Identity and Mobility at Tell Atchana, Alalakh - Tara Ingman

Identity and Mobility at Tell Atchana, Alalakh: Isotopic Analysis and Mortuary Practices - Tara Ingman, Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED)

Burials have long been a key type of archaeological evidence in learning about the past and about ancient people’s lives, who they were, and how they experienced the world. In recent decades, an ever-growing constellation of bioarchaeological methods, including isotopes and ancient DNA analyses, along with the identification of pathologies, biological sex, and other analyses of skeletal material, have given researchers new perspectives and provided opportunities to reconstruct the lives of ancient individuals, sometimes in great detail. This presentation takes the diverse and well-studied burial record at Tell Atchana, Alalakh as a case study to look at the lives of the ancient inhabitants of the city as revealed by recent isotopic and DNA studies. Multiple lines of evidence – scientific, anthropological, and archaeological – are used to examine patterns of mobility and the ways in which they may have overlapped and interconnected with aspects of identity for the ancient Alalakhians.