Prehistoric Communities Of Practice

该项目的目标是研究过去食物策略的发展，文化边界和身份形成，以及专业农民和海上渔民社区的社会经济组织。通过研究这些早期的辅食生产社区，研究人员试图更好地理解不同的食物策略是如何结合起来发展更复杂和综合的社会的。世界历史上最具影响力的事件之一——粮食生产及其后果——导致了景观和人口的重大变化，最终支持了定居生活方式的传播和古代世界伟大文明的兴起。然而，粮食生产不仅仅是生存和景观变化的问题。它还导致了社会、仪式和象征实践的巨大转变，包括在面对不同社区形成时维持社会凝聚力、增加社会规模和分化、环境变化、满足新经济需求的新技术以及发展新制度以管理不同风险性质变化的不同方式的需求等挑战。然而，通过不断增长的集体行动和新的社区规范和机构来管理这些挑战，可能与实现成功的粮食生产一样困难，特别是当社会结合不同的粮食战略时，这需要不同的谈判和组织方式来应对农业等单一生产模式之外的新挑战。考古遗址的研究最适合研究这些变化和挑战，因为它们保留了过去食品技术的经验证据，人们的社会和技术组织策略，以及他们为应对这些变化和挑战而形成的实践和制度。关于早期粮食生产、社区间融合、技术探索、创新和发展以及这些活动的前因和后果的考古知识仍不清楚。近海水域提供了一些最多样化和最丰富的海洋资源，邻近的海岸线为研究早期渔业和农业社区之间的社会经济挑战和相互作用提供了最合适的场所之一。这些情况代表了定居生活方式的演变、人口扩张、不同的劳动力需求、对海洋资源和陆地食物的更大依赖、重大的气候波动，为研究走向文明的社会运动提供了机会。本研究的重点是这些渔业和农业社区如何通过非暴力手段建立社会凝聚力，以及他们如何通过新的粮食生产战略象征性地表达他们不断变化的社会和文化身份。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。

The goal of this project is to study past development of food strategies, cultural boundary and identity formations, and socio-economic organizations of communities of specialized farmers and maritime fisherfolks. By studying these early complementary food producing communities, researchers seek to better understand how different food strategies coalesced to develop more complex and integrated societies. One of the most impacting events in world history—food production and its consequences—led to significant changes in landscapes and human populations, eventually supporting the spread of a settled lifeway and the rise of great civilizations in the ancient world. Yet, food production was more than just a matter of subsistence and landscape changes. It also led to dramatic shifts in social, ritual and symbolic practices, including challenges such as the maintenance of social cohesion in the face of variable community formations, increased social scale and differentiation, environmental changes, new technologies to meet new economic demands, and the need for different ways of developing new institutions to manage the changing nature of different risks. However, managing those challenges through growing collective action and new community norms and institutions may have been as problematical as arriving at successful food production, especially when societies combined different food strategies, which required different means of negotiation and organization to deal with new challenges beyond those of a single mode of production such as agriculture. Research at archaeological sites is best suited to study these changes and challenges through time because they retain the empirical evidence of past food technologies, people’s social and technological organization strategies, and the practices and institutions they formed to deal with those changes and challenges. Archaeological knowledge of early food production, inter-community integration, technological exploration, innovation and development, and the antecedents and consequences of these activities remains unclear. The offshore coastal waters provide some of the most diverse and abundant marine resources and adjacent shorelines offer one of the most appropriate places to study the socio-economic challenges and interactions that developed between early fishing and farming communities. Such situations representing the evolution of a settled lifeway, population expansion, different labor demands, greater dependence on marine resources and terrestrial foods, major climate fluctuations provide opportunities to study social movements toward civilization. This research focuses on how these fishing and agriculture communities built social cohesion by non-violent means and how they symbolically expressed their changing social and cultural identities with new food production strategies.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.