieldwork on the island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, for example, intergenerational practices of water and soil management in semiarid watersheds reveal diverse localized orientations to the politics of resource use during the Iron Age (Kearns and Georgiadou 2021; Kearns 2023). What would appear as “risky” or unstable land, for example, in the highly gypseous and weather-dependent soils west of the nonperennial Vasilikos River, became places for community rootedness and gathering. Such records provide counternarratives to commonly held ideas that Mediterranean microclimates acted in the same ways as external triggers to productivity and suggest instead how humans construct and perceive climates of their own making. The consensus of Western science is neither encompassing of global humanity nor historiographically adequate. And as a neoliberal and imperialist project, it is obfuscating and self-serving. The war talk that aims to preserve the commons by enlisting publics against fossil fuel executives is not in itself necessarily problematic, but in its abstractions of climate, it can risk perpetuating the same kinds of hegemonic discourse that promote agonistic histories of climate and society concurrent with late-stage capitalism (see Hutchings and La Salle 2015). We should study struggles, for example, in the uneven politics of class, race, and gender driving human-environment interactions, while continuously asking to and for whom we are accountable (Cameron 2012; Shaw 2016; Stahl 2020). We should, then, challenge the idealist metaphor of “history as justice” in popular discourse about environmental crises, such as Pope Francis's admonition in 2017 that “history will judge our decision” about denying the realities of climate science, or a letter penned by youth activists Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate that warns the global media that their decisions today will be adjudicated by “history.”3 Our discipline might know better than others that we cannot romanticize nor turn to an abstract “capital H” history to act as judge of our decisions or to defer moral action now. We, as archaeologists, produce our archives and narratives of the past (Hauser et al. 2018). As we have seen over the last decade especially, archaeologists are epistemically confronting the problems of scale—human and nonhuman—exploring futurity, temporality, and horizons of possibility across material and immaterial relations (e.g., Yao 2019). The ethics of doing archaeology and environmental history today should involve eschewing militaristic binaries by studying and uplifting other forms of situated knowledge and by highlighting the dangers of yielding to progressivist or providential time or to abstractions of externalized, antagonistic climates. I thank R. S. Hunter and A. Gaggioli for the invitation to join this important conversation, to J. Kearns for teaching me about war talk, and to the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at the University of Chicago for inspirations to think about past and future commons. All errors or omissions are my own.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Everyday Climates: Household Archaeologies and the Politics of Scale

  Heritage · 2025-06-14 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The small scale is recognized as a necessary rebuttal to macroscalar narratives of climate–society relationships in the past, and archeologists and historians have increasingly turned to advocating smaller and shorter scales of analysis and interpretation, from “microclimates” to interannual droughts and single settlement histories. Such provocations rightly caution against the dangers of oversimplification and determinism in recent planetary or Earth-systems approaches to human history, as well as push scholars to acknowledge human-scale experiences: weather, seasonality, landscape change. When it comes to smaller-scale remains, however, like those of household practices, we often consider them data or proxies that validate larger-scale arguments about societal persistence or economic vulnerability. Yet the material and ideational ways that people in premodern worlds made sense of their surroundings, especially via gendered and class-based rhythms of production and consumption, were deeply entwined in the politics of everyday household life. What would a household archeology of climate entail? In this paper I highlight how households themselves were critical sites of environmental construction, experience and history-making through a selection of examples of archeological work from the Mediterranean. I argue that archeologists can critically rethink themes of persistence and adaptation by taking seriously the scalar constructions and varied politics of domestic life.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Beyond metrics of resilience and survival in Mediterranean landscape archaeologies

  Archaeological Dialogues · 2025-06-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In recent years, alongside increasing interest in collapse narratives, Mediterranean landscape archaeologists have turned to resilience theory and concepts like sustainability to examine the complexity of social responses to environmental stress and to counter a predominant focus on catastrophism and decline. Yet the revamping of systems theory has its pitfalls, most notably in its reductionist language, its sidelining of human agency and its privileging of normative claims of success or failure. In this paper I build on cross-disciplinary critiques of resilience to highlight problems with metrics of stability or vulnerability, macrohistorical functionalism, patchy material chronologies and the obscuring of social dynamics. I argue that research on past human–environment relationships needs more attention to landscape time and smaller-scale practices, and advocate studying the political dimensions that structured how past communities created and managed liveable conditions in uneven ways.

