Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: An Integrative Approach To Examining Migration, Community Interaction And Social Diversity

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Migrations, past and present, fundamentally influence human interaction, community building, and social evolution. Large scale population movement is particularly pertinent to today's globally mobile society as the effects of climate-driven migrations continue to gain precedence in international dialogues. While anthropologists have long been interested in relationships between episodes of migration and large social transformations, few have considered the diversity of ways the actions and lives of individual agents shape these broad social movements. How do diverse migrants differentially respond to their new social and political environments, and how do their responses in turn shape new social and political transformations? Archaeology is particularly well placed to provide insight because it can contextualize the long-term effects of increasing human mobility and population interaction today in the study of prehistoric migrations spanning over hundreds or even thousands of years. Using innovative biogeochemical analyses, this project addresses the long-term social transformations triggered by the actions of diverse individuals living within the prehistoric south central Andes. The research will be conducted at the site of Omo M10 in the Moquegua Valley of southern Peru. Omo M10 was at the center of a system of colonies established by the early expansive Tiwanaku (AD 700-1050) state and marks a unique region of interaction between contemporaneous Tiwanaku, Wari, and coastal polities. This interdisciplinary research will use bioarchaeological (sex and age at death estimates, paleopathology, cranial modification practices, diet, and funerary rituals) and biogeochemical (isotopic analyses) evidence to reconstruct the residential mobility and community affiliations of several migrant groups interred at Omo M10. The isotopic analysis of multiple dental and skeletal elements from each of 152 individuals will allow this project to reconstruct the residential mobility of these individuals throughout their lives. This fine-grained temporal control is inaccessible through traditional lines of archaeological evidence. The researchers will result in the training of a group of Peruvian and American undergraduate university students in the interdisciplinary biogeochemical and osteological methods employed, promoting future international collaborations and contributing to the participation of underrepresented groups in science. This project will significantly alter current understandings of early South American complex polities. Further, the innovative interdisciplinary approach employed provides future researchers with the tools necessary to identify the significance of individual actors in large scale and long-term social transformations.