Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Networking Identity Research

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Under the direction of Dr. Barbara Mills, Leslie Aragon will conduct research to study how group identity is constructed at multiple scales and how it might change over time. Archaeology provides a unique opportunity to develop a framework for investigating different concepts of group identity and social interactions among communities with deep time depth in the ancient past. This project takes a multidisciplinary approach, incorporating social network analyses (SNA), petrographic analyses, and stylistic analyses across multiple media to understand internal and external diversity, an important step in gaining insight into social organization. Using the Hohokam Ballcourt World in the southern U.S. Southwest as a case study, this research informs upon the dynamic ways that groups form social boundaries regardless of spatial proximity. In a broader sense, the project addresses questions regarding the organization of human communities at varying scales, how people form identities, and the long-term effects of these processes. As part of her Ph.D. dissertation research, Ms. Aragon will use archaeological data from across southern Arizona to examine how people in the prehispanic Southwest formed both relational and categorical identities among social groups and how those identities changed or persisted with the rise and decline of the Hohokam Ballcourt World during the eighth through twelfth centuries (A.D. 700-1100). The researchers will use a multiscalar network approach to reconstruct group identities in the Hohokam Ballcourt World based on material culture at 100-year intervals to create "snapshots" through time. In this way, the project addresses issues of group adaptation during times of cultural and ideological change and reorganization. The investigators will use understudied curated material and published reports to integrate and synthesize more than 50 years of fieldwork across the study region. Research with existing collections will add to the stock of information available to managing agencies and will contribute new information that can be used in the interpretation of sites for the public. Finally, this research will contribute new methods for studying identity across time and space, which will be useful to researchers investigating similar processes, both in the past and present. 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.