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

对于社会科学家来说，社会不平等的出现是最耐人寻味的问题之一，因为它意味着等级权力结构的存在和复杂社会的出现。家庭作为社会的基本单位，尤其适合于研究早期社会的经济差异，重构社会不平等的性质和程度。在伊丽莎白·阿尔库什博士的指导下，匹兹堡大学的博士生陈培宇将挖掘秘鲁北部海岸的Huaca Negra遗址，并对发现的材料进行分析，从家庭角度调查早期的社会不平等。通过调查家庭活动的实践，既可以研究平民的日常生活，也可以研究精英的日常生活，这为考察特定社会内的整个社会变化提供了可能性，并有助于重建社会不平等的性质和程度。该项目将吸收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复杂社会出现的学术关注的是纪念碑建设，假设它需要领导人组织大规模的建设项目。然而，这项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的家庭实践上。瓦卡内格拉是秘鲁沿海的一处遗址，公元前5000到3000年间被占领在维鲁河谷，早期的研究人员曾将它确定为国内的中型丘陵，它的时间跨度见证了秘鲁北部和中部海岸出现了大规模的纪念碑建设。这使该网站成为审查家庭做法和社会不平等发展的理想场所。这项研究将涉及挖掘和分析出土材料的计划。定量和定性分析将用于查明资源的空间分布、家庭之间丰度的差异以及不同资源比例的差异。该项目将区分与自给自足经济(粮食)、手工业生产(功利品)和社会网络(贸易品)有关的材料，为了解某些家庭可能能够不平等地获得资源并开始积累力量以支持其领导地位的进程提供一个窗口。

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.