Kyriaki Tsirtsi joined the Cyprus Institute in 2017 when she enrolled for her PhD, after receiving her MA in Archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean: Greece, Egypt and the Near East from the University of the Aegean, Greece (2017), her MA in Historical Research, Teaching and New Technologies from the Ionian University, Greece (2014) and her Bachelor’s degree in History and Archaeology from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece (2007). Kyriaki has worked as a contract archaeologist in excavations conducted by the Greek Ministry of Culture (Ephorate of Antiquities of Ancient Corinth); as an archaeobotanist, she has participated in international field projects in Greece and has collaborated with the Universities of Cambridge, Copenhagen, Brussels, Vienna, Toulouse, and the Dickinson College (USA), at the sites of Mycenae, Sikyon, Crete, Keros, Delphi and Pheneos.
For her PhD project, Kyriaki is affiliated with the Danish archaeological Project “Finding Old Sikyon”, for which she was awarded a very competitive 3-year fellowship by the Carlsberg Foundation of Denmark. Her PhD, supervised by Dr. Evi Margaritis, is focused on the agricultural products and domestic pottery where they were processed, stored and cooked at the site of Sikyon in the NE Peloponnese, Greece. Through this interdisciplinary study, her PhD makes it possible to reenact the kitchen as a functional area with a central role in the life of the settlement and not just as a location, in combination with the agricultural practices and dietary habits. Kyriaki’s principal research interests cover the reconstruction of domestic activities -by using interdisciplinary proxies- and the understanding of a settlement’s economic and social organization during the Classical era.