Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Examining Social Networks And Communties Of Resistance To New Religious Movements

芭芭拉米尔斯博士（亚利桑那大学）和刘易斯博克（亚利桑那大学和考古西南）将研究人们对新宗教意识形态的传播或扩散所带来的文化和组织模式变化的复杂反应方式。研究人员将研究日常和仪式生活的对象如何塑造过去人群复杂的社会和政治生活。了解过去人们对扩张性意识形态的反应提供了比较数据，以评估现代扩张性宗教，包括其各种教派。这不仅将提高对意识形态如何传播的理解，而且还将提高对群体如何以及为什么加入或抵制新宗教的理解。以前关于扩散的考古学研究集中在技术而不是思想或意识形态上，这种调查通常依赖于空间数据或社会数据。本项目将整合社会网络和空间扩散模型，向多个领域的研究人员展示整合这两种方法的实用性和准确性。这个项目还将与社区成员分享有关考古道德、过去的所有权和深厚的当地历史的信息（土地所有者，社区大学生，和公立学校学生）米尔斯博士和博克先生将利用来自亚利桑那州和新墨西哥州西部的考古数据，研究前西班牙时代晚期西南部的人们对与传播有关的变化的反应。萨拉多教派在13至15世纪（公元1200-1450年）。该项目将通过使用陶瓷分布数据（某些种类的陶器被制造和使用，然后被考古学家发现）建模阻力来测量接触萨拉多的可能水平和相应的抵抗水平（或缺乏）。他们将这些数据与一个空模型进行比较，该模型包括一个模拟物质商品流动的空间组件，以及一个研究思想如何随着时间的推移通过网络传播的社交网络组件。考古学作为一个领域，对于研究诸如宗教传播等困难的长期过程特别有用，因为考古学数据主要来自实物，而不是可能包含人类偏见的文本或人种学记录。这项研究将产生新的方法来研究思想在时间和空间上的传播，这些方法将有助于研究过去和现在类似过程的不同研究人员。

Dr. Barbara Mills (University of Arizona) and Lewis Borck (University of Arizona and Archaeology Southwest) will examine the complex ways that people react to changing cultural and organizational patterns brought about by the spread, or diffusion, of a new religious ideology. The researchers will study how objects of daily and ceremonial life shaped the complicated social and political lives of past groups of people. Understanding how people in the past reacted to an expansive ideology provides comparative data to evaluate against modern expansive religions, including their various sects. This will improve understanding not only of how ideology spreads, but also of how and why groups join or resist a new religion. Previous archaeological research on diffusion has focused on technology rather than ideas or ideology, and such investigations typically relied on either spatial data or social data. This project will integrate social network and spatial diffusion models to demonstrate to researchers in many fields the utility and accuracy of integrating the two approaches. This project will also share information about archaeological ethics, ownership of the past, and deep local history with community members (landowners, community college students, and public school students) in areas often underserved by academia.Dr. Mills and Mr. Borck will use archaeological data from across all of Arizona and western New Mexico to examine how people in the late prehispanic Southwest reacted to changes associated with the spread of the Salado religious cult during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries (A.D. 1200-1450). This project will measure the probable level of exposure to and the corresponding level (or lack) of resistance to the spread of Salado by modeling resistance using ceramic distribution data (where certain kinds of pottery were made and used, and then found by archaeologists). They will compare these data against a null model that includes a spatial component that models the flow of material goods, as well as a social network component that examines how ideas spread through a network over time. Archaeology as a field is particularly useful for examining difficult, long-term processes such as the spread of religion, because archaeological data primarily derive from material objects, rather than textual or ethnographic records that may incorporate human bias. This research will generate new methods for studying the spread of ideas across time and space, and these methods will be useful to diverse researchers examining similar processes in the past and the present.