Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Effects of Societal "Collapse" on a Rural Community

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Researchers from the University of Colorado-Boulder wish to understand how political collapse affects the lives of those living in rural communities. Within the context of this project, political collapse is understood as a transformative event, in which local populations abandon (and sometimes even destroy) old expressions of power and move to form new political affiliations, change economic possibilities, and build new social ties. In archaeological studies, the research on political collapse has focused largely on its impact on people living in large cities; much less attention has been devoted to examining how people living in rural areas engage with the shifting political, economic, and social tendencies that follow large-scale political transformation in order to ensure their own well-being. By taking the perspective of a rural community, the Monte El Santo Archaeological Project (MSAP) will include rural people in the narrative of post-political collapse, an arena in which they have traditionally been overlooked. As a doctoral dissertation project, the MSAP will provide training and professional preparation for a doctoral student from the United States, and incorporates additional graduate students from both the United States and Mexico, fostering international collaboration. The data collected during the project will be made available to researchers through publication in academic journals. The results of the research will be shared with the public via presentations and question and answer sessions to both the local Mexican community and to the public in the United States through organized museum talks and lecture series. The project results will also be available online at www.colorado.edu/rioverdearchaeology, a bilingual website about archaeological research in the Rio Verde region. The MSAP researchers will directly engage with questions of political collapse, rural agency, and economic integration both intra and inter-regionally. The project will focus on the rural site of Monte El Santo in Coastal Oaxaca, located 11 km north of the urban center of Rio Viejo. Research at Rio Viejo has shown that following the political collapse, commoner households were able to produce and manage surplus cotton and gain greater access to long-distance goods including obsidian, green stone, and alabaster. The MSAP will expand on this research by asking: what were the economic conditions like for rural communities following collapse? Did common people living in former political and demographic centers have economic advantages following collapse relative to those in rural communities because of better access to economic resources (e.g. good land, established exchange partners) that had previously been controlled by regional elites? And if so, how did rural communities respond to these changes? The proposed study has merit beyond archaeological research by recognizing the variability in which collapse is experienced, even within a single region. In providing a rural perspective on political collapse, the MSAP research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of large regional political and social transformations