Amanda Cates Ball

Amanda Cates Ball is a Mediterranean archaeologist, whose research focuses on sacred landscapes and material evidence of cultural interaction between Greeks and Thracians in the northeast Aegean. She received her PhD in Classics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2025, her MA in Classical Archaeology from UNC Chapel Hill in 2019, her MA in Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015, and her BA in Classical Studies from UPenn in 2014. Amanda has received several prestigious fellowships to support her research, such as the Olivia James Traveling Fellowship from the Archaeological Institute of America, the Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation/Teaching Fellowship at Kenyon College, and the Homer A. and Dorothy B. Thompson Advanced Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She has taught a wide range of courses on topics related to archaeology, art history, and classical studies at UNC Chapel Hill and at Kenyon College.

Amanda has excavated in the UK, Italy, and Greece. She has been a member of American Excavations Samothrace since 2018, and has served as trench supervisor, survey team supervisor, and field supervisor. Amanda is actively involved in the planning of future seasons and publications of the project.

Amanda's dissertation project focused on the archaeological evidence of community building acts in the sanctuaries of the northeast Aegean, and particularly how in the 5th and 4th century BCE, as sacred spaces were monumentalized, 7th and 6th century BCE dedicated objects were curated and embedded in the sites, resulting in memory landscapes. She is in the process of developing this project into a monograph. Amanda has an interest in the materiality of ancient magic and magic dolls of the ancient Mediterranean world, the subject of a forthcoming chapter. Additionally, Amanda is developing studies on terracotta figurines discovered on Samothrace and terracotta sarcophagi found in the cemeteries of the northeast Aegean.