Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Craft Specialization in Traditional Societies

这项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了不同形式的工艺专业化。考古学家对手工艺专业化进行了深入的研究，因为它突显了劳工组织在更广泛的社会变革中的作用。专家通常被定义为提供家庭以外需求的技术人员，在建立社区之间的相互依存方面可能特别关键。专家需要其他社会单位的支持，才能使他们的手工艺在经济上可行，这将参与社区约束于互惠和交换的义务。因此，考古学家和其他社会科学家通常只在复杂的等级社会(如国家)中期望专业化，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手工艺品生产。然而，有证据表明，在美国东南部的一些非等级狩猎采集社会中，可能发生了专门的陶器生产。在没有国家地位或集权治理的情况下，什么可能会产生专业化的需求？这项研究通过调查特定的历史环境如何要求出现不同类型的手工艺专家来解决这个问题。该项目聚焦于前殖民时代美国东南部的两个关键社会变革时代，特别是将一种评估陶器技能的新方法与陶器采购技术相结合，如中子活化分析、激光烧蚀-电感耦合等离子体质谱、X射线衍射和陶瓷岩石学，以评估有助于解释在每个时间段对应的历史条件下出现的专业生产的假设。与陶器相关的放射性碳分析将建立一个客观的年表，以评估停尸陶器生产的社会组织随着时间的推移而发生的重大变化。这个项目使用宗教专业化，即与仪式领导力相关的熟练工艺，作为一个假设，以调查早期公民仪式中心的崩溃如何潜在地促使人们更多地依赖仪式专家。该项目还引入了基于身份的专业化，即利用专业化生产使身份永久化，作为一种假设，以调查专业化如何与社会竞争的出现和居住密度的增加联系在一起。参与式手工艺，即普通民众的非熟练手工艺，将作为一种替代假设，以检验是否有宗教和基于身份的专业化。通过成功地在每个时间框架的历史条件下实现专业化，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长期持有的关于全球非等级社会中的社会组织、劳动力和交换的假设。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。

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.