Collaborative Research: Spatial Analysis of State Agropastoral Economies

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Dr. John M. Marston, of Boston University, and Dr. David Meiggs, of the Rochester Institute of Technology, in collaboration with colleagues from the US, the Netherlands, and Turkey, will undertake research to examine how societies manage sustainable agricultural production across the varied landscapes under their control. Anthropologists have documented different strategies used by social elites to manage agricultural economies, which reflect either collaborative, inclusive or hierarchical, exclusive mechanisms for maintaining societal stability and elite authority. Yet, the relationship between particular practices by elites and responses by farmers and herders is not well established, and social scientists seek to better understand how elite priorities were negotiated within a society and balanced against elite needs to secure goods used in external exchange. Archaeology offers a unique, long-term perspective on both successful and unsuccessful social responses by farmers and herders to these political strategies of elites under changing environmental conditions, and contributes to clearer understandings of the agricultural resilience of human societies, including societies today.Previous research has been at a disadvantage when attempting to understand relationships between the geographic scale and seasonal organization of agriculture, and the responses of elite managers and state bureaucracies. This project will employ multiple analyses of plant and animal remains, excavated from the site of Gordion in Central Turkey and curated as museum collections, to study agricultural economies across two time periods that straddle a significant political and economic reorganization in the region. The international research team, led by Drs. Marston and Meiggs, will use isotopic analyses of plant and animal remains, as well as geographic information systems (GIS) models, to examine geographic patterns in both animal grazing and agricultural fields that supplied the population of Gordion. The results will shed light on the configuration and spatial organization of farming and pastoralism across several hundred years of significant social and environmental change in the region. This project will provide a "bottom-up" approach with which to evaluate linkages between elite control and agricultural practices. The research team will create multidisciplinary training opportunities for students and disseminate project data and methods via open source databases.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.