Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Social Adaptation In Cross Cultural Contexts

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In diverse contexts of the ancient and modern worlds, the study of culture contact has proven critical to understanding political trajectories and the emergence of ethnic and class identity. To reconstruct how these phenomena developed, scholars have increasingly looked to archaeology as a methodology capable of exploring the long-term impact of culture contact on ethnic groupings and social inequality in early societies. The archaeological project described here had been designed to study one of these contexts: a Preclassic (1000 BC - AD 250) borderland center from the time of Mesoamerica's early urban settlements. The site was located on the cultural frontier between the emergent Maya and Olmec civilizations. By demonstrating how different social classes in this frontier center variably adapted some customs from their neighbors while combining and developing unique practices of their own, the researchers will demonstrate how borderland groups can flexibly integrate foreign practices through time as they work to maintain and improve their social position. This research is relevant to ongoing studies of both historic and modern-day identity and will help improve understanding of frontier contexts today. The fieldwork will be conducted by Jeffrey Dobereiner, a Harvard University graduate student, and will provide data for his doctoral dissertation. Thus it will further his education as a scientist. Because of close collaboration with Mexican students the project will strengthen long term scientific ties between the US and Mexico.As a frontier community between several emergent Preclassic cultures, the decisions made by these borderland residents provide a critical data set from which to explore how non-local connectivity affected different parts of ancient Mesoamerican society in different ways. Throughout the site, unique architecture, burials and ceramics that draw upon several separate cultural identity groups have been found, alongside a wide range of sources for imported goods such as marine shell and obsidian. While this evidence indicates that site residents articulated with varied cultural currents of Preclassic Mesoamerica while maintaining their own independent identity, the mechanism of this independence is unclear. Through field research in households at diverse social levels, the researchers will explore whether elites or commoners were the primary actors controlling how and when these foreign practices were adopted, rejected, and modified. This project at Rancho Búfalo, Chiapas, Mexico will use field work, laboratory analysis and chemical techniques to demonstrate who was mediating these variable adaptations, and in which social strata foreign customs first arrived. By reconstructing how the people of this region variably integrated these customs to negotiate their tenuous social position, the final results will provide a case-study in research on culture contact and frontier peoples more broadly.