Doctoral Dissertation Research: Utilization of Prior Cultural Features

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation projects seeks to understand how formations of identity and difference are established through interaction with the physical environment, and especially with material remains of the past. The physical remains of past peoples frequently persist in living cultural landscapes and are often engaged in ways that bear upon the present, including in the construction and legitimation of novel identities. This study focuses on the social mechanisms of these processes of identity construction: How do people understand the relevance of the past for their present? Which pasts become useful for which kinds of identity projects? An archaeological study concentrating on monumental landscapes with many phases of engagement can reveal how these social processes unfold, offering a diachronic perspective on the imagination of the past under different historical conditions. In studying these archaeological contexts of material engagement, this study provides novel insight on the role of the past in group formation and the maintenance of social difference. These issues are particularly relevant today, when political and social movements make ample use of symbols of pasts to claim legitimacy and cultural value. This research also establishes a framework for critical engagement with local heritage. It solicits input from local residents and visitors to the research sites and incorporates this input into the dataset. A version of the resulting composite dataset will be made openly available online for continued public engagement and contribution, benefiting both local stakeholders and the research community. Three study areas that each encompass a variety of monuments, settlements, and other archaeological features that show evidence of successive phases of reuse, re-occupation, modification, or other kinds of engagement have been identified. The investigators hypothesize that these landscapes constituted the material arenas in which identities were constructed in the early historic period, offering the material remains of prehistoric occupants as a resource in these constructions. The doctoral student seeks to understand whether there are distinct patterns in the ways these landscapes are reused through time, and if certain features or monuments from one period are more likely to be incorporated into the living landscape of another. Such patterns lend insight into the ways the relevant pasts were imagined to related to the early historic people who interacted with them. Drone-based aerial photography, used to produce high-resolution imagery and topographic models, serves alongside pedestrian survey as the primary means of data collection to apprehend spatial relationships within these complex landscapes. GIS-based statistical analysis of these data focuses on the ways contrasts between groups were created in these patterns of landscape reuse. The researchers are additionally excavating a cairn feature of prehistoric origin which may have been taken up as a salient cultural boundary marker in the early historic period. This excavation will allow the researchers to assess the nature of this feature and to attain radiocarbon dates for its multiple phases of use and possible modifications. 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.