Status Differentiation within the Context of Subsistence Change

代际财富传递作为社会不平等发展的一个关键组成部分的研究构成了人类学理论的一个重大进展。利用这些研究成果，考古学家开始研究制度化的社会分化是如何变得普遍的。研究小组将在向粮食生产过渡的风口浪尖上重建觅食社区的社会动态，这是理解后来出现的社会政治复杂性的关键阶段。虽然考古学家已经设计了各种方法来量化物质财富，但该项目将提供生物考古学，同位素和古基因组学证据，以接近体现和关系财富，从而为测量和理解社会和文化变化的多个维度提供新的方法。此外，在地方一级，该项目将与地方机构和组织密切合作，开展一项积极的外联方案，重点是促进文化遗产的保护和促进可持续的生态旅游。通过研究专家和多名本科生和研究生的参与，这项跨学科的调查将提供关于平等的移动的狩猎采集社区如何过渡到日益分层的久坐不动的粮食生产社会的关键见解。促进财富转移的体制机制是再现社会不平等、导致社会政治日益复杂的根本。该项目的重点是一个时期，在此期间，许多移动的觅食平等主义社区采取了越来越久坐不动和制度上的等级生活方式的基础上粮食生产。代际财富传递如何促进这一过程仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。通过收集有关多个方面的财富从太平间遗骸和使用多变量方法的数据，本研究将表征觅食社区之间的社会分化制度化的因素。具体而言，物质财富将通过测量埋葬投资和祭品的质量和数量来评估，具体财富通过直接检查营养，压力和社会身份的骨骼指标来评估，关系财富通过分析祭品的来源，流动性的同位素签名以及使用古代DNA的群体关联内部和之间的关系来评估。最后，这些结果将使用多维尺度和广义线性模型进行比较，以确定社会分化的结构和程度。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

The study of intergenerational wealth transmission as a key component in the development of social inequality constitutes a major advance in recent anthropological theory. Using this body of work, archaeologists have begun to investigate how institutionalized social differentiation became widespread. The research team will reconstruct the social dynamics of foraging communities at the cusp of making the transition to food production, a critical stage for understanding later emergent sociopolitical complexity. Whereas archaeologists have devised various ways to quantify material wealth, this project will contribute bioarchaeological, isotopic, and paleogenomic lines of evidence to approach embodied and relational wealth, thus, providing new approaches to measuring and understanding the multiple dimensions of social and cultural change. Moreover, at a local level and in close collaboration with local institutions and organizations the project will carry out an active outreach program focused on fostering the preservation of cultural heritage and promoting sustainable eco-tourism. By involving research specialists and multiple undergraduate and graduate students this interdisciplinary investigation will provide key insights into how egalitarian mobile hunter-gatherer communities transitioned into increasingly hierarchical sedentary food-producing societies. Institutional mechanisms for facilitating wealth transmission are fundamental for reproducing social inequality leading towards increasing sociopolitical complexity. The project focuses on a period during which many mobile foraging egalitarian communities adopted an increasingly sedentary and institutionally hierarchical lifestyle based on food production. How intergenerational wealth transmission facilitated this process remains an open question. By collecting data about multiple dimensions of wealth from mortuary remains and using multivariate methods, this study will characterize the factors involved in institutionalizing social differentiation among foraging communities. Specifically, material wealth will be assessed by measuring the quality and quantity of burial investment and offerings, embodied wealth by directly examining skeletal indicators of nutrition, stress, and social identity, and relational wealth by analyzing the provenience of the offerings, isotopic signatures of mobility, and within and between group associations using ancient DNA. Finally, these results will be compared using multidimensional scaling and generalized linear models to determine the structure and degree of social differentiation.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.