Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Shared Knowledge, Practice and Identity in Semi-Sedentary Populations

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Semi-sedentary groups often live on the peripheries of more complex societies, interacting with those groups through various mechanisms including exchange and conflict. The semi-sedentary groups may emphasize or mask aspects of their identities in such boundary situations to facilitate movement and interaction across the borders. Dr. Patricia Crown and Miss Jacqueline Kocer of the University of New Mexico will conduct archaeological research to understand how semi-sedentary groups located on the periphery of more complex societies negotiated these social boundaries, particularly in a setting of ongoing violence. This research is relevant to understanding how "alien" groups manipulate symbols and either try to blend or resist assimilation into a more powerful society. The study also examines the level of cohesion among groups along the borders and how they might band together or factionalize. This broad perspective can inform on United States policies and strategies used to ameliorate violence along the borders today. The project provides educational opportunities including the co-PI, who is a female scientist of Hispanic and Native American ancestry and undergraduates of similar heritage from the University of New Mexico, who will assist in laboratory analyses. Results will be shared with the public through lectures, a museum exhibit, a blog available through the UNM anthropology website, and with the scientific community through publication. All data generated from this project will be made available to the public through digital repositories.Do semi-sedentary groups living in dispersed settlements share practices and knowledge broadly? Do these groups also emphasize a shared group identity? When such groups live on the periphery of a more socially complex polity, do they share, borrow, or copy practices from their more complex neighbors? The researchers will evaluate the extent of intergroup interaction (village, zone, or across the culture area) and group identity through models of communities of practice and communities of identity. Groups participating in the same community of practice share a background of learning and their "ways of doing" are similar. Low visibility attributes are used to examine the scale of communities of practice based on shared knowledge and practice in the sequence of production for ceramics. High visibility attributes will be used to examine the scale of communities of identity, wherein groups asserted their identity with shared symbols through ceramic design. The Gallina culture (A.D. 1050-1300) of northwestern New Mexico is an ideal case study to examine these issues as they constituted disaggregated, semi-sedentary groups bordering the more socially complex polities on all sides. They created artifacts distinct from their neighbors and are lived in an area with high levels of violence evidenced by burned structures and skeletal trauma. Analysis from six sites from the Gallina area will determine how proximity to group boundaries affects community cohesion. This project is of broad anthropological significance because understanding how patterns of interaction are related to shared knowledge and practice has implications for how peripheral semi-sedentary groups interact at multiple scales throughout the world.