Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Interaction between Violence and Perception of Social Difference

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Identity-based violence - violence directed at individuals or groups perceived as divergent - often accompanies periods of socio-political upheaval. While a growing body of anthropological and behavioral research demonstrates that the perception of social difference can motivate instances of mass violence today, little work has been done to examine such identity-based violence archaeologically. This may be because the subtleties of distinct social identities can be difficult to interpret in the past. A bioarchaeological approach, however, is well suited to empirically reconstruct past individuals' social identities, as many facets of identity such as age, sex, or biological relatedness, are grounded in the physical body, while others leave traces on the body through behavior, such as dietary preferences or cultural modification. This research will support both graduate and undergraduate student training and enhance international research partnerships and collaborations between the United States and Mexico. Furthermore, it will contribute to broader anthropological understandings of how instances of mass violence may arise from the interaction between specific social identities and complex social processes of migration, demographic change, and biological relatedness.Using a combination of biogeochemical and biodistance analyses, this project reconstructs the residential histories and biological kinship affiliations of victims of human sacrifice interred at a small shrine site in pre-Hispanic central Mexico. The shrine site dates to the Epiclassic period (600-900 CE). In central Mexico, this period was characterized by the decline of the major regional center of Teotihuacán and was a time of dramatic political, social, and demographic reorganization. In such a volatile socio-political landscape, individuals' residential histories or kinship affiliations may have singled them out as targets of ritual violence. This research will answer the question: how did specific aspects of individuals' social identities predispose them to suffer ritual violence? The biogeochemical analysis of dental and skeletal elements from a sample of 72 individuals will allow this project to reconstruct the geographic origins of the sacrificial victims, while biodistance analyses will allow for the reconstruction of patterns of genetic relatedness among the sacrificial victims themselves, as well as between the sacrificial victims and contemporary populations in central Mexico