Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Craft Specialization in Traditional Societies

博士论文进步奖：传统社会工艺专业化

• 批准号: 2052613
• 负责人: Neill Wallis
• 金额: $ 2.99万
• 依托单位: University of Florida
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-12-01 至 2022-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2052613&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Improvement; Award; Craft

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.

这篇博士论文研究调查了不断变化的历史条件如何在非等级社会中创造出不同形式的工艺专业化。考古学家深入研究了手工艺专业化，因为它凸显了劳工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赖方面尤其重要。专家需要其他社会单位的支持才能使他们的制作在经济上可行，这使参与社区承担互惠和交换的义务。因此，考古学家和其他社会科学家通常期望只有在复杂的等级社会（例如国家）中才会出现专业化，这些社会具有集中的政治经济，可以利用集中的资源来支持全职手工艺生产。然而，有证据表明，美国东南部的一些非等级制狩猎采集社会可能出现了专门的陶器生产。在没有国家地位或集中治理的情况下，什么可能会产生专业化的需求？本研究通过调查特定的历史环境如何要求不同类型的手工艺专家的出现来解决这个问题。该项目重点关注美国前殖民时期东南部两个关键社会变革时期，并特别将一种评估陶器技能的新方法与陶器采购技术相结合，例如中子活化分析、激光烧蚀电感耦合等离子体质谱仪、X射线衍射和陶瓷岩相学，以评估有助于解释在对应于每个时期的历史条件下专业化生产的出现的假设。 大体时间。与陶器相关的放射性碳测定将建立一个客观的年表，以评估随时间推移殡葬陶器生产的社会组织的重大变化。该项目使用宗教专业化、与仪式领导相关的熟练工艺作为假设，调查早期公民仪式中心的崩溃如何可能导致对仪式专家的更大依赖。该项目还引入了基于身份的专业化，即利用专业化生产来延续身份，作为研究专业化如何与社会竞争的出现和定居密度增加联系起来的假设。参与式手工艺，即普通民众的非熟练手工艺，将作为替代假设来检验基于宗教和身份的专业化。通过在每个时间框架的历史条件下成功地建立专业化，该项目将产生一种关于陶器生产的新形式的知识，促使社会科学家重新审视全球非等级社会中关于社会组织、劳动力和交换的长期假设。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并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，被认为值得支持。