Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Community Solidarity on Frontier Regions

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Throughout history, human societies have cycled through periods of coalescence and fragmentation and processes of social identification play an important role in their long-term success. When people identify strongly with others in their community, the potential for collective action is high and the community as a whole tends to thrive. However, the archaeological record illustrates the development and decline of villages, states, and empires over time and across space. Widespread and long-lasting collective action, therefore, occurs most frequently when groups of individuals (1) recognize membership in the same social categories (e.g., nationality or religious affiliation) and (2) engage in repeated, face-to-face interactions (e.g., neighbors or colleagues). When one of these modes of social identification is weak or breaks down, the potential for collective action decreases and the community is at risk for failure. While this theoretical framework was developed for regional-scale, comparative research involving cases of modern nation-states and social movements, this project adapts it into a methodology that can be applied at the community scale within a frontier context. Traditional frontier studies treat these peripheral regions as whole entities and focus on how they engage with or in reaction to processes occurring within the core, rather than examining the agency frontier inhabitants have in shaping, maintaining, and altering their social identities. By examining how people expressed their identity through material culture, this project will shed new light on how collective identities form and change in frontier regions. Furthermore, this project involves long-term collaboration among American and Mexican researchers working in the northern frontier of Mesoamerica and will result in rapid advances in the characterization of social dynamics within northern frontier communities and across the region as a whole.This research will examine the interplay of the two modes of identification to establish the potential for collective action through time and across spatial scales within the Epiclassic (600-900 CE) site of La Quemada, Zacatecas, Mexico. The material culture of the northern frontier region suggests both the existence of shared social categories and direct interaction among frontier communities, yet these communities persisted for varying lengths of time. La Quemada, for example, was abandoned around 900 CE, while other sites persisted. It is hypothesized that either a change in how La Quemada residents identified with one another weakened its collective identity, or the conditions for sustained collective action never existed at the site scale. Ceramic data collected via chronological, stylistic, and petrographic analysis will be used to assess each mode of social identification: (1) shared styles of ceramic decoration are assumed to represent similar social categories; and (2) the raw materials used to produce pottery are interpreted as evidence of direct interaction. The characterization of social identification within La Quemada and how changes in identification may have impacted the potential for collective action will provide a model that can continue to be tested in the future through comparison with more persistent communities in the northern frontier and in other frontier settings.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.