Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Craft Production And Population Movement Interaction

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In an increasingly global society archaeologists are uniquely positioned to examine cross-cultural exchange along an extended timescale. Tracking how new ideas spread has broad implications for understanding how artisans respond to technologies, accept skilled producers and learn new ways of doing. Whether populations accept, reject, or modify these new technologies depends on how they are introduced, and what these new technologies represent. Changes in craft production becomes a case study of how ideas are transmitted (or fail to be transmitted) in contact situations, bringing together concepts of self, identity and cultural belonging. Specifically, this dissertation addresses how American and Mexican indigenous groups interacted and introduced new pottery manufacturing technologies across a cultural frontier. The modern international border artificially divides current research on these prehispanic cultures, creating an inaccurate image of how indigenous population exchanged ideas and goods. Additionally, both the border and language divide prevent communication between researchers. The researcher's conference presentations and publications on these data will bring northern Mexican archaeological research to an English-speaking audience, diminishing the effect of the modern boundary on cultures that were once continuous. The research will be conducted by Tanya Chiykowski, a graduate student at SUNY Binghamton and will provide data for her doctoral dissertation thesis. Thus it will further her intellectual and professional advancement.The late prehistoric Southwest US was a landscape of warfare, migration and identity formation. Archaeologists study the movement of potters, materials and techniques to understand this period of upheaval, by tracking ceramic styles, using geologic sourcing to map exchange, and recording the history of technological style. American ceramicists have developed extensive methods and databases to address questions of identity and craft production in the U.S. Southwest; however, Northwest Mexico presents an abrupt termination to these research questions. In Sonora, archaeologists have clear evidence of population upheaval after AD 1300. Southern Arizona Hohokam groups migrated into the Altar Valley in Sonora, Mexico, bringing with them new ceramic technologies and displacing a resident Trincheras population to the Middle Magdalena valley. While the presence of large amounts of Hohokam ceramics at Cerro de Trincheras in the Middle Magdalena valley suggests that Trincheras and Hohokam populations interacted, neither how the process occurred nor the impact of those linkages is well understood. What processes caused such a large percentage of "foreign" ceramics at Cerro de Trincheras? The investigators will use ceramic petrography and GIS analysis to address the likelihood of trade, community migration and the movement of women, all hotly debated mechanisms of introducing new technology.