Dr Katie Campbell

Katie is currently a Research Fellow at King’s College and a Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. She studied history and archaeology at Exeter and worked as an archaeologist and heritage manager for commercial and research institutions across Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia before completing an MSc in digital heritage at York and a DPhil in archaeology at Oxford. Her research has focussed on the archaeology and heritage of complex urban sites, with her doctoral thesis examining evidence for the Mongol Conquest of the 13th century and subsequent urban change at cities in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

She has also worked on sites dating from the pre-pottery Neolithic in Turkey to the 20th century in Qatar, and many of the periods and countries in between, for institutions including the British Museum and the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, University College London, Copenhagen, Liverpool and York.  In particular she is interested in what happens to urban centres when they are conquered and how this can be observed archaeologically, which means spending a lot of time carefully excavating in the cities and trying to work out the difference between the remains of conquest versus those of abandonment and desertion.

She is currently a research fellow at King’s College investigating broader changes in these urban sites from the 11th to 15th centuries, a period when Turco-Mongol groups moved into the area. She has worked extensively in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkmenistan and currently leads a field project with colleagues from the Otrar State Archaeological Museum and Archeoservice at the urban site of Otrar in southern Kazakhstan.

While not in the trenches, she likes to explore, and has traveled extensively around Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East teaching and lecturing on archaeological field schools and tours, and trying to understand (to some extent!) the many languages of the region. Katie first joined ASA in 2019 as tour lecturer for ASA’s tour  ‘The Silk Route: China & Kyrgyzstan’.

A new study by Dr Katie Campbell: