About Panagiotis Karkanas

Panagiotis Karkanas is the director of the Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory for Archaeological Science at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. For over 20 years, Karkanas served as senior geologist in the Ephorate of Palaeoanthropology-Speleology within the Antiquities Service of Greece. He holds both a bachelor's and a doctorate degree in geology from the University of Athens. He has previously served as associate editor for the Journal of Human Evolution and is currently associate editor for Geoarchaeology.

His geoarchaeological research covers archaeological sites from nearly all cultural periods and their associated landscapes in Greece. Additionally, he has participated in international geoarchaeological projects in countries such as South Africa, China, Israel, France, Spain, Hungary, Albania, and Cyprus. His research interests encompass all aspects of geoarchaeology, including site-formation processes (stratigraphy, soil and sediment micromorphology, post-depositional chemical alterations), palaeoenvironmental reconstructions, and techniques and methods related to petrography, mineralogy, sedimentary analysis, chemical analysis, and provenance studies. 

He received the Rip Rapp Archaeological Geology Award from the Geological Society of America and is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His research has been published in high-impact-factor international scientific journals, cited about 10500 times (h-index 54). In 2019, he co-authored a well-known textbook on geoarchaeology, with Paul Goldberg, titled Reconstructing Archaeological Sites: Understanding the Geoarchaeological Matrix, published by Wiley Blackwell.