Provisioning an urban center under foreign occupation zooarchaeological insights into the Hittite presence in late fourteenth-century BCE Alalakh

Abstract

The effects of foreign military interventions on production and distribution systems in occupied lands are commonly assessed through the study of textual sources and pottery typologies in Bronze Age archaeology and historiography. In this article, we explore the zooarchaeological record of the recently uncovered Late Bronze IIA deposits at Alalakh (Tell Atchana) to test whether the Hittite intrusion into Syria had any effect on the economic organization of local policies. The quantitative analysis of taxonomic compositions, mortality profiles, and body part distributions suggests that while slight modifications occurred in the distribution of provisions, the faunal economy of Alalakh did not go through drastic changes under Hittite rule.