Sarah Graff

Sarah R. Graff is an Honors Faculty Fellow and Principal Lecturer at Barrett, The Honors College of ASU. She is affiliated faculty with the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, a Senior Global Futures Scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, affiliated faculty with The Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict and a faculty affiliate at The Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies at Arizona State University. She directs Honors theses and teaches a variety of exciting courses such as The Human Event, History of Ideas, and special topics courses in anthropology and archaeology. 

Professor Graff (she/her) is an anthropological archaeologist focusing on early economies and social relationships connected to city life and material exchange. Her research and teaching interests involve the varied social interactions between producers, merchants, consumers, and political authorities. This includes the production, exchange, and use of ceramic containers. It also includes the preparation and presentation of food or other substances for social interactions (often while using ceramic vessels). While she is studying the techniques of production and mechanisms of exchange and consumption, she is also interested in the use of space within and between sites, and how different (perhaps unequal) individuals lived and worked together in both regulated and unregulated ways. Dr. Graff’s major theoretical interests are: political, informal, human, and popular economy; cooking and food preparation; cuisine; craft production; urbanism; material culture; technological change; and materials science in archaeology. Methodologically she analyzes the production techniques used to make ceramic containers, their use and movement. She also analyzes archaeological evidence in context, spatial and environmental data, archival records, and material culture more broadly.

Professor's Graff’s current fieldwork is at the ancient Phrygian site of Kerkenes in the Yozgat Province of the Republic of Türkiye. Kerkenes was the largest city in Türkiye when it was inhabited, between 620 and 550 BC. She has also been working at the ancient city of Al-Baleed in Salalah, Oman. During the late ancient and medieval times, Al-Baleed was a significant port city in the Indian Ocean. Previously, her field project was located in the Orontes River Valley of western Syria.

From 2006-2010, she was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows and assistant professor in the social sciences at The University of Chicago. She held a Postdoctoral American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (2010-2011).

Professor Graff’s publications include:

Graff, Sarah R., “What a Difference Structure Makes: Material Styles of Syrian Caliciform Ware Identified through Ceramic Petrography.” Chapter 9 in Searching for Structure in Pottery Analysis: New Frameworks and Techniques in Instrumental Ceramic Analysis. Edited by Alan F. Greene and Charles W. Hartley. In the Series, New Directions in Anthropological Archaeology. Equinox Publishing Company. August 2022.

Graff, Sarah R., “Archaeology of Cuisine and Cooking” Annual Review of Anthropology 49: 337-54. October 2020.

Graff, Sarah R., Scott Branting, and John Marston, “Production requires water: Material remains of the hydrosocial cycle in an ancient Anatolian city”, Economic Anthropology, 6(2), June 2019.

Graff, Sarah R., “The Archaeology of Cooking and Food Preparation” in Journal of Archaeological Research, Volume 26 (3): 305-351, September 2018.

Branting, Scott, Joseph Lehner, Sevil Baltalı Tırpan, Sarah R. Graff, John M. Marston, Tuna Kalaycı, Yasemin Özarslan, Dominique Langis-Barsetti, Lucas Proctor, and Paige Paulsen. “The Kerkenes Project 2015-2016”, Chapter 8 in Steadman, Sharon R. and Gregory McMahon, eds. The Archaeology of Anatolia: Recent Discoveries (Volume 2), Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2017.

Graff, Sarah R., “Archaeology of Cooking” in The Archaeology of Food: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1: A-K, edited by Karen Bescherer Metheny and Mary C. Beaudry. Pp. 32-33. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 2015.

Graff, Sarah R. and Enrique Rodriguez-Alegria, eds., The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. 2012.