Dr Kate Spence

Kate is an Official Fellow, Director of Studies in Archaeology and one of our Tutors. She was elected to the Fellowship in 2015, and at the University is Senior Lecturer in Department of Archaeology. She also directs studies in Archaeology at Christ's College.

Biography

Kate grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne and began excavating at a Bronze Age site in Northumberland while she was at school. Despite strong interests in Archaeology and Classics, she studied Architecture at Cambridge, taking her undergraduate degree and Diploma in Architecture at Sidney Sussex College and working briefly for an architectural practice in London. Returning to Cambridge, she studied for a PhD at Christ’s College focusing on ancient Egyptian royal architecture. After completing her PhD, Kate held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and a McDonald Institute Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Cognitive Archaeology. She took up a University Lectureship in 2007, and became Senior Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology in 2015.

Teaching

Kate teaches the first year Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia core paper and the Egyptian archaeology papers for second and third years. She supervises undergraduates from across the Archaeology course on these papers. Kate also supervises MPhil and PhD students, and recent graduates have produced research on non–elite mortuary variability at Early Dynastic Memphis, Old Kingdom mortuary practices, Egyptian approaches to artificial light and material culture and colonisation in ancient Nubia.

Research

Her research focuses on architecture and the built environment, and she has worked at a number of sites in Egypt, including Amarna, Karnak, Deir el–Bahari and Hierakonpolis. Her most recent fieldwork has been at Sesebi in Northern Sudan where she codirected a project investigating an Egyptian colonial town constructed around 1352 BC by the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Work at the site has shown that the main focus of activity at the site was gold mining which supplied the Egyptian king and court as well as fuelling Ancient Near Eastern networks of trade and gift exchange.

She and her collaborators aimed to shed light on the lives of those living and dying at the site: for example, their housing provides information on changes to the community there over the many generations that the site was inhabited. Sesebi’s temples also provide important evidence for significant political and religious changes during Akhenaten’s reign, while excavation and study of the ceramics has shown that the site is around 200 years earlier than previously thought, and attest to the complexity of interactions between Egyptians and Nubians at the site in the formative stages of the New Kingdom Egyptian empire. Fieldwork is on hold as a result of the devastating ongoing conflict in Sudan, but work on publication continues.