Rethinking Societal Collapse:

This lecture will take place online; a Zoom link will be provided via email to registered participants.

Registration is required at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rethinking-societal-collapse-new-evidence-from-the-hittite-case-registration-121784872833

What does it mean to say a society has collapsed? Who is affected, and how do they respond to changing circumstances? In this lecture, these questions are addressed using new archaeological evidence from the collapse of the Hittite empire in ancient Turkey, part of a massive regional collapse that affected much of the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age, ca. 1200 BCE. This talk presents the analysis of animal remains from a rural settlement in the Hittite heartland in order to reconstruct aspects of Hittite daily life and to highlight local responses to the Late Bronze Age collapse. It emphasizes that, while changes in local lifeways did occur following the collapse of the Hittite empire, the nature of these changes does not always follow the trajectories assumed in conventional narratives of collapse, demonstrating a need to re-examine how we think about societal collapse and its aftermath.

Sarah Adcock is a Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago (2020) and her BA in Archaeology and English Literature from Baylor University (2008). Her current work focuses on the Late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean region around 1200 BCE. For her dissertation research, she examined local responses to the Hittite collapse in central Turkey at the end of the Late Bronze Age through the analysis of animal remains from the Hittite capital Hattuşa and from Çadır Höyük, a Hittite provincial center. By comparing her results from these sites, she considered the specific impacts empire’s collapse had on animal management systems and the economic organization of food production both at the Hittite capital and in the empire’s provinces. Her current work expands the focus of her research from the collapse of the Hittite empire to the Late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean region more broadly.

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