Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The Social Dynamics Of Coalescence

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This project examines how relationships among individuals can contribute to or undermine the ability of entire groups to act collectively. How and why groups of people come together and achieve common goals is a key question in contemporary social science. In this research, scholars often focus on two ways that people relate with one another: 1) through direct, face-to-face interactions (e.g. conversation, trade); and 2) by sharing an association with the same abstract concept (e.g. identifying as an "American"). When members of a group share both of these types of relations with one another, they are more likely to mobilize to achieve shared goals. To date, scholarship on this topic has focused mostly on how collective action arises in contemporary settings among segments of a larger population that is already socially cohesive in some respects (i.e., social movement within a nation). However, social cohesion develops in many kinds of human societies, and among small or large groups of people. Archaeology is particularly well-suited to make a contribution to this literature because it can offer long term case studies including a variety of human societies that are not represented in contemporary or historical examples. This project focuses on long-term changes in relationships among people in a smaller-scale prehistoric society to provide a new perspective on the development of social cohesion. Such work is essential to understanding how and why social cohesion does (or does not) develop, how and why it is sometimes sustained, and the experiences of people who live through this type of dramatic social change. This research examines changing individual and group relations during a period of coalescence, a process by which previously separate people or groups come together to form a socially cohesive and long-lasting community. Archaeological data from four Ancestral Wendat (Iroquoian) villages that were successively occupied by the same community over a period of 150 years (1400-1550 C.E.) in what is today Ontario, Canada, provide a long term, intra-community perspective on how social cohesion develops and is sustained. Previous scholarship in this region documents the process of coalescence through changes in village plans from smaller, dispersed communities housing several hundred people to the large, and spatially integrated Mantle site, the culmination of coalescence. This project develops a new approach for studying the development of social cohesion, utilizing a unique theoretical framework to draw new insights from existing, well-established methods. Indicators of the techniques used to produce pottery and pipes provide evidence for direct, interpersonal interactions, while the design and decoration of pottery, pipes, and ornaments reveal abstract, shared connections. Changing individual and group relations among people will be identified within each community by considering the spatial patterns of these characteristics. Differences in these patterns in each sequential community will reveal changing relations among people over the period of coalescence.