Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Integration at Edges of States

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Although rigidly bordered nation-states are ubiquitous in the modern world, both cooperation and conflict frequently drive sociopolitical communities and economic institutions to diffuse across borders. This transnationalism has come to define our fundamentally cosmopolitan, global political economy. In order to better understand the driving forces and sociopolitical dynamics of transnationalism the researchers seek to identify an origin for these processes. Given the inherently complex, densely connected and global scale of today's geopolitical landscape, tracing the deep prehistoric origins of these phenomena must be done using the archaeological record. Prehistoric examples traced through the archaeological record offer ideal long-term case studies for understanding the sociopolitical and environmental mechanisms that first propelled communities across borders. This project pursues multiple lines of archaeological evidence drawn from well-preserved archaeological sites located in southern Peru, which constituted the western frontier of the Tiwanaku civilization (ca. AD 500-1100), one of the earliest state-level societies to develop in South America. Here in the northern reaches of the Atacama Desert, hyper-arid conditions gave rise to one of the best-preserved archaeological deposits in the world, giving this project an unprecedented view into the daily lives of prehistoric populations. How communities living on the frontier of the Tiwanaku state negotiated their roles within local and regional networks will help to better understand processes and potential outcomes of personal as well as community driven agency and negotiation in today's sociopolitical landscape. This project examines the ancient Tiwanaku state to investigate the development of early globalized networks from the perspective of colonial encounters. With access to distinct scales and relationships, both spatial and social, archaeology is uniquely suited to examine broad diachronic patterns within complex systems from a variety of perspectives, from state polities and local communities. Communities on the frontiers of states have traditionally been considered disenfranchised and passive. Moving away from this uniform assessment, this project examines an ancient frontier community as embedded within dynamic local and regional social, economic, and symbolic networks generated by the Tiwanaku state in the south-central Andes (Bolivia, southern Peru, northern Chile). Focusing on the site of Cerro San Antonio (Locumba Valley, southern Peru), this project will target the well-preserved remains of three separate Tiwanaku frontier-settlements utilizing some of the newest methods in the archeological toolkit. Methods include low altitude aerial photography and remote sensing for large-scale mapping, and wide-area excavations of households, neighborhoods, and living spaces to investigate the connectivity and complexity of residential group networks. Treating such settlements with this network approach will provide a powerful framework for illustrating both the local source of global processes as well as the global implications of local action. Following in the tradition of complexity and network analysis, this project will demonstrate that the social, economic, and ritual networks engaged in by frontier communities were localized within broader regional, political processes otherwise attributed entirely to the Tiwanaku state. Ultimately, the research will contribute to understanding how diverse community networks can be integrated (or not) under incipient polities, and their role in the generation and maintenance of states. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.