Prehistoric Communities Of Practice

该项目的目标是研究专业农民和海洋渔民社区过去粮食战略的发展、文化边界和特征的形成以及社会经济组织。通过研究这些早期互补的粮食生产社区，研究人员试图更好地理解不同的粮食战略是如何结合在一起，发展出更复杂、更一体化的社会。世界历史上最具影响力的事件之一--粮食生产及其后果--导致了景观和人类人口的重大变化，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、仪式和象征性做法的戏剧性变化，包括各种挑战，如在社区组成变化、社会规模和分化增加、环境变化、满足新的经济需求的新技术以及需要以不同方式发展新机构以管理不同风险的变化性质的情况下保持社会凝聚力。然而，通过越来越多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成问题，特别是在社会结合不同的粮食战略的情况下，这需要不同的谈判和组织手段来应对农业等单一生产方式以外的新挑战。考古遗址的研究最适合研究这些随时间推移的变化和挑战，因为它们保留了过去食品技术、人们的社会和技术组织战略以及他们为应对这些变化和挑战而形成的做法和制度的经验证据。关于早期粮食生产、族群间融合、技术探索、创新和发展以及这些活动的前因后果的考古知识仍不清楚。近海沿海水域提供了一些最多样和最丰富的海洋资源，邻近的海岸线为研究早期捕鱼和农业社区之间形成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、人口增长、不同的劳动力需求、对海洋资源和陆地食物的更大依赖、重大气候波动，为研究走向文明的社会运动提供了机会。这项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NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.