Hannah Chazin

Human-Animal Relationships, Political Anthropology, Semiotics, Archaeological Theory and Methods, Zooarchaeology, Isotope Analysis

Eurasia, Caucasus; South Caucasus

Chazin’s current research focuses on animals' role in shaping systems of value and political power and inequality in the past; and how these roles can be investigated materially through archaeology. Her work also explores how archaeologists use material sciences to generate understandings of the past, present, and future.

Her recent book, Live Stock and Dead Things: Zoopolitics between domestication and modernity (University of Chicago Press 2024), uses new archaeological interpretations of human-animal relations in the Late Bronze Age South Caucasus to pull apart the deep-seated narratives that seek the origins of contemporary forms of inequality and instrumental relations with nonhuman animals in the deeper past. Taking an innovative approach to zooarchaeological data, the book demonstrates how post-Neolithic, "pre-modern" herding societies were a space of potential -- one where the capacities of both humans and herd animals were altered by novel material-semiotic practices and multispecies labor relations, creating value beyond calories or "cash".

Questioning the ways that archaeological methods (and story-telling more broadly) assume links between the past and present, it argues that herds and herders in the Late Bronze Age were not a middle point between domestication and modernity. The unexpected nature of the entanglements documented for the Late Bronze Age highlights how humans' relationships with domesticated herd animals in the deeper past did not funnel towards a singular future, marked by instrumental exploitation and inequality, and emphasizes the need to rethink how we link the present and the past (and the future) through our stories about human-animal relationships.

Her current book project explores how the explosion of new scientific methods and the turn to big data is re-shaping contemporary practices of archaeological knowledge production. While these advanced techniques are often hailed as the source of a revolution in archaeology, revealing previously unknown aspects of life in the past, less attention has been paid to the more subtle impact of these methods on archaeological knowledge production. Careful attention to the material and social practices of archaeological knowledge production in the lab and beyond reveal that these techniques vary in the ways that the enable and constrain knowledge about the past.  

She is currently the co-director of the Karashamb Animals Project, which is analyzing the animal remains included in burials in the Bronze and Iron Age necropolis at Karashamb, Armenia. Through zooarchaeological and isotopic analysis of faunals remains, the project asks what the incorporation of animals in mortuary practices can tell us about human-animal relationships in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages in the South Caucasus. Previously, she has done archaeological fieldwork in Armenia, Russia, Chile, Cambodia, and the western United States.
 

University of Chicago, PhD in Anthropology, 2016 
University of Chicago, MA in Anthropology, 2011