Jack Tillman is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Archaeology.

More information about Jack Tillman

Current research

Jack Tillman is a full-time, internal PhD candidate at the Faculty of Archaeology. His research focuses on mortuary practices in Late Prehistoric Cyprus, inequality, and ethnoarchaeology.

Jack's PhD research investigates the long-term continuities and discontinues of mortuary practices in Cyprus throughout the Chalcolithic and Prehistoric Bronze Age (4000-1650 BCE) with a focus on differential burial treatment within/between communities using quantitative and qualitative methods. His work explores why certain people are buried in cemeteries and different mortuary facilities, receive different types and quantities of grave goods, and are buried with others and/or receive secondary burial. The variability of these practices and how they change over time reflects the heterogeneity and dynamics of mourners’ choices and how they negotiate social inequality through mortuary performance. Jack’s research articulates these changes in differential burial treatment with synchronic differences in settlement organization, diet, and mobility investigated by other researchers of the Inequal Cyprus project to compare how differences in performance relates to lived inequality. Through post-processual and ethnographically informed analysis, this research works towards understanding how mortuary practice was entangled with the broader socio-political changes in Cypriot society during Late Prehistory.

Curriculum vitae

Jack Tillman studied anthropology with an archaeological focus for his BA at Western Washington University. He pursued his MA in Global Archaeology at Leiden University, where he investigated Philia phase mortuary practices in Cyprus, comparing burial types with Early Bronze Age Anatolia and Northern Syria to explore different models of Cypriot-mainland connectivity during the mid-third millennium BCE.

Jack has been excavating in Cyprus since 2022, working at the Bronze Age site of Kissonerga-Skalia with the Cypriot American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) and later at the Chalcolithic site of Chlorakas-Palloures with the University of Cyprus and Leiden University. In 2025 he presented his MA research at the Postgraduate Cypriot Archaeology conference (PoCA) in Nicosia, Cyprus.

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