Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Reflection Of Social Structure In Community Organization

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Under the supervision of Dr. Bryan Hanks of the University of Pittsburgh, and in collaboration with local institutions in the Republic of Serbia, Mr. Gilgor Dakovic will conduct a program of research examining long-term transitions in settlement patterning, regional demography, and centralized control of resources. Previous scholarship emphasized rich burial evidence as the primary means for understanding broader scale social processes. In contrast, this program of research will identify how populations were organized across the landscape at regional and local community scales and how these trends changed through time. This will be one of the first major studies to use regional scale survey and data analysis of spatial patterning and demographic dynamics in the Republic of Serbia. This research, therefore, provides a crucial opportunity for important academic exchange in methods and theory with Serbian academic institutions and in training students who will have the opportunity to participate in new developments in archaeological research design, field methods and data analysis. At completion, the study will provide an important new comparative case study, available as an open source dataset, on late prehistoric European societies that indexes the emergence of new forms of social, economic and political organization. The research will contribute to anthropological studies of social, economic and political processes in a way seldom utilized for this region and produce and interpret datasets at multiple scales (household, settlement and regional) allowing for a more robust and empirically supported model of diachronic social change. This will contribute to regional scholarship but also to broader studies on trajectories of developing social complexity in early human societies. Archaeological field research will be undertaken in the Banat region of Northern Serbia, located in the Carpathian Basin of Europe, where it appears that egalitarian communities gave way to completely new forms of hierarchical social organization by the early second millennium BCE. Research questions include: (1) What is the spatial and demographic scale of late prehistoric communities and how does this change over time? (2) Can settlements be identified with evidence of centralization of resources, craft production, and supra local exchange? (3) Do such settlements exhibit substantial demographic growth or are populations still dispersed in smaller farmsteads at the local and regional scales? (4) Is there evidence of settlement enclosure and fortification and how does this co-vary with more centralized sites? (5) Does regional scale settlement patterning indicate settlement proximity to important natural resources and regional river waterways associated with long-distance exchange? Planned fieldwork activities include: (i) a regional scale pedestrian survey of 80 sq. km, (ii) surface collection of artifacts and statistical analysis, (iii) targeted near surface geophysical surveys (soil magnetic susceptibility and fluxgate gradiometry), (iv) targeted test pit excavations and, (v) spatial analysis of topographic, environmental and survey data using ArcGIS software. This field research will fill current critical gaps in knowledge and generate a new multi-scalar dataset to better model late prehistoric communities and examine the organization of populations across the landscape in relation to increased economic and political centralization.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.