Jelena Živković is a postdoctoral fellow specialising in the post-medieval archaeology of the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. She focuses on the examination of ceramic production and consumption practices in the Ottoman Empire with the aim to explore the topics of Ottomanisation, craft organisation in urban and rural centres and industrialisation. Her research approach is cross-disciplinary and often combines archaeology, materials science and history.
Jelena holds a PhD from UCL (2020) in addition to an MA in Archaeology of the Arab and Islamic World from UCL (2014), an MA in Archaeology from Belgrade University (2011) and a BA in Archaeology from Belgrade University (2010). Her PhD presents the first archaeological study of Ottomanisation in the Balkans seen through changes in production technology of common wares from Belgrade between the 14th-17th centuries.
Since joining the Cyprus Institute in 2019, Jelena has been working on the project ‘Byzantine and Ottoman ceramic workshops in the Eastern Mediterranean’ funded by the A.G. Leventis Foundation (PI Prof Thilo Rehren). The project aims to address the place of ceramic workshops in urban and rural economies of the Eastern Mediterranean between the 15th-20th centuries. It includes archaeological ceramics from several sites in Cyprus (Nicosia, Ayia Napa, Larnaca and Paphos) and Greece (Thessaloniki). This is the first systematic and interdisciplinary study of post-medieval ceramics in the region that includes the classification and quantification of ceramic wares from the existing collections in Cyprus and Greece as well as scientific analyses carried out by ceramic petrography, X-Ray fluorescence analysis, scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectroscopy and lead isotope analysis.
In the past Jelena also undertook research on the consumption of Iznik Ware in Ottoman Belgrade (dating to the 16th-17th centuries) and the ceramic production in SE Arabia (from the 17th-20th centuries) that brought to light the first evidence on the use of lead-barium glaze in Islamic lands.