Doctoral Dissertation Research: Early Urbanism and Long-Term Technological Change in Material Culture

George Washington University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation project will utilize geoarchaeological data to advance our knowledge of past people’s relationship with the environment and its natural resources, particularly during periods of significant sociopolitical transformations. In addition to generating new comparative data of ancient ceramics to advance archaeological knowledge of long-term sociopolitical change in prehistory, this project will offer robust datasets to better understand the social impacts of raw material procurement and use in modern and prehistoric communities. The project will foster collaborative relationships between scholars and students of various academic disciplines, such as geology and materials science, and provide advanced research and training for archaeology students and an underrepresented female minority scholar in STEM. The researchers will also promote interest in local cultural heritage through public outreach and collaborations with modern communities. This project builds upon recent literature on early urban societies by scholars who call for more nuanced understandings of urbanism and its effects on daily life. Urbanization in prehistory involved many changes to people’s everyday lives that enabled them to live in dense, socially differentiated settlements. This project aims to better understand changes to raw material procurement and use in ancient crafting traditions during the transition to an urban society. It is centered on long-term technological changes in pottery production at two sites. The researchers will perform two complementary forms of compositional analysis – Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) and petrography (optical mineralogy) – on ceramic collections from these sites. The compositional data will offer insight into how significant sociopolitical change in the region impacted people’s access to and use of raw materials for craft production. These fine-grained analyses will ultimately offer new geochemical and mineralogical data of pottery from both sites to examine the relationship between early urbanism and long-term technological change in ancient crafting traditions. 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.