Christine Anna Mikeska

CHRISTINE MIKESKA, then a graduate student at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was awarded a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Feeding the City, Feeding the Gods: Animal Economy and Mobility at Bronze Age Hattuša,” supervised by Dr. Benjamin Arbuckle. This project investigates human-animal relationships and networks of interaction at the Bronze Age archaeological site of Boğazköy-Hattuša, located near the modern city of Çorum, Turkey. Hattuša was the epicenter of a diverse and culturally specific range of human-animal interactions. However, despite the clear significance of human-animal relationships to ancient cities, our understanding of these relationships within the urban landscape of Hattuša remains limited. Therefore, through a combination of zooarchaeological, isotopic, and historical analyses, the grantee investigates Hattuša’s 1) animal economies, 2) animal geographies, and 3) urban development in light of these interactions as the city transformed from an independent kingdom of regional significance in the Middle Bronze Age into the imperial capital of Anatolia’s first empire in the Late Bronze Age. Using a theoretical framework that emphasizes the significance of non-human animals to urban development and heterogeneity in urban provisioning networks, the research results support the argument that the systems that managed Hattuša’s animal economies and geographies were integral to both the material (i.e., feeding the city) and metaphysical (i.e., feeding the gods) maintenance of the urban landscape.