Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Role of Urbanization in Shaping Social Identity

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Urbanism is a transformative process, altering not only the physical surroundings that people inhabit, but also their social environment. Urban centers bring together diverse groups and individuals, creating opportunities for both innovation and conflict. Investigating how people negotiate and manage these interactions is important to understanding ideological and demographic trends, which in turn have cascading effects in political, economic, and even artistic realms. An archaeological perspective on these dynamics can be particularly insightful as it expands the types of urban contexts that can be examined beyond industrialized, modern cities, to diverse chronological, geographic, and historical scales. Researchers will examine how communities use social identity to negotiate urban ideological, political, and economic landscapes. Approximately 83% of the United States population lives in urban areas; and this number is projected to continue to rise. This is a global trend as well. By examining the past, one can broaden understanding of the potential ways people can and do adapt to urbanism in a growing range of contexts. Such research also helps illuminate how different political, economic, and social movements and policies may impact people's reactions. This project will examine the impact of two social forces that have been shown to be important global drivers of identity: religion and kinship. The researchers will examine urbanism's impact on social identity and organization through a study of variability in religious expression and kinship. The research will be conducted on a series of medieval (8th-13th cent. CE) sites across western-central Central Asia, especially focusing on sites in Uzbekistan. Medieval Central Asia was a crossroads for diverse ideas and groups that came together in a range of urban contexts. Medieval Central Asian cities were also shaped by state sponsored spread of Islam and strong local identities rooted in kinship. The meeting of these complex layers of ideology in Central Asian cities makes them a productive context for exploring diverse urban experiences in the face of both top-down and bottom-up identities. In this research, the impact of religion will be examined through burial practice, while local kinship identities will be evaluated through levels of biological relatedness between individuals. Burial practice will be studied through descriptions of grave locations, structures, and treatment of bodies. Biological relatedness between individuals will be measured by quantifying morphological differences in human crania from each site. Data will be collected from excavations of a highland medieval cemetery, as well as from museum collections of skeletal remains and excavation reports. Beyond direct academic contributions, this project will promote international collaboration. The researchers will work with American and Uzbek archaeologists and graduate students to conduct excavations and data collection. This work will include training students, publication and presenting opportunities, and the establishment of labs in collaborating Uzbek institutes, allowing for sustained research opportunities. International collaboration is crucial not only to bring together diverse knowledge sets, but also to build bridges between countries in social and economic realms.