Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Craft Specialization in Traditional Societies

这篇博士论文研究了不断变化的历史条件如何在非等级社会中创造不同形式的工艺专业化。考古学家深入研究了工艺专业化，因为它突出了劳动组织在更广泛的社会变革中的作用。专家通常被定义为满足家庭以外需求的技术人员，在建立社区之间的相互依存关系方面可能特别重要。专家需要其他社会单位的支持，使他们的手工艺在经济上可行，这将参与社区绑定到互惠和交换的义务。因此，考古学家和其他社会科学家通常认为，专业化只存在于复杂的、等级森严的社会（如国家）中，这些社会具有集中的政治经济，可以利用汇集的资源来支持全职的手工艺品生产。然而，有证据表明，专门的陶器生产可能发生在美国东南部的一些无等级的狩猎采集社会。在没有国家地位或中央集权治理的情况下，什么可能产生专业化的需要？本研究通过调查特定的历史环境如何要求出现不同类型的工艺专家来解决这个问题。该项目的重点是在前殖民地美国东南部的两个关键社会变革的时代，并特别结合了一种新的方法，用于评估陶器的采购技术，如中子活化分析，激光烧蚀电感耦合等离子体质谱，X射线衍射和陶瓷岩相学，评估有助于解释与每个时间框架相对应的历史条件下专业化生产出现的假设。与陶器容器相关的放射性碳分析将建立一个客观的年表，以评估随着时间的推移，丧葬陶器生产的社会组织的主要变化。这个项目使用宗教专业化，熟练的制作与仪式的领导，作为一个假设，以调查如何在早期的公民礼仪中心的故障可能促使更多的依赖仪式专家。该项目还介绍了基于身份的专业化，使用专业化生产来延续身份，作为一种假设，以调查专业化如何与社会竞争的出现和不断增加的定居密度联系在一起。手工艺，即普通人群的非熟练手工艺，将作为一个替代假设，以检验宗教和基于身份的专业化。通过在每个时间框架的历史条件下成功地建立专业化，这个项目将产生一种新的关于陶器生产的知识形式，促使社会科学家重新审视长期以来关于社会组织，劳动，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的评估来支持。影响审查标准。

This doctoral dissertation study investigates how changing historical conditions create different forms of craft specialization in nonhierarchical societies. Archaeologists have intensively studied craft specialization because it highlights the role of labor organization in broader social transformations. Specialists, typically defined as skilled persons that provision demands beyond their household, can be particularly critical in establishing interdependence between communities. Specialists require support from other social units to make their crafting economically viable, which binds participating communities into obligations of reciprocity and exchange. Archaeologists and other social scientists have thus typically expected specialization only among complex, hierarchical societies (e.g. states) with centralized political economies that can draw on pooled resources to support full-time craft production. However, there is evidence to suggest that specialized pottery production may have occurred in some nonhierarchical hunter-gatherer societies in the southeastern United States. What might create the need for specialization in the absence of statehood or centralized governance? This research addresses this question by investigating how specific historical circumstances call for the emergence of different types of craft specialists. The project focuses on two eras of critical social change in the pre-colonial southeastern United States and specifically combines a novel method for assessing potting skill with pottery sourcing techniques, such as Neutron Activation Analysis, Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry, X-ray diffraction, and ceramic petrography, to evaluate hypotheses that help explain the emergence of specialized production under historical conditions corresponding to each time frame. Radiocarbon assays associated with pottery vessels will establish an objective chronology to assess major changes in the social organization of mortuary pottery production through time. This project uses religious specialization, skilled crafting linked to ritual leadership, as a hypothesis to investigate how the breakdown in earlier period civic-ceremonial centers potentially prompted greater reliance on ritual specialists. This project also introduces identity-based specialization, the use of specialized production to perpetuate identities, as a hypothesis to investigate how specialization was linked to the emergence of social competition and increasing settlement density. Participatory crafting, unskilled crafting by a general population, will serve as an alternative hypothesis to test against religious and identity-based specialization. By successfully grounding specialization within the historical conditions of each time frame, this project will generate a new form of knowledge about pottery production that urges social scientists to revisit long-held assumptions about social organization, labor, and exchange in nonhierarchical societies globally.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.