May 13, 2026 To celebrate our 2026 Fellowship recipients , we connected with this year’s awardees to learn more about their projects and the unique paths that led them into the field of archaeology. We’re thrilled to introduce Madolyn Hyytiainen-Jacobson, recipient of the prestigious 2026 Olivia James Traveling Fellowship ! Madolyn Hyytiainen-Jacobson (UC Berkeley) Tell us about your project: My research explores how people in the Mycenaean world understood death and the body through an analysis of secondary treatment. Although Mycenaean burial practices have been extensively studied, the meaning and purpose of secondary treatment remain poorly understood. During the Late Bronze Age on the mainland, people repeatedly returned to tombs to move, rearrange, and sometimes remove bones entirely; this frequency and visibility of post-burial engagement with the dead indicate that secondary treatment was fundamental to Mycenaean mortuary practice and ontological conceptions of the body.…