Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Craft Specialization in Traditional Societies

这篇博士论文研究了在非等级社会中，不断变化的历史条件是如何创造不同形式的工艺专业化的。考古学家对工艺专业化进行了深入研究，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，通常被定义为提供家庭以外需求的熟练人员，在建立社区之间的相互依存方面可能特别重要。专家需要其他社会单位的支持，以使他们的工艺在经济上可行，这使参与的社区遵守互惠和交换的义务。因此，考古学家和其他社会科学家通常认为，专业化只会发生在复杂的、等级森严的社会（例如国家）中，这些社会具有中央集权的政治经济，可以利用集中的资源来支持全职的工艺生产。然而，有证据表明，专业化的陶器生产可能发生在美国东南部一些没有等级制度的狩猎采集社会。在没有国家地位或集中治理的情况下，什么可能会产生对专业化的需求？本研究通过调查特定的历史环境如何要求不同类型的工艺专家的出现来解决这个问题。该项目侧重于前殖民时期美国东南部的两个关键社会变革时代，并特别结合了一种新的方法来评估陶器生产技术，如中子活化分析、激光烧蚀-电感耦合等离子体质谱法、x射线衍射和陶瓷岩石学，以评估有助于解释在对应于每个时间框架的历史条件下专业生产出现的假设。与陶器容器相关的放射性碳测定将建立一个客观的年表，以评估随着时间的推移，殡葬陶器生产的社会组织的重大变化。这个项目使用宗教专业化，与仪式领导相关的熟练工艺，作为一个假设，来调查早期公民仪式中心的崩溃是如何潜在地促使人们更依赖仪式专家的。该项目还引入了基于身份的专业化，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的增加联系在一起的假设。参与式手工制作，普通民众的非熟练手工制作，将作为另一种假设来测试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将专业化接地，该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全球无等级社会的社会组织、劳动和交换的假设。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。

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.