Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Community Role In Emergence Of Complex Societies

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This research addresses the role of large-scale public architecture in the emergence of early communities and the formation of complex societies. Monumental construction remains one of the most widely recognized markers of settled agricultural communities and relationships of inequality which structure labor organization. Thus, it is often viewed as an outcome of social complexity. However, several noteworthy early instances of monumental constructions throughout the world indicate impressive projects could be accomplished through cooperative relationships among largely mobile and minimally stratified populations. These findings require an adjusted framework for interpretation of the social relationships between individuals engaging in the construction and use of public spaces and the role of constructed space in promoting new social relationships. Does the act of creating and interacting in a constructed space bind people together in new ways? Do such constructions promote integration across broader regions, as well as local communities? This dissertation project will investigate the role of public architecture in local community formation and regional integration at an archaeological site. In an effort to increase analysis capacity and offer laboratory experience to aspiring researchers, local students will participate in the research.The proposed project investigates how the development of the public architecture relates to markers of increased community integration by focusing on evidence for labor investment, activity, ritual deposits, and regional interaction. A key architectural complex at the site dates to very early in its history. Its foundation appears to predate household construction at the site and indicates the complex was integral to the formation of a local settlement. Changes in the architectural materials and arrangement of the complex correlate with important temporal and political regional changes providing a fitting archaeological context to examine the long-term relationship between public architecture and integration and the local and regional scales. In this project, shifts in labor investment and activity within a public plaza-structure complex will be examined as markers of local community development while increased similarity in ritual deposits and ceramic styles between those found within the site and those reported from others in the region will be examined as markers of regional integration. Indicators of change will be anchored in time through the use of statistical modeling in building and improving the site chronology. Activity residues, derived from geochemical testing of samples, collected from buried floors across the site, add an important dataset to the study of early monuments and elucidate additional aspects of their uses and meanings to local populations. Integrating this dataset within systematic examination of traditional archaeological measurers derived from architectural excavations and analysis of recovered artifacts expands understanding of early construction and stands to further understanding of the diverse drives contributing to social complexity.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.