Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Social and Environmental Impacts of Village Formation

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This research examines how social and environmental contexts are altered as groups of individuals aggregate and settle into sedentary village life. This is a cultural transformation that has occurred in many different societies across the world. The formation of villages requires a dramatic social and cultural reorganization, which entails a redefinition of social networks, personal and collective identities, and space and place, as people adjust to their new mode of living. This research will focus on the patterns of continuity and change in interaction and integration across time and space to explore the social processes involved in the cultural transformations that occurred prior to village formation. This process which started thousands of years ago continues today and is fueled by worldwide social mobility. This research also provides training and experience in curation procedures and fieldwork to several undergraduate students, which will assist them in developing the necessary skills to pursue a career in archaeologyThis research is concerned with understanding the social interactions and integration among communities that occurred just prior to village formation. Recent research has suggested that the basic social structure of village life developed alongside increasing sedentism, prior to the formation of villages. The Early Pithouse period (A.D. 200 to 700) in the Mogollon region of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona is ideally suited for this research because it marks just this step of the process. To explore these negotiations, this research uses a multi-scalar, historical framework that focuses on social interactions and integration among communities of practice. The data for this research will rely on ceramics, obsidian, and architectural features from existing artifact collections and excavation reports as well as an ongoing excavation project. Social interaction will be examined through pottery circulation, analyzed through instrumental neutron activation analysis and petrographic analysis, as well as obsidian procurement, analyzed through x-ray fluorescence. Integration among communities will be examined through technological and stylistic attributes of ceramics and architecture. In addition, accelerator mass spectrometry dating of radiocarbon samples will be used to further refine the chronology of the Mogollon Early Pithouse period. The results of these analyses will be compared across time and space to gain an understanding of how people negotiated their social and physical landscapes prior to village formation.