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。她将指导一组经验丰富的志愿者在位于索诺拉州和墨西哥奇瓦瓦州交界的西马德雷山脉的四个悬崖住宅进行密集的建筑记录。这些有5到20个房间的土坯建筑被认为与东部40公里处的Casas Grandes（或Paquime）区域中心是同一时期的，可以追溯到公元1100-1475年。MS Bagwell将研究这些遗址，以确定在墨西哥北部的史前社会中，建筑的生产是如何组织的。虽然全职的建筑专家可能是建造金字塔和宫殿的必要条件，这在阿兹特克人这样更复杂的社会中很常见，但考古学家对专家在普通人日常房屋建设中的作用知之甚少。对建筑进行技术分析是确定这些建筑是否有专家参与的一种方法。专家建造的建筑应该比非专业人士建造的更加统一。原材料组成，制造技术和计划的建设，在一个时间超过一个结构已经联系到建筑专家。因此，本工作将比较这些属性及其随时间的产生。通过树木年轮测年法，我们可以更细致地了解建筑生产的历史。这种技术利用树木年轮的粗细变化规律，就像条形码一样，来确定树木死亡的年份，并通过关联来确定建筑物建造的年份。由树木年轮产生的时间信息将与技术数据相结合，以创建建筑历史和聚落增长模式。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。MS Bagwell的研究将有助于理解非国家社会中建筑生产的组织方式。它还将扩大我们对墨西哥北部知之甚少的认识，并建立这些遗址与其他当代群体之间的关系，如霍霍坎人、卡萨斯格兰德人、里约热内卢索诺拉人和阿尼玛斯人。最后，这项研究将使建立该地区急需的年表更近一步。

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.