Doctoral Dissertation Research: Material Reflections of the Emergence of Social Inequality

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).This project investigates the role of specialized knowledge in constituting sociopolitical power in non-Western contexts. Understanding sociopolitical organization is a cornerstone of the social sciences, but this scholarship is often based upon categorical types derived from Western contexts. Are such categories universally applicable in understanding sociopolitical development in other social and historical contexts? Some researchers advocate for more culturally-situated models of sociopolitical development to understand the global diversity of political strategies. While the accumulation of material wealth is often treated as a proxy for social inequality, Indigenous scholars argue that this overshadows a far more salient foundation of power and social inequality: knowledge. Drawing from core concepts of Indigenous philosophy, this study asks: In what ways does specialized knowledge circulate in emergent power structures? Is the control of knowledge employed to create and legitimize new social inequalities? The deep-time perspective of archaeology offers important ways of examining changes in sociopolitical organization from the ground up, without prioritizing pre-determined typological schemas. This study contextualizes multiple sources of archaeological and ethnographic data to produce new culturally-situated models for interpreting sociological change. By relying on the non-destructive reanalysis of existing museum collections for primary data collection, this study will add value to existing collections while minimizing the impact on the in situ archaeological record. This research promotes collaboration between archaeologists, conservation scientists, museum professionals, and descendant communities to produce innovative interpretations of sociopolitical change.This project utilizes an archaeological example to examine paint technology to understand the development and eventual dissolution of a traditional large scale social complex. In this instance, paint is a specialized technology produced following strict adherence to protocol governed by ritual sodalities, making it an ideal material to study relationships between knowledge and power. The project employs social network analysis to evaluate the homogeneity or heterogeneity of knowledge networks based on shared recipes in paint and painted material culture. Paint recipes are defined based on both technological similarities identified through polarized light microscopy, X-ray fluorescence, and Raman and Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy. The researchers employ these data to examine how the transformation of political power corresponded with changes in the centralization and dispersal of knowledge through time. This study represents the first standardized treatment of paint as such a technology and works to produce a robust database for future research.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.