Julia Puglisi
Julia Viani Puglisi is an ancient historian who studies the social histories of ancient Egyptian landscapes. With a particular focus on the cemeteries of the third millennium BCE, Puglisi explores the legacies of the living communities who shaped these sites. She examines how their local practices, organization of labor and resources, and transmission of knowledge contributed to the development of cemeteries over time. Her research combines archaeological and archival evidence with digital methods, including 3D modeling and GIS mapping, to investigate how landscapes are inhabited, transformed, and remembered. As part of this work, she is particularly interested in the historiography of Egyptology, and how refining the relative chronology of tombs can support more nuanced and inclusive histories of these sites.
The Giza Necropolis has been central to Puglisi’s research for the past decade, particularly the transformation of the Central Field from a limestone quarry into a cemetery. A member of the Harvard Giza Project since 2017, she documented the Central Field as part of her doctoral research with support from an ARCE–CAORC Fellowship (2022–2024). At Yale, her project, Constructing Memory, Managing Landscapes: Quarry-Cemeteries in the Memphite Region, extends this work to examine how former quarries became burial grounds where communities managed resources and developed new artistic and architectural practices.
Puglisi also directs a conservation and documentation initiative in the Giza Necropolis on two early rock-cut tombs built for Prince Nebemakhet (LG 12 and LG 86), a project supported by the Antiquities Endowment Fund (2026–2027). She is currently assisting in the digitization initiative of the excavation archives of Egyptian Egyptologist Selim Hassan at the American University in Cairo. Beyond Giza, she has worked as an archaeologist and 3D scanning specialist with the Dayr al-Barsha Project (KU Leuven). Her interdisciplinary work includes serving on the scientific committee for the third edition of Ancient Egypt New Technologies and organizing Methodologies in Egyptology and Mesopotamian Studies, an interdisciplinary workshop at Harvard. At Yale, she co-organizes the Yale Egyptology Lecture Series (2026–2027).
Puglisi received her Ph.D. in Egyptology from Harvard University in 2025. She holds an M.A. in Egyptology from Indiana University Bloomington (2017) and a B.A. in Classical Languages from the University of California, Berkeley (2015).