Please join the Student Affairs Interest Group for their annual Dissertation Lecture featuring Sarah Malik Bell, who received her PhD from Brown University in 2025, for her talk, “Remembering Collapse: Understanding Ritual at Abandoned Late Bronze Age Sites on Crete through the lens of Social Trauma Theory” on Tuesday, September 22nd at 5:00 PM ET/2:00 PM PT. The lecture will be held on Zoom – please register here.

Abstract:

This talk will discuss social trauma theory—a theory that is currently applied almost exclusively to social traumas originating in the contemporary moment—and its applicability to ancient archaeological contexts. Bell will discuss the ritual practices covered in her dissertation and map the periodic renewal of these practices against the material evidence for subsequent episodes of social change on the island of Crete. She will show that, as social trauma theory allows us to predict, embodied ritual practices became vital resources in the repeated reification of post-collapse identities during times of increased social threat on the island. She will also touch on regional variation and sociopolitical change to discuss long-term sociopolitical developments on Crete, including the development of the Cretan Poleis.