Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The Production of Architectural Artifacts: An Analysis of Cliff-Dwellings in the Northern Sierra, Sonora, Mexico

在Patricia Crown博士的指导下，Elizabeth Bagwell女士将为她的博士论文收集数据。她将指导一个由经验丰富的志愿者组成的摄制组，在墨西哥索诺拉州和奇瓦瓦州之间的西山马德雷山脉的四个悬崖民居进行密集的建筑录音。这些有5到20个房间的土坯建筑被认为是与东部40公里处的卡萨斯·格兰斯(或帕奎姆)的区域中心同时存在的，该中心可以追溯到大约公元1100-1475年。巴格威尔女士将考察这些遗址，以确定墨西哥北部史前社会是如何组织建筑生产的。虽然建造像阿兹特克人这样更复杂的社会中常见的金字塔和宫殿可能需要全职建筑专家，但考古学家们对专家在普通民众日常住宅建设中所扮演的角色知之甚少。对建筑进行技术分析是确定专家是否参与建造这些建筑的一种方式。由专家建造的建筑应该比由非专家建造的建筑更加统一。原材料组成、制造技术和一次建造多个结构的计划都与建筑专家有关。因此，这项工作将比较这些属性及其随时间的产生。随着时间的推移，对建筑产品的细粒度了解的一种方法是树轮断代，这是一种技术，它使用树上生长年轮的粗细模式，很像条形码，来确定树死亡的年份，并通过关联确定结构建造的年份。树木年轮产生的时间信息将与技术数据相结合，以创建建筑历史和定居点增长模式。最终，如果确定了统一的属性，它们将被解释为史前建筑专家的证据。巴格威尔女士的研究将有助于理解非国家社会中建筑生产的组织方式。它还将扩大我们对鲜为人知的墨西哥北部的了解，并建立这些遗址与其他当代群体之间的关系，如霍霍卡姆人、卡萨斯人、里奥索诺拉人和阿尼马斯人。最后，这项研究将向建立该地区亟需的年表又迈进了一步。

Under the direction of Dr. Patricia Crown, MS Elizabeth Bagwell will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will direct a crew of experienced volunteers in intensive architectural recording at four cliff-dwellings located in the Sierra Madre Occidental along the border between the states of Sonora and Chihuahua, Mexico. These five to twenty room adobe buildings are believed to be contemporaneous with the regional center of Casas Grandes (or Paquime) 40 km to the east, which dates to ca. A.D. 1100-1475. MS Bagwell will examine these sites to determine how the production of architecture was organized among prehistoric societies in Northern Mexico. While full-time building specialists were probably necessary to build the pyramids and palaces common in more complex societies like the Aztecs, archaeologists know very little about the role of specialists in the every-day construction of the homes of the common people. A technological analysis of architecture is one way to determine if specialists helped produce these buildings. Buildings built by specialists should be more uniform than those built by non-specialists. Raw material composition, manufacturing techniques and planned construction of more than one structure at a time has been associated with architectural specialists. Therefore this work will compare these attributes and their production through time. One way of gaining a fine-grained understanding of architectural production through time is with tree-ring dating, a technique that uses the pattern of thick and thin growth rings in a tree, much like a bar code, to determine the year that the tree died and by association the year that the structure was built. Temporal information resulting from tree-rings will be combined with technological data to create construction histories and settlement growth patterns. Ultimately, if uniform attributes are identified, they will be interpreted as evidence of prehistoric architectural specialists. MS Bagwell's research will contribute to the understanding of the way architectural production was organized in non-state societies. It will also expand our knowledge of a poorly understood Northern Mexico and establish the relationship between these sites and other contemporary groups such as the Hohokam, Casas Grandes, Rio Sonora and Animas. Finally, this research will move one step closer to establishing a badly needed chronology for the region.