Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Mechanisms Of Integration In Early States

研究大规模的、政治上一体化的社会发展、运作和变化的方式，是当今社会科学家研究的一个重要领域。考古学特别适合为这一努力做出重大贡献，因为它可以通过分析物质遗迹来研究长期以来复杂的社会。然而，考古学家在重建早期国家时倾向于强调胁迫而不是合作，尽管有证据表明，领导人和他们的臣民倾向于就制度化的政治权威的条款进行谈判。考虑到这些想法，本项目将研究生活在农村社区的人们与政治中心领导人建立的社会控制机制合作、独立行动或竞争的过程。这项研究意义重大，因为它超越了简单地识别过去的社会复杂性，解决了为什么不同的国家遵循历史道路，从而有助于建立描述领导者和追随者如何参与发展、维护、复制和改造复杂政策的模型。传统上，对前哥伦布时期的中美洲（从墨西哥中部延伸到萨尔瓦多）的研究，从“自上而下”的角度审视早期国家的政治整合，重点关注领导人为集中和维持其权威所采用的策略。这些模型隐含的假设是，农村社区是由平民居住的，他们的唯一目的是在统治者的命令下提供城市消费。需要另一种“自下而上”的视角，从农村社区的角度审视政治整合，以严格检验导致中央集权政治形成、持续和崩溃的原因。该项目通过研究在形成末期（公元前150年-公元前250年）出现在墨西哥瓦哈卡沿海的Río Verde河谷下游的复杂政体的组织来解决这个问题。下佛得州的第一个州由CE 100开发，其主要中心位于里约热内卢Viejo遗址。目前的证据表明，随着公元250年的政体崩溃，该地区的人口分散到小定居点，里约热内卢Viejo国家不稳定。本研究通过对位于山谷腹地的乡村社区Cerro de la Virgen进行实地调查，探讨了里约热内卢Viejo统治者对边远地区的控制程度。Cerro de la Virgen是考察偏远社区和里约热内卢Viejo之间谈判的理想场所，因为该地点在形成时期末期的社会动荡中一直存在。该项目包括四个月的挖掘和实验室分析，目的是确定政治、经济和宗教资源是否在地方或区域一级受到控制。挖掘将针对公共和家庭建筑，以检查公共和家庭环境中的资源控制，考古分析将为Río Viejo国家崩溃的假设提供多种测试，因为它的领导人未能将农村人口融入更广泛的政治体系。

Examining the ways in which large-scale, politically integrated societies develop, operate, and change forms an essential area of research for social scientists today. Archaeology is particularly well suited to make significant contributions to this effort because it can study complex societies over extended periods through the analysis of material remains. However, archaeologists have tended to emphasize coercion over cooperation in reconstructing early states, despite evidence that leaders and their subjects tend to negotiate the terms of institutionalized political authority. With these ideas in mind, this project will examine the processes through which people living in rural communities cooperated with, acted independently of, or contested the mechanisms of social control instituted by leaders at political centers. The research is significant because it moves beyond simply identifying social complexity in the past by addressing why different states followed historical paths, thereby contributing to models that describe how leaders and followers participated in developing, maintaining, reproducing and reworking complex polities. Traditionally, research in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, an area that extends from central Mexico to El Salvador, examines political integration in early states from a "top-down" perspective that focuses on the strategies leaders employed to centralize and sustain their authority. Implicit in these models is the assumption that rural communities were populated by commoners whose sole purpose was to provision urban consumption at the behest of polity rulers. An alternative, "bottom-up" perspective that examines political integration from the view of rural communities is needed to rigorously test what causes centralized polities to form, persist, and collapse. This project addresses the problem by examining the organization of a complex polity that emerged in the lower Río Verde Valley of coastal Oaxaca, Mexico during the Terminal Formative period (150 BCE-CE 250). The lower Verde's first state developed by CE 100, with its primary center located at the site of Rio Viejo. Current evidence suggests that the Rio Viejo state was unstable, as the polity collapsed by CE 250, and the region's population dispersed into small settlements. This study explores the degree to which rulers at Rio Viejo maintained control over outlying areas by conducting field research at Cerro de la Virgen, a rural community located in the valley's hinterland. Cerro de la Virgen is ideal for examining negotiations between outlying communities and Rio Viejo because the site persisted through the social upheaval at the end of the Formative period. The project involves four months of excavation and laboratory analyses aimed at determining whether political, economic, and religious resources were controlled at the local or the regional level. Excavations will target public and domestic architecture to examine resource control within communal and household settings, and archaeometric analyses will provide multiple tests of the hypothesis that the Río Viejo state collapsed because its leaders failed to integrate rural populations into the broader political system.