  PublisherDOI

• :<i>Trench Warfare at Enkomi: Personalities, Politics and Science in Cypriot Archaeology</i>

  American Journal of Archaeology · 2024-04-09

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• :<i>Athens at the Margins: Pottery and People in the Early Mediterranean World</i>

  Classical Philology · 2023-01-26

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Rural Landscapes of Archaic Cyprus

  2022 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Geography
  • History

  The ninth to the fifth centuries BCE saw a series of significant historical transformations across Cyprus, especially in the growth of towns and in developments in the countryside. In this book, Catherine Kearns argues that changing patterns of urban and rural sedentism drove social changes as diverse communities cultivated new landscape practices. Climatic changes fostered uneven relationships between people, resources like land, copper, and wood, and increasingly important places like rural sanctuaries and cemeteries. Bringing together a range of archaeological, textual, and scientific evidence, the book examines landscapes, environmental history, and rural practices to argue for their collective instrumentality in the processes driving Iron Age political formations. It suggests how rural households managed the countryside, interacted with the remains of earlier generations, and created gathering spaces alongside the development of urban authorities. Offering new insights into landscape archaeologies, Dr Kearns contributes to current debates about society's relationships with changing environments.

  PublisherDOI

• Rural Complexities: Comparative Investigations at Small Iron Age Sites in South-Central Cyprus

  Journal of Field Archaeology · 2021 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Archaeology
  • Geography

  Archaeological survey methods combined with geophysical reconnaissance and test excavations offer systematic ways to shed light on ancient landscapes and settlements in regions considered passive “backwaters” on the edges of more well-known states or urban configurations. For the island of Cyprus, such rural places developing during the Iron Age (ca. 11th–4th centuries b.c.) are understudied, despite evidence for diverse and complex regional occupation patterns. This paper presents preliminary results of investigations in the Vasilikos and Maroni River valleys of south-central Cyprus and discusses the archaeological traces of emerging small-scale communities on the eastern edges of the polity of Amathus. Recent work incorporating legacy data reveals not only diverse taphonomies of rural landscapes, but also heterogeneous activities marked by investment in rural commodities, as well as by ritual and mortuary practices. Such investigations allow archaeologists to reassess assumptions of static hinterlands and interrogate instead the recursive generation of urban and rural formations.

  PublisherDOI

• Archaeological assessment reveals Earth’s early transformation through land use

  Science · 2019-08-29 · 588 citations

  articleOpen access

  Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 years before the present (yr B.P.) to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists by 3000 years ago, considerably earlier than the dates in the land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by more than 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological expertise and data quality, which peaked for 2000 yr B.P. and in traditionally studied and wealthier regions. Archaeological reconstruction of global land-use history illuminates the deep roots of Earth's transformation and challenges the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that large-scale anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly a recent phenomenon.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Contents

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-04-15

  paratextOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• 9. Discerning “Favorable” Environments: Science, Survey Archaeology, and the Cypriot Iron Age

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-04-15 · 7 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Sturt W. Manning

  Cornell University

  4 shared

• Pauline Sebillaud

  Jilin University

  2 shared

• Georgia M. Andreou

  University of Southampton

  2 shared

• Anna Georgiadou

  University of Cyprus

  2 shared

• John W. Ives

  1 shared

• Keir Strickland

  La Trobe University

  1 shared

• David Sewell

  1 shared

• David Wright

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• ACLS
• Loeb Classical Library Foundation
• university grants