Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Role of Heritage in Community Organization

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Doctoral candidate Ryan Lash, of Northwestern University, along with colleagues in the US and Ireland, will undertake research to study how the adaptation of ritual heritage contributes to the sustainability of marginal communities. The commemoration of shared heritage through the maintenance of traditional rituals and material culture is often an important means for communities ? both past and present - to maintain integration and identity. Nevertheless, most approaches to sustainability in the past focus on environmental and demographic factors while placing little emphasis on considerations of community commemoration and cooperation. By focusing on the material realities of community life over long time frames, archaeology is especially poised to build comprehensive accounts of sustainability that consider how the challenges of social integration and environmental adaptation are entangled. How do communities adapt their traditions and maintain solidarity as they undergo major transformations in subsistence practices and political economy? How can people deploy old practices to make new forms of social organization possible? By investigating what contributed to community sustainability in the past, social scientists can better address parallel challenges in the present. In particular, this research can inform strategies of heritage maintenance among indigenous or other marginalized communities undergoing economic transformations that threaten their ways of life and continued existence. Mr. Lash and his research team will investigate how members of a small island community adapted the monuments and practices of a ritual tradition as the community underwent major transformations in agriculture, political economy, and demographics in the 18th to 20th centuries. Previous scholarship suggests that ritual practices can foster shared heritage and identity by maintaining monuments from the past as places of collective access and commemoration. From c. 1750-1960, islanders on Inishark in western Ireland visited a series of monuments as part of annual ritual processions dedicated to St Leo. Scattered around islanders? houses and field plots, these monuments were remnants of a monastery abandoned centuries earlier. To assess the impact of this ritual tradition on community sustainability, research will trace how the use, abandonment, renovation, and destruction of ritual monuments corresponds across time with transitions in village agriculture, landholding, and demographics. Combining oral history, archival documents, and excavation of four monuments will reconstruct the changing practices and spatial dynamics of the ritual tradition. Results will test common assumptions about the capacity of heritage maintenance to support political economic formations by structuring community members? movements and commemorations. A research team of American, Irish, and local collaborators will generate a dataset that will enhance archaeological analyses of sustainability and inform local initiatives that incorporate archaeological heritage as a key cultural and economic resource.