Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant: Resilience In Adaptation To Social Change

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Gavin R. Davies of the University of Kentucky together with associates from the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala will investigate how rural communities in the southwestern Maya highlands in Guatemala negotiated the multiple challenges of the Classic to Postclassic Transition (c. 800-1200 AD). Inspired by recent research on the environment and globalization, this research is grounded in notions of community resilience and quality of life, concepts that have significant potential for the comparison of past and present social dynamics and for facilitating cross-disciplinary research. Long an important focus of studies in the Maya Lowlands, this period remains shrouded in mystery in the neighboring highlands, critically undermining understanding of the origins and development of the major social and political entities. Preliminary data from the southwestern highlands, however, indicates that collapse in the lowlands and crisis in the adjacent Pacific Coast may have galvanized political elites in this area to strive for greater integration, urbanism and complexity. However, a lack of rural settlement data means that it is currently impossible to determine how rural households and communities responded to, or were affected by, this transformation. Addressing this lacuna, the current investigations will generate baseline settlement and chronological data for all habitable portions of the western shore of Lake Atitlan region. Representing the first collaboration between the University of Kentucky and the Universidad Del Valle de Guatemala, this project is expected to pave the way for future collaborations between these two institutions and to generate future training and research opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology and related disciplines. It will also provide data for Mr. Davies doctoral dissertation.Combining intensive reconnaissance survey, with the test excavation of domestic and non-domestic locales, the investigators will identify patterned responses to broad-level changes and delineate changes in community wealth, identity and resilience. Recognizing that all adaptations entail a cost or trade-off, the primary hypothesis of this research is that the communities that were most prosperous in the aftermath of the crisis were those that traded community autonomy and identity for security by submitting to the rising power of a centralized authority.