Sarah Murray is an archaeologist and historian whose research examines the socioeconomic institutions of early Greece. She received a Ph.D. in Classics at Stanford University in 2013. She is the author of The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy (Cambridge, 2017) and Male Nudity in the Greek Iron Age (Cambridge, 2022) and single- or co-authored numerous articles and reports in scholarly journals. Her fellowship research project is titled Descending through Hephaistos’ Sooty Realm: Metallurgy, Pyrotechnology, and Death Ritual in Early Greece. Sarah is one of our 2024-25 JHI Faculty Research Fellows.
What are your main research interests and what excites you most about them?
My research is focused on is the development of economy and society after the widespread ‘collapse’ of complex states that characterizes the end of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean, with an emphasis on affairs in the Aegean (Greece). Instead of concentrating on what sorts of problems might have caused the collapse, as many generations of scholars have done without good results, I focus on how communities responded and adapted to change, and what sorts of strategies seem to have proved successful in helping people prosper in challenging conditions. Living as humans in the world, both individually and collectively, has always presented and continues to present non-trivial challenges; I find that researching ancient responses in the face of crises provides a basis for optimism about our shared capacity to meet those challenges, even when they seem rather frightening. On a less grandiose level, I draw sustained joy from engaging with early Greek material culture, because of its evergreen capacity to surprise and delight with its wonderful vitality and spark.
What project(s) are you working on at the JHI and why did you choose it (them)?
My project for the JHI fellowship explores the relationship between the introduction of iron metallurgy and the advent of what I am tentatively calling an ‘ideology of fiery transformation’ in early Greece. The project grew out a previous book project that assessed a longstanding view that the spread of iron smelting technology greatly impacted the Mediterranean economy, putting together a lot of data that constituted compelling contradictory evidence to that hypothesis. I did, however, notice that a lot of ritual changes involving ‘fiery transformation’ seemed to occur simultaneously with the introduction of iron metallurgy in the Aegean region: cremation burial, large-scale burnt animal sacrifices at sanctuaries, etc. This made me wonder if the invention of a novel, transformational, aurally and visually dramatic form of pyrotechnology (iron metallurgy) might have led people to develop new ideas about life, death, and what happens in between. The JHI seemed to be a perfect place to explore this idea along with a group of like-minded fellows also thinking creatively about this year’s theme of undergrounds and underworlds.
How has your JHI Fellowship experience been so far?
The weekly lunches and conversations with other fellows have been nothing short of revelatory for me. Although trained as a Classicist in a thoroughly humanistic tradition, I have gradually become more ‘social scientific’ in my research approaches over time, mainly insofar as I’ve carved out a niche in matters connected to the ancient economy, an area wherein practitioners are very concerned with making arguments that are rooted in the ‘hard surfaces’ of quantitative evidence that can be proven. Learning about the research projects and ideas of my fellow fellows has served as a salutary and bracing reminder that humanities research can enrich discourse and expand the imagination without necessarily needing to offer certain ‘proof’ or remaining tethered to so-called ‘objective’ data. From this perspective, I have found immense inspiration in the virtuosic explorations of a truly kaleidoscopic range of topics involved in the research and artistic pursuits being undertaken by my fellow fellows.
Why do you believe the humanities are important?
The humanities are often lambasted for being ‘useless’ in comparison with STEM fields, but this is obviously a silly attitude. The ability to enjoy your life is a pretty useful skill to have, in my opinion, and there’s probably no better way than to ensure that you can always be having a good time, no matter what, than learning to extract profound joy from things you can do alone by yourself, like reading a great book or appreciating beautiful music. This has probably always been true, but it seems especially so in the increasingly chaotic, hopeless, dystopian, fragmented world of the 21st century. I have an older brother, and when we were growing up, we had very different ideas about what we wanted to do as adults – I really wanted to be a musician of some kind, and he wanted to be a doctor. I used to think about that a lot – how these two ambitions, under the surface, belied vastly different philosophical positions on what was important in life. On the one hand, a doctor is straightforwardly of great utility. People get hurt, and the doctor is there to swoop in and provide necessary medical assistance. In comparison, the musician or the artist is not really all that useful – nobody will die if they don’t spend time in art museums: it’s proven! On the other hand, I’ve never had a real medical emergency, and if I ever do, it’ll probably just be on one or two occasions in my life – important occasions, sure! But it’s likely true that for most people, the doctor plays a limited role in enriching day-to-day operations. In contrast, every day that I’ve been alive that I can remember I have benefited from my ability to gild the bare struggle for survival with the delight that comes from reading, listening to music, and appreciating art. From that point of view, one could say that, in quantitative use-value terms, appreciating arts and humanities might be the single most important skill that anyone could ever acquire.
Can you share something you read/watched/listened to recently that you enjoyed/were inspired by?
I have been inspired by JHI faculty fellow Tong Lam’s book Abandoned Futures, a collection of photos of industrial and postindustrial ruins with accompanying commentary. I study ruins in my professional career as an archaeologist, of course, but I also indulge in a bit of amateur industrial ruin exploration myself. Tong’s photography and insights are a wonderful example of the genre, a beautifully haunting and thought-provoking ensemble that calls to mind future archaeologists puzzling over our own society’s material detritus long after it has passed into obsolescence.
What is a fun fact about you?
I ran my first marathon in Death Valley while in graduate school and took first place in the women’s division. The prize was a rubber chicken. I thereafter retired from running marathons, so that I could be undefeated at one thing in life. So: my fun fact is that I am undefeated at marathons, with a proud record of 1-0.