Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Urban Longevity and Social Inequality

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Doctoral Candidate Zachary Nissen will conduct research that examines the household labor and socioeconomic conditions which enabled the persistence of an urban community during a period of political and environmental stress. Cities are diverse places of dense human interaction that provide ordinary people important possibilities to make a living through household labor practices, yet they are also places of concentrated inequality. Today, over half of the global population lives in cities, and archaeology provides important opportunities to examine what leads some cities to thrive over the long term while others fail after a few generations. As periods of stress do not affect all people equally, this project will investigate whether an urban community's long-term persistence was built on the socioeconomic exploitation or integration of its most vulnerable population segment. Through this research undergraduates from Northwestern university will be trained in archaeological methods. Results will be shared through public and academic presentations, journal articles, an online database, and community events to ensure a broad audience (including academics, government representatives, and the general public) has access to the project's findings. Nissen and his research team will investigate the labor practices and socioeconomic access of urban commoner households in a prehistoric urban center. A period of prolonged drought and conflict, and heightened inequality which lead many people to leave urban centers and settle in smaller rural communities. To investigate what enabled one city to persist while other cities could not, Nissen's team will assess the labor practices of commoner households and the degree to which these practices enabled them access to the city's economic and social resources, such as fine trade goods and community ritual practices. They will conduct systematic excavations designed to collect a range of residential artifacts and samples for chemical and microartifact analysis to reconstruct the activities of four urban commoner households. Together, the research conducted by Nissen and colleagues will provide insights into the labor practices that sustain diverse urban centers, as well as the socioeconomic forces that shaped the lives of city residents during a period of regional stress.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.