Changing Agrarian Foundations Of Urban Life: A Long-Term Perspective

这项研究的中心目标是了解在传统社会(如当今发展中世界许多地区的传统社会)中，城市居民和农村居民如何通过社会和经济联系在一起，以及这些联系如何受到环境变化的影响。考古学为这类分析提供了极好的背景，因为它可以追踪并关联社会组织和环境背景的变化，有时是在千年时间尺度上。这项由美国国家科学基金会支持的调查将重建墨西哥尤卡坦北部玛雅地区随着时间的推移农业生活的经济基础。前现代国家经济基础的力量和复杂性，鲜明地反映在政府机构对社会中最卑微、最边缘的居民的影响上。这种影响可以是积极的、中性的，也可以是消极的。例如，蓬勃发展的市场网络可以将农村房主与更大的与外部世界互动的领域联系起来，从而带来富裕和职业专业化的机会。或者，由于更高的税收水平或与战争相关的不稳定，位于竞争激烈的城市国家矩阵中的普通民众可能会遭受繁荣机会的抑制。同样重要的是自下而上的过程，普通公民通过这些过程创新或复制促进家庭维持和生存的经济战略。了解农村人口的经济组织对于评估支持这一干旱地区城镇所需的可持续农业食品基地的前景至关重要。主要研究目标是记录农业、手工业和服务业的多样性程度，这些行业是农村居民群体随着时间的推移而表现出工作生活的特征。还将评估相关因素，包括腹地平民住房群体的财富、稳定和寿命程度，以及他们对当地和区域交换日常生活必需品的依赖程度。一个广泛的家庭考古项目将提供解决这些研究目标所需的数据，该项目建立在之前NSF支持的调查的基础上，该调查使用LiDAR遥感技术在40平方公里的连续占用区域内定位了数千所住宅。我们将比较两种不同政治地理环境下的农村生活。最初，晚期和末期古典时代的房屋处于极其边缘的位置，远离规模巨大的城镇。后来，后古典主义时代的宅基地距离一个主要的政治首都不到四公里，玛雅潘就是在这个地区出现的一个大型城市中心。这项研究将记录由此产生的对区域政治经济的转变。这项研究将研究在干旱多发地区农业的长期可行战略，该地区一再遭受灾难性的人口崩溃，随后是非凡的弹性和人口复苏。尽管先前的地面调查显示，尤卡捷克农村在古代人口密度惊人，内陆大片地区的农村人口密度至少为每公顷6人，但之前没有任何研究针对非城市玛雅农村的家庭经济。

The central goal of this research is to understand how within traditional societies (such as those which characterize many parts of the developing world today) urban and rural dwellers are linked together through social and economic ties and how these linkages are affected by environmental change. Archaeology provides an excellent context for analyses of this type because it can trace and correlate changes in social organization and environmental context sometimes over millennial time scales.This NSF-supported investigation will reconstruct the economic foundations of agrarian life through time in the northern Maya area in Yucatan, Mexico. The power and complexity of the economic foundations of pre-modern states is acutely reflected in the impacts that governmental institutions had on the humblest, most peripheral residents of society. Such effects can be positive, neutral, or negative. For example, thriving market networks can connect rural houselots to larger spheres of interaction with the outside world that bring opportunities for affluence and occupational specialization. Alternatively, commoners situated within a matrix of competitive city states may suffer suppressed opportunities for prosperity, due to higher levels of taxation or instability associated with warfare. Of equal importance are bottom-up processes by which ordinary citizens innovate or reproduce economic strategies that foster household maintenance and survival. Understanding the economic organization of rural populations is essential for evaluating the prospects for a sustainable agrarian food base needed to support urban towns and cities of this arid region.The primary research objective is to document the degree of diversity in farming, craft production, and service industries that characterized the work lives of rural residential groups through time. Related factors will also be evaluated, including the degree of wealth, stability, and longevity of the hinterland commoner house groups, as well as their level of dependency on local and regional exchange for the essentials of daily life. An extensive program of household archaeology will provide the data needed to address these research objectives, building on a previous NSF-supported investigation that located thousands of dwellings across a continuously-occupied area of 40 square kilometers, using LiDAR remote sensing. Rural life in two contrastive political geographic settings will be compared. Initially, Late and Terminal Classic era houselots were located in an extremely marginal position, far from towns or cities of significant size. Later, Postclassic homesteads were within four kilometers of a major political capital, the site of Mayapán, a large urban center that emerged in this area. This study will document the resulting transformations to regional political economy. The study will examine long term viable strategies for farming in a drought-prone environment in an area that suffered repeated catastrophic demographic collapses, followed by remarkable resilience and demographic recovery. Although prior surface surveys revealed that the Yucatecan countryside was surprisingly populous in ancient times, with rural densities of at least 6 persons per hectare across vast tracts of the outback, no prior study has targeted the household economies of the non-urban Maya countryside.