Got Milk? The Past, Present, and Future of Human-Animal Relations
Hannah Chazin is an archaeologist whose work investigates the history of human-animal relations, and explores how new scientific techniques like isotope analysis and ancient DNA analysis are re-shaping how archaeologists learn about life in the past.
Currently an assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Chazin’s book, Live Stock and Dead Things, was released in 2024 to critical acclaim. Yannis Hamilakis, professor of archaeology and of modern Greek studies at Brown University, states "We have been waiting for a book like this for many years... this is a rare bird of a book that pays our dues to the mundane beings that lived and labored with and alongside humans, but which were instrumentalized and objectified in scholarship for far too long."
Chazin's scholarship has appeared in American Anthropologist, American Antiquity, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Archaeometry, and the Journal of Field Archaeology. In support of her scholarship, she has received fellowships and grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study. Previously, she has done archaeological fieldwork in Armenia, Russia, Chile, Cambodia, and the western United States.
Chazin received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago and is currently the co-director of the Karashamb Animals Project, which is exploring, using cutting-edge scientific analyses, the lives of the animals buried in an ancient necropolis in Armenia.