Sarah Adcock

Sarah E. Adcock is an anthropological archaeologist who currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Her research examines how people living in the ancient world responded to the impacts of societal collapse, and she specializes in the study of animal remains from archaeological sites. More specifically, she uses animal bones to examine how changes and continuities in the use of animals and their products in the aftermath of collapse can help us better understand the processes of social and economic re-organization associated with societal collapse. Her work focuses on the Late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean region around 1200 BCE, including the collapse of the Hittite empire in ancient Turkey where she has examined zooarchaeological materials from the Hittite capital Hattuşa and a rural center Çadır Höyük. She is currently working on an expansion of this project, which incorporates comparative data on the Late Bronze collapse from the broader Eastern Mediterranean region, including the Aegean and Mesopotamia. Sarah has excavated in central Anatolia (Turkey), northern Mesopotamia (Syria), and on the southern end of the Great Plains (central Texas and the Texas panhandle). She received her Ph.D. and her M.A. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and her B.A. in Archaeology and English Literature from Baylor University.