Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Long Term Establishment of Social Interactive Ties

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates how social traditions may adapt long-distance economies to local community structures. Previous research suggested that long-distance economies generate inequality by creating opportunities for greater wealth hoarding and status differentiation with prestige goods from distant regions – thereby dissolving local community bonds. However, historians and ethnographers have instead discovered multiple case studies of group-oriented societies altering how long-distance economies interface to limit activities such as wealth-hoarding and blunting the overall inequality. Archaeologists in particular have found examples of major urban settlements involved in long-distance economies that instead retained community-based social structures. Such group-oriented societies are often maintained through regular community-building practices steeped in values of tradition. While it was previously thought that long-distance economies have a “homogenizing” effect, economy rarely overrides tradition and both often intertwine to produce diverse social outcomes. Investigating how long-distance economies localize in such societies will then further understanding on the many possible trajectories cultures undertake in globalizing spheres all over the world. This project specifically aims to examine the outcomes of community-building practices on the localization of long-distance economies through mortuary ceramics. Ceramics often index the circulation of goods in the archaeological record, and mortuary ceramics specifically were often curated as prestige or ritual materials. This project focuses on a region which over long periods of time was involved in long distance trade. Associated mortuary traditions appear to have limited wealth hoarding and status differentiation and instead encouraged community-building dynamics through ceramic material. In collaboration with a research reactor, this project will employ compositional analysis that differentiates ceramic manufactures to examine how such ceramics circulated and were ultimately deposited in tombs. The acquired data would then show who was involved in such exchanges and ultimately allow for evaluation of how successfully community-building practices helped preserve a group-oriented social structure in the context of long-distance trade. The project data will also be used to prepare public-facing visual materials that summarize archaeological research for stakeholders. 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.