Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Factors Influencing the Development of Monumental Architecture

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The construction of large and elaborate monumental architecture, such as mounds, pyramids, tombs, and statues, were important factors in the emergence of socially complex societies, as they are seen as archaeological evidence for the rise of organized religion, social stratification, competition between social groups, and large-scale cooperation within them. How these processes relate to environmental and ecological factors, however, is poorly understood and this limits understanding of societal evolution. This project seeks to shed insight into the socio-ecological factors underlying the emergence of monument construction.These processes will be investigated through archaeological and environmental investigations on the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), famous for its elaborate religious monumental architecture. The famous monuments of Rapa Nui are at great risk of being destroyed by erosion, storm surges, and development. This research will result in the creation of high-resolution 3D models to be used as digital documentation and preservation tools to help conserve Rapa Nui's monument sites. This is an urgent need and a goal that will be achieved through an on-going collaborative partnership with Rapanui archaeologists and stakeholders. This project also involves several education, training, and outreach initiatives, including training of American and Rapanui students in archaeological survey and geospatial field techniques, training and dissertation completion for Co-PI DiNapoli, and dissemination of results in both academic and public media. These initiatives will directly contribute to enhancing collaborative relationships, training for underrepresented groups, and public engagement in archaeological science. This project will test predictions of an evolutionary ecology model known as costly-signaling theory for the origins of monument construction using Rapa Nui as a case study. Given Rapa Nui's small size, isolation, and plethora of religious monuments, it offers an ideal model system to investigate the evolutionary ecology of monument construction. The central hypothesis is that, in addition to their well-known religious roles, monuments functioned within Rapa Nui society as conspicuous displays (i.e., costly signals) of communities' competitive ability to control and defend their limited critical resources, which resulted in limited violent conflict or interaction between groups. This hypothesis will be tested through archaeological and environmental investigations of: 1) the energetic costs of building monuments; 2) their visibility on the landscape; 3) relationships between the costs of building monuments, their visibility, and contested subsistence resources; and 4) the degree of interaction between prehistoric communities. These objectives will be approached through a series of geospatial field techniques, quantitative analyses, and geochemical sampling. All data and analyses will be made fully open-access, which is crucial for reproducible research in archaeological science. This project has the potential to advance anthropological theory and a broader understanding of societal change by illuminating the social and ecological influences behind why cooperation, competition, and religiosity were so frequently manifested as monumental architecture in the human past.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.