Doctoral Dissertation Research: Social and Environmental Risk and the Development of Complex Societies in Precolumbian Masaya, Nicaragua

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Under the direction of Dr. Robert D. Drennan, Mr. Manuel A. Roman-Lacayo will collect data for his doctoral dissertation in the Masaya region along the Pacific coastal plain of Nicaragua. He will conduct a systematic surface survey, recording all traces of prehistoric human occupation in an area of 160 km2 so as to be able to reconstruct in detail how these populations distributed themselves across the landscape through the period from about 1000 BC until the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century AD. The earliest Spanish Conquest period accounts for the region describe politically and economically centralized societies with powerful chiefs. The distributions of settlement in earlier periods will reflect when these characteristics emerged and how they changed through time. The region offers a wide diversity of abundant resources at elevations ranging from 100 to over 800 meters above sea level. Comparing the distribution of these re-sources to the patterns of settlement location as they changed through time will reveal shifts in the ways in which the region's inhabitants took advantage of what it had to offer to satisfy their basic needs and to finance a developing political economy. Complex hierarchical societies developed repeatedly in many different regions of the world over periods of thousands of years, reflecting the operation of processes deeply embedded in human social dynamics. While these developments are all broadly parallel, they also manifest interest-ing variations. Some arrive at much larger spatial and demographic scales than others and manifest much more developed hierarchies. They vary in the social, cultural, political, military, and economic bases for centralization and hierarchy. In seeking to understand why the devel-opment of such broadly similar social patterns is so pervasive in human prehistory as well as why these patterns vary in the ways that they do, archaeologists have worked with a number of models. Some of these models focus on low-risk, abundant resources and predictability as fa-vorable to the rapid development of social complexity, while others consider risk-filled environ-ments where resources are scarce as providing the catalyst for major social change. Evaluating such contrasting views requires the comparative study of a number of cases in which relation-ships between social and environmental risk, diversity, abundance, predictability, and long-term social change can be assessed. Mr. Roman-Lacayo's research will provide the necessary docu-mentation for one such case in a region where resources are varied, abundant, and predictable. The broader impacts of this research will include the training of a number of young scientists, not only the doctoral candidate himself, but also less advanced students who will participate in carrying out the fieldwork and gain valuable methodological experience. It will also help to fos-ter healthy collegial relationships between scientists in the U.S. and Nicaragua.