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

在匹兹堡大学的布莱恩·汉克斯博士的指导下，吉尔戈尔·达科维奇先生将与塞尔维亚共和国的当地机构合作，开展一项研究计划，考察定居点模式、地区人口结构和资源集中控制方面的长期过渡。以前的学术强调，丰富的墓葬证据是理解更广泛的社会过程的主要手段。相反，这个研究项目将确定人口是如何在区域和当地社区规模上组织起来的，以及这些趋势是如何随着时间的推移而变化的。这将是塞尔维亚共和国利用区域比例尺调查和数据分析空间格局和人口动态的首批重大研究之一。因此，这项研究为与塞尔维亚学术机构在方法和理论方面进行重要的学术交流和培训学生提供了一个重要机会，这些学生将有机会参与考古研究设计、实地方法和数据分析方面的新发展。完成后，这项研究将提供一个重要的新的比较案例研究，以开放源码数据集的形式提供，关于史前晚期的欧洲社会，索引新的社会、经济和政治组织形式的出现。这项研究将以该区域很少使用的方式促进对社会、经济和政治进程的人类学研究，并在多个尺度(家庭、住区和区域)产生和解释数据集，从而建立一个更有力、更有经验支持的历时社会变化模型。这将有助于区域学术，但也有助于更广泛地研究早期人类社会发展社会复杂性的轨迹。考古实地研究将在位于欧洲喀尔巴西安盆地的塞尔维亚北部的巴纳特地区进行，在那里，平等主义社区似乎在公元前2世纪初让位于全新形式的等级社会组织。研究问题包括：(1)史前晚期社区的空间和人口规模是什么？这种变化是如何随着时间的推移而变化的？(2)聚落是否可以通过资源集中、手工艺生产和超地方交换的证据来识别？(3)此类聚落是否显示出显著的人口增长，或者在当地和区域尺度上，人口仍然分散在较小的农场中？(4)是否有聚落封闭和加固的证据，以及这种情况与更集中的地点有何不同？(5)区域规模的聚落模式是否表明聚落接近重要的自然资源和与远距离交换相关的区域河流水道？计划中的实地考察活动包括：(I)一项面积为80平方米的全港性行人调查。(Ii)地表文物收集和统计分析；(Iii)有针对性的近地表地球物理调查(土壤磁化率和磁通门梯度法)；(Iv)有针对性的试验坑挖掘；以及(V)利用ArcGIS软件对地形、环境和调查数据进行空间分析。这项实地研究将填补目前关键的知识空白，并生成一个新的多标量数据集，以更好地模拟晚期史前社区，并检查与经济和政治集中度增加有关的整个景观中的人口组织。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.