Sarah Wilker

Sarah is the Thomas F. Cooper Post-Doctoral Fellow and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Oberlin College. Her work investigates the impact of community social behavior on regional economic networks in the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman Mediterranean. She is specifically interested in how production and consumption ideas spread through social connection and contact, and she uses a range of formal network methods (including social network analysis and agent-based computational modeling) to assess the possible influence of past socio-economic networks on the archaeological record. Sarah completed her PhD at Stanford University with the dissertation ‘The Social Life of Ancient Markets: Using Formal Network Approaches and Ceramic Data to Reconceptualize Market Behavior in the Late Classical–Early Hellenistic (400–200 BCE) Southeast Aegean.’ This dissertation combined archaeological and computational analyses to explore the connection between community social relationships, wine production and drinking practices, and market exchange in the ancient Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. Sarah is an active fieldwork archaeologist, and has worked on maritime and terrestrial archaeological projects across Italy, Turkey, Greece, and the United States, focusing specifically on ceramic materials. She currently works as a ceramicist and the field director of finds and analysis for the Marzamemi Maritime Heritage Project in southeast Sicily.