Doctoral Dissertation Research: Early Urbanism and Long-Term Technological Change in Material Culture

这个博士论文项目将利用地质考古数据来推进我们对过去人类与环境及其自然资源关系的认识，特别是在重大社会政治转型时期。除了生成古代陶瓷的新比较数据以推进史前长期社会政治变化的考古知识外，该项目还将提供可靠的数据集，以更好地了解现代和史前社区原材料采购和使用的社会影响。该项目将促进地质学和材料科学等不同学科的学者和学生之间的合作关系，并为考古学学生和STEM中代表性不足的少数族裔女性学者提供先进的研究和培训。研究人员还将通过公共宣传和与现代社区的合作，促进对当地文化遗产的兴趣。这个项目建立在学者们最近关于早期城市社会的文献基础上，他们呼吁对城市主义及其对日常生活的影响有更细致的理解。史前的城市化涉及到人们日常生活的许多变化，使他们能够生活在密集的、社会分化的定居点。该项目旨在更好地了解在向城市社会过渡的过程中，古代工艺传统中原材料采购和使用的变化。它以两个地点的陶器生产的长期技术变化为中心。研究人员将对这些地点的陶瓷藏品进行两种互补形式的成分分析——仪器中子活化分析（INAA）和岩石学（光学矿物学）。这些成分数据将有助于深入了解该地区重大的社会政治变化如何影响人们获取和使用工艺生产原材料。这些精细的分析最终将为这两个地点的陶器提供新的地球化学和矿物学数据，以研究早期城市化与古代工艺传统中长期技术变革之间的关系。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This doctoral dissertation project will utilize geoarchaeological data to advance our knowledge of past people’s relationship with the environment and its natural resources, particularly during periods of significant sociopolitical transformations. In addition to generating new comparative data of ancient ceramics to advance archaeological knowledge of long-term sociopolitical change in prehistory, this project will offer robust datasets to better understand the social impacts of raw material procurement and use in modern and prehistoric communities. The project will foster collaborative relationships between scholars and students of various academic disciplines, such as geology and materials science, and provide advanced research and training for archaeology students and an underrepresented female minority scholar in STEM. The researchers will also promote interest in local cultural heritage through public outreach and collaborations with modern communities.This project builds upon recent literature on early urban societies by scholars who call for more nuanced understandings of urbanism and its effects on daily life. Urbanization in prehistory involved many changes to people’s everyday lives that enabled them to live in dense, socially differentiated settlements. This project aims to better understand changes to raw material procurement and use in ancient crafting traditions during the transition to an urban society. It is centered on long-term technological changes in pottery production at two sites. The researchers will perform two complementary forms of compositional analysis – Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) and petrography (optical mineralogy) – on ceramic collections from these sites. The compositional data will offer insight into how significant sociopolitical change in the region impacted people’s access to and use of raw materials for craft production. These fine-grained analyses will ultimately offer new geochemical and mineralogical data of pottery from both sites to examine the relationship between early urbanism and long-term technological change in ancient crafting traditions.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.