Collaborative Research: Ceramic Geography and the Social Formations of the Smoky Hill Phase, east-central Kansas

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With National Science Foundation support, the researchers will analyze curated ceramic assemblages to investigate social formations of the Smoky Hill phase of the Central Plains tradition (CPt) of North America. The 18-month project will apply detailed ceramic style analysis and neutron activation analysis to problems of social organization and interaction, and will control chronology by radiocarbon dating 36 Smoky Hill phase sites in central and north-central Kansas. The late prehistoric period in the Central Plains (cal A.D. 1100?1350) featured an emerging farming economy, with attendant changes in technology, settlement, and social organization. The social organization is the least understood of these dimensions. The basic social unit was the economically autonomous household, but households by necessity were integrated into communities. This late prehistoric adaptation really has no historic analog in the region. The project's primary objective is to develop an empirically based model to map the late prehistoric social landscape and to delineate the individual communities formed among the people of the Smoky Hill phase. The team will use ceramic style analysis as a proxy measure of the community affiliation of individual households. The analysis will examine multiple dimensions of stylistic variation and will examine the geographical distribution of style groups. This analysis will be augmented with extensive radiocarbon dating using annual plant species to ensure that analyzed materials are contemporaneous with the associated component. Extensive neutron activation analysis (NAA) will allow the evaluation of interaction within and among communities by delineating chemical compositional groups and mapping their distribution. GIS will be a critical visual and analytical tool for mapping ceramic style groups and chemical compositional groups. The intellectual merits of the project are grounded in a break with the traditional ways of viewing late prehistoric social organization on the Central Plains and of lifeways on the Plains in general. Traditional ways have relied on historic analogies and have reified rather than truly exposed aspects of social organization. Contemporary theory and method, however, now allow social organization to be addressed empirically. The results of this research will be a baseline study of the organization of this underrepresented type of social formation from a geographical area that has also been largely underrepresented. The broader impacts of the study are that it will contribute to advances in theory, education, and outreach. The project supports theory concerning the effects of the transition to food production on social organization, including gender, as well as the chronology and structure of social change across the Central Plains. Undergraduate and graduate students will be educated and trained in the analysis of Smoky Hill phase material culture and the application of ceramic data and GIS tools to that analysis. By defining the community structure of twelfth through fourteenth century people on one part of the Central Plains, the result will be a better understanding of the social organization of early Plains farmers.