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. The Late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean is one of the largest and best known collapse events in human history, and it affected multiple polities across the region, presenting an opportunity for exploring differing responses to the processes associated with societal collapse. This project, “Everyday Lives at the End of the World?: Post-Collapse Animal Economies in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean” works to develop a macro-level understanding of changes and continuities in animal management and foodways that accompanied the Late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean. The goal of this work is to offer a new perspective from which to examine the massive political, economic, and social changes that occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean and to critically examine the historical narratives and theoretical frameworks that create our conceptions of collapse and “dark age.”