Collaborative Research: Long Term Process of Cultural Melding

University Of South Alabama, Mobile AL

Investigators

Abstract

Researchers will investigate how communities form and hybrid cultural traditions develop through migration and settlement in new ecological contexts. The manufacture, exchange, and use of objects are embedded in social relationships that include processes of teaching and learning, negotiation, and everyday use. Thus, objects actively forge relationships among the people who create and use them, despite differences in backgrounds, lifeways, and belief systems. In a time of increasing migration and environmental instability worldwide, archaeological research that centers networks of people linked by material culture and practice reveals how people contend with the universal challenges of negotiating physical and cultural borders. Anthropological approaches such as this, grounded in archaeological data, contribute resilient strategies for a changing world. This project will emphasize the participation and training of first-generation and Indigenous students in archaeological research. The team will also collaborate with tribal nations to help them define direct historical connections with their ancestors and refine their areas of historical interest, to better facilitate consultation and repatriation processes outlined by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This project emphasizes how daily practice—in this case, the production and use of pottery—facilitated different types of social connections among groups of people living in a US coastal region some of whom were recent migrants. Rather than assuming shared identities or affiliations, the researchers will examine the structure of these relationships using a social network analysis approach that incorporates fine-grained elemental, technofunctional, and iconographic attributes of pottery. Making use of extant collections, the researchers will develop a geographically and temporally sensitive spatial model. This region presents a new context for investigating increasing social complexity in coastal environments, and among people who did not rely on agriculture to provide the food surplus that typically underpins complex societies. The methods employed will provide a model for examining 1) how fine-grained distinctions in material culture practice reflect various connections among the people who create and use these objects, and 2) how objects are fundamental to connecting people through kinship, trade and exchange networks, political alliances, and/or religious practice. 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.