Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Social Collapse and Reorganization

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The focus of this study is on sociopolitical collapse and its effects on extant communities in neighboring regions. Previous studies of collapse events have focused on the organizational breakdown of societies faced with various insurmountable internal and external stressors. These studies tend to portray collapse as infrequent, catastrophic ruptures in the social fabric of societies. Recently, scholars have deemphasized these apocalyptical perspectives by discussing collapse as examples of rapid, lasting structural change within long-term histories. Building on this latter view of collapse, this project focuses on the wide-ranging impacts of collapse on nearby populations by examining the relationships between population movements, demography, and cultural transformations. Neighbors of collapsed polities would have had to contend with reorientations of long-distance exchange networks along with potentially massive influxes of new residents in cases of regional abandonment. One such archaeologically identified collapse occurred at around AD 1350 among the chiefdoms in the Savannah River Valley of Georgia and South Carolina. However, the Georgia Coast, a neighboring region at the mouth of the Savannah River, did not suffer the same mix of circumstances that led to that collapse and remained populated during this time. Several changes noted by archaeologists during this period on the coast could reasonably be linked to those occurring upriver, such as changes in settlement practices, political organization, and the adoption of new subsistence technologies. This research will investigate how these changes along the Georgia Coast were related to the collapse of the Savannah River chiefdoms. Through examination of such changes in traditional "non-complex" societies it may be possible to extract basic principles relevant to understanding the massive changes impacting the world today.Specifically, this research will consist of archaeological excavations at the Kenan Field site on Sapelo Island, Georgia. This large site was occupied both before and after the collapse of the Savannah River chiefdoms. Through a combination of systematic shovel test survey, limited test excavation, shallow geophysical survey, and a large-scale radiocarbon dating program, the researchers will produce reconstructions of community organization before, during, and following the collapse of polities in the Savannah River Valley. Anthropologists recognize that the built environment and related spatial practices reflect, reinforce, and transform social structures. Therefore, reconstructions of community organization provide a window into the production, negotiation, and transformation of the social and political practices of the residents of the Georgia Coast.