Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Examining Social Networks And Communties Of Resistance To New Religious Movements

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Dr. Barbara Mills (University of Arizona) and Lewis Borck (University of Arizona and Archaeology Southwest) will examine the complex ways that people react to changing cultural and organizational patterns brought about by the spread, or diffusion, of a new religious ideology. The researchers will study how objects of daily and ceremonial life shaped the complicated social and political lives of past groups of people. Understanding how people in the past reacted to an expansive ideology provides comparative data to evaluate against modern expansive religions, including their various sects. This will improve understanding not only of how ideology spreads, but also of how and why groups join or resist a new religion. Previous archaeological research on diffusion has focused on technology rather than ideas or ideology, and such investigations typically relied on either spatial data or social data. This project will integrate social network and spatial diffusion models to demonstrate to researchers in many fields the utility and accuracy of integrating the two approaches. This project will also share information about archaeological ethics, ownership of the past, and deep local history with community members (landowners, community college students, and public school students) in areas often underserved by academia. Dr. Mills and Mr. Borck will use archaeological data from across all of Arizona and western New Mexico to examine how people in the late prehispanic Southwest reacted to changes associated with the spread of the Salado religious cult during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries (A.D. 1200-1450). This project will measure the probable level of exposure to and the corresponding level (or lack) of resistance to the spread of Salado by modeling resistance using ceramic distribution data (where certain kinds of pottery were made and used, and then found by archaeologists). They will compare these data against a null model that includes a spatial component that models the flow of material goods, as well as a social network component that examines how ideas spread through a network over time. Archaeology as a field is particularly useful for examining difficult, long-term processes such as the spread of religion, because archaeological data primarily derive from material objects, rather than textual or ethnographic records that may incorporate human bias. This research will generate new methods for studying the spread of ideas across time and space, and these methods will be useful to diverse researchers examining similar processes in the past and the present.