RESEARCH PROFILE

I am an archaeologist and ancient historian, trained at the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge and Exeter, with additional research visits to Münster, Athens, Ankara and Washington D.C. I am currently Assistant Professor in Classical Archaeology in the Department of Culture and Society at Aarhus University.

My research focuses mainly on the spread of eastern religions and religious innovations in the Roman Empire, as witnessed through material culture and social networks; my first monograph, Religious Networks in the Roman Empire: The Spread of New Ideas was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 and was a finalist in the American Academy of Religion’s book prize, Best First Book in the History of Religions 2014. My geographical and temporal focus is the Graeco-Roman east Mediterranean: I have been part of excavation projects in Crete (Minoan Palaikastro, with the British School at Athens) and Turkey (the sanctuary at Doliche, with the Universität Münster), as well as co-directing the Lower Göksu Archaeological Salvage Survey Project from 2015 onwards. My main current research project, as part of the Emergence of Sacred Travel in the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean project at Aarhus University, is a monograph exploring the interfaces between Syrian cults and the sacred landscape, Syrian migration, pilgrimage and social networks in the Roman Empire, as documented through material records. Other related projects include exploring archaeological approaches to social emotion, memory and migration through epigraphy, material culture and landscape, walking and the sacred, and an edited volume on Economies of Sacred Travel (co-edited with Troels Myrup Kristensen).

I co-founded and continue to be an active leader of The Connected Past, an international research network on networks and archaeology. To date, we have organised three international conferences (Southampton 2012, Paris 2014, Imperial College London 2014) and held sessions at TAG (2011) and SAA (2013), as well as offering practical training in network techniques. We are planning a major international conference, The Connected Past II, for 2017.

Publications to date:

• Analyser      les réseaux du passé en archéologie et en histoire. Les nouvelles de      l’archéologie (2014).
• The      Connected Past: critical and innovative approaches to networks in      archaeology. A special issue of Journal of Archaeological Method and      Theory (vol. 22, 1). (2015).
• The      Connected Past: challenges to network studies of the past (Oxford: OUP, 2016).

Links to various papers can be found on my Academia page: https://au.academia.edu/AnnaCollar or on my website: http://annacollar.wordpress.com