Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Social Organization And The Importance Of "Persistent Places"

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Over the past sixty years, a growing body of federal legislation has been explicitly concerned with the preservation of Native American cultural resources. Yet, despite these efforts, the management of traditional cultural properties - places of special significance to indigenous groups - on public lands remains a contentious issue. Contemporary collaborations between anthropologists and Native American communities have demonstrated that the importance of particular locations extends far beyond their economic utility and that, over time, a given place may be important to multiple groups and for many different reasons. Drawing on these insights, this doctoral dissertation research project will explore the implications that such an understanding of place has for the dynamics of landscape use in the past through a case study of 14 Adena (c. 500 BC - AD 250) sites located in northeastern Kentucky. The results of this research will contribute to understanding of a poorly understood period in American prehistory as well as enhance the infrastructure for research and education by updating existing museum collections. Results will also have implications for the repatriation process required by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Consequently, this project demonstrates the continuing relevance that archaeological research has for the development of federal policy concerning cultural resources management. To explore the dynamics of landscape use in the past, this project focuses on the relationship between the construction of monuments and territorial behavior on the part of their builders - a long-standing paradigm within archaeological research. Rather than inferring territoriality from the spatial distribution of sites, this research takes a novel approach to investigating territorial behavior by evaluating change over time in both (1) how specific monuments were engaged with and (2) who was engaging with them. The former is assessed by investigating the spatial distribution of shared practices as indicated by similarities in mortuary behavior between discrete burial contexts. The latter is assessed by quantifying the relative amounts of biological variability present at multiple spatial scales. This is accomplished by using phenotypic variance as a proxy measure for biological variability and by collecting and analyzing data pertaining to a variety of cranial and dental metric and morphological traits. If monuments served a territorial function, they can be expected to have been embedded within relatively stable social configurations. In other words, they would have been used by the same social group or groups over time, resulting in spatial clustering of both shared practices and biological variability. Alternatively, as work with contemporary indigenous peoples suggests, monuments may have been engaged with by multiple social groups and in multiple ways. In this case, monuments are unlikely to have served a territorial function and, instead, can be expected to have been embedded within a sequence of changing social configurations. This situation would result in the loss of the spatial clustering of shared practices and biological variability that is expected within a territorial scenario. The results of this research will be compared to the expectations given above to provide a nuanced evaluation of past landscape use.