Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The effect of Long Term Migration on Community Processes

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

This project explores the impact of immigration of politically stratified groups on local non-stratified communities during the precolonial period and focuses on the processes under which these interactions occurred. Migrations have occurred throughout human history and were as important in the past as they are today, particularly with concerns such as cultural identity, interactions between groups of people, land, and security. Along with the movement of people come not just practices and ideas, but physical bodies and objects that occupy area and space differently. The results of such massive social and cultural changes occur throughout time and space all over the world, with archaeological interest particularly focused on changes in political institutions and subsistence patterns. However, these archaeological studies in the past have often assumed that changes occur ubiquitously and unilaterally. This assumption minimizes the autonomy and agency of the local populations who are acting, interacting, and reacting to these changes and to the immigrant populations. This study examines one such shift that highlights and provides a case-study for these large-scale changes which in this case was characterized by an increase in population, sedentism, agriculture, trade networks, shared iconography and ideologies, intensified political stratification, intensified monumental construction, and the emergence and peak of chiefdoms and chiefly centers. This case relates to the impact of immigration on these local non-stratified communities and how they adapted with the arrival of the earliest agricultural peoples. The researchers focus on two archaeological sites in the same region .By focusing on evidence for local and regional-scale transformations, this project provides unique insights into the social and political processes and practices that defined the spread of the agricultural lifeway. The researchers evaluate several interrelated domains of archaeological data including subsistence, crafting, site organization, and regional organization from these sites before, during, and after evidence of agriculture appears. One goal is to determine whether local people welcomed this new practice or actively resisted doing so. By integrating data from archaeological excavations, radiocarbon dating, botanical analyses, and museum collections this project permits the researchers to evaluate different possible models. By producing a more complete record of social and cultural practices the project informs the broader study of processes involved and variation in changes to complex socio-political phenomena such as practices of agricultural intensification and social inequality. 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.