Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Household Practice And The Emergence Of Social Inequality

社会不平等的出现，在这里被定义为在一个社会中获得物质和社会资源的不平等，是社会科学家最感兴趣的问题之一，因为它意味着等级权力结构的存在和复杂社会的出现。作为基本的社会单位，家庭是研究经济差异和重建早期社会社会不平等的性质和程度的特别合适的场所。在伊丽莎白·阿库什博士的指导下，匹兹堡大学的博士生陈培宇将对秘鲁北部海岸的Huaca Negra遗址进行挖掘，并对回收的材料进行分析，从家庭的角度研究早期的社会不平等。通过调查家庭活动的实践，可以研究平民和精英的日常生活，这为检查特定社会中整个社会变化范围提供了潜力，并有助于重建社会不平等的性质和程度。该项目将包括来自不同大学的美国和秘鲁学生，并提供不同考古技术和分析方面的培训。获得的信息将成为陈博士论文的基础，这些信息将被数字化，并通过匹兹堡大学比较考古中心提供。以前关于安第斯史前史复杂社会出现的学术研究主要集中在纪念碑的建设上，认为这需要领导者组织大规模的建设项目。然而，拟议的研究试图将注意力从宏伟的公共建筑转移到理解日常家庭实践上。Huaca Negra是秘鲁的一个沿海遗址，在公元前5000年到3000年间位于维鲁山谷，早期的研究人员已经确定它是一个国内的中丘，它的时间跨度见证了秘鲁北部和中部海岸大规模纪念碑建筑的出现。这使得该遗址成为研究家庭习俗和社会不平等发展的理想场所。这项研究将包括一个挖掘和分析出土材料的计划。将采用定量和定性分析来辨别资源的空间分布、家庭间丰富程度的差异以及不同资源所占比例的差异。该项目将区分与自给经济（食品）、工艺生产（实用商品）和社会网络（贸易商品）相关的材料，为某些家庭可能获得不平等资源并开始积累权力以支持其领导地位的过程提供一个窗口。

The emergence of social inequality, here defined as unequal access to material and social resources within a society, is one of the most intriguing issues for social scientists as it implies the existence of hierarchical power structures and the emergence of complex society. As the basic social unit, household is a particularly apt arena for studying economic difference and for reconstructing the nature and degree of social inequality in early societies. Under the supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Arkush, doctoral candidate Peiyu Chen, of the University of Pittsburgh, will excavate the site of Huaca Negra on the Peruvian northern coast and undertake analysis of the recovered materials to investigate early social inequality from a household perspective. Through investigating practices of domestic activities, both commoners' and elites' everyday life can be studied, which offer the potential for examining the whole spectrum of social variation within a given society, and helps to reconstruct the nature and degree of social inequality. This project will incorporate US and Peruvian students from various universities and provide training in different archeological techniques and analysis. The information obtained, which will be the foundation for Chen's dissertation, will be digitalized and made available through the Center for Comparative Archaeology of the University of Pittsburgh.Previous scholarship on the emergence of complex society in Andean prehistory has focused on monument construction, under the presumption that it requires leaders to organize large scale construction projects. The proposed research, however, attempts to shift attention away from magnificent public constructions towards understanding daily household practice. Huaca Negra, a Peruvian coastal site that was occupied from 5,000 to 3,000 B.P in the Viru Valley, had been identified by earlier researchers as a domestic midden mound, and its time span witnessed the emergence of large-scale monument construction on the Peruvian northern and central coast. This makes the site an ideal place to examine both household practices and the development of social inequality. The research will involve a program of excavation and analyses of unearthed materials. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses will be applied to discern the spatial distribution of resources, variation in abundance between households, and diversity in the proportion of different resources. This project will distinguish materials related to the subsistence economy (food), craft production (utilitarian goods) and social networks (trade goods), providing a window onto the process by which certain households might be able to gain unequal access to resources and started to accumulate power to support their leadership.