Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Chronologically Related Changes in Material Culture Composition

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the factors underlying long term social change. It will use geochemical, petrographic, and other technical data derived from pottery along the northern Gulf Coast of Florida to examine social changes associated with the abandonment of large size settlements in which people lived. Judging from the diversity of settlement and pottery technology that followed, social outcomes varied. The objective of this research is to determine the extent to which these changes involved social movements. Social movements in the modern world are often the impetus for transformative social change, including those which are often called "collapse." However recent scholarship on societal collapse has illuminated how social groups in fact can enact structural change through deliberate collective action, a curative to the bias that collapse was necessarily a matter of failure or "devolution" of society. In its emphasis on materiality and the material conditions of human experience, study of the past holds good potential for contributing to the cross-cultural study of social movements well beyond the reach of ethnography, sociology, and literary history. Pottery from 12 sites across the study area will provide data on clay provenance (neutron activation analysis), composition (petrography), manufacture and use (technofunctional analysis), and surface treatment (stylistic analysis) as analytical proxies for social identity and affiliation. Pottery from sites spanning the period of abandonment and resettlement varies wildly with respect to surface treatment and vessel form, Provenance and compositional data may be equally variable, but this is not yet known. Compositional data embody choices for clays and aplastic additives that carry the weight of tradition inconspicuously, and are thus possibly indicative of shared practices that took form over generations of co-residency of potters at civic-ceremonial centers and then continued into the ensuing centuries of dispersed settlement. As the samples for this project are drawn from sites on public lands that are vulnerable to the negative effects of rising seas, this research will contribute to federal mandates for the inventory, assessment, and conservation of archaeological sites. Furthermore, this research will: (1) contribute to ongoing archaeological critique of popular "collapse" narratives and the development of alternatives based on empirical studies; (2) add information concerning a period of time that is poorly understood in the area and throughout the southeastern United States; and (3) provide case material to the growing body of studies on the archaeological signatures and material implications of social movements. 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.