Dr Claire Zikidi

Claire is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Ancient Disease and Pandemics in the Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (CCEH) and the Department of Classics, Ancient History, Religion and Theology at the University of Exeter. She works on the interdisciplinary project 'Pustules, Palaeogenetics and Pandemics from Galen to Rhazes: How to do the Early History of Smallpox and Measles', funded by a Wellcome Discovery Award (322103/Z/24/Z; PI Professor Rebecca Flemming). On the project she brings skeletal, palaeopathological, mortuary and palaeogenetic evidence into dialogue with the ancient medical writings.

She is a bioarchaeologist and prehistoric archaeologist. She specialises in mortuary archaeology, human osteology and palaeopathology in Greece from the Bronze Age to the Roman period. Her research combines osteological and palaeopathological analysis with archaeological theory to investigate identity, funerary practice, social organisation and how past communities responded to death and disease. Her particular interests are osteobiographies, mortality salience and the treatment of the dead, palaeopathology and palaeodemography.

Alongside her position at Exeter, Claire serves as a Research Associate in the Phaleron Bioarchaeological Project at the Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory for Archaeological Science, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, where she has worked as a Bioarchaeologist since 2023. She is also Co-Investigator on a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Award (2026–2028), People and Graves of the Phaleron Cemetery (c. 8th–5th centuries BCE).
Before joining Exeter, she held a postdoctoral research position at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2024–2026) with the project 'From Bones to Biographies: Osteobiographies from the Cemetery of Phaleron', and in 2025–2026 taught there as Adjunct Lecturer in Prehistoric Archaeology (Introduction to Bioarchaeology and Critical Re-interpretation of Mortuary Data).

Her work has appeared in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Bioarchaeology International, and Time and Mind. Her monograph, Marginal Identities: Middle and Late Bronze Age Mortuary Practices and Collective Identities, is in press as an Athens University Review of Archaeology (AURA) Supplement.