Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Family Resilience And Social Change

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Kent Johnson, Ph.D. candidate at Arizona State University, under the direction of Dr. Jane Buikstra and Dr. Chris Stojanowski, will investigate the effects of transformative sociopolitical processes on families. This research will benefit society by providing temporal depth to understanding of how human families have been constructed and the ways that family relationships respond to, shape and in turn are affected by larger social institutions. This project will generate new anthropological knowledge about families' responses to state collapse and contribute to current discussions about the nature and structure of families by exploring what constitutes relatedness in non-Western context. This research will enhance understanding of kinship in the past and present by investigating how kin-based social networks influence individual lives and community histories. This new information has implications for understanding the decline of complex polities worldwide. The project will advance discovery and understanding by producing educational brochures that describe the studies findings and promote the museums that provide access to research collections. The project will enhance the infrastructure for research and education by fostering dialogue and collaboration among the institutions to be visited and the researchers' home institution. Study results will be disseminated to scholars interested in family, kinship, and Andean archaeology through professional publications, public presentations, and the online digital archive for archaeological data, the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR). Bioarchaeological investigations of kinship have typically focused on improving methods for identifying biological kin in archaeological contexts and thus generate relatively narrow inferences. Rather than simply identifying kin groups within the archaeological record, this study will explore the diverse ways that families are constructed and how they influence individual and small group responses to political turmoil and economic collapse. Drawing on recent developments in kinship research in contemporary societies and bioarchaeological studies of social groups, this project will examine evidence from human skeletal remains and their associated burial contexts to evaluate three important aspects of kin-based social organization following political decentralization: (1) the degree to which criteria for kin group membership is redefined or adapted; (2) the extent to which family ties are strengthened or weakened by political decline and economic destabilization; and (3) the role of family-based responses to political and economic upheaval in shaping broad changes in social organization. To investigate the effects of political decline on family, the researchers will collect and analyze data on patterns of mate exchange, cranial modification practices, and mortuary rituals of Middle Horizon (ca. AD 500-1100) and Late Intermediate Period (ca. AD 1100-1450) Tiwanaku and Chiribaya communities of the lower Osmore Drainage in southern Peru. Skeletal and dental markers of genetic relatedness will be combined with evidence of cranial modification practices and funerary rituals to investigate the role families played in shaping responses to political decentralization and the collapse of long-distance exchange networks.