Doctoral Dissertation Research: Resilience and Social Transformation in Middle-Range Societies

该奖项全部或部分由2021年美国救援计划法案（公法117-2）资助。该项目侧重于“中档社会”（根据传统社会进化模型介于乐队和国家之间的社会）中发生的社会变革，以及在大规模社会经济变革期间影响其社会和文化系统弹性的因素。虽然重大的社会转型问题，特别是崩溃和解体，通常是在国家或帝国的背景下提出的，但在不太复杂的社会中，这些过程还有很多值得探讨的地方。中产阶级社会--由于其社会政治组织和互动系统的多样形式--为研究大规模变化的社会反应的研究人员提供了宝贵的信息来源。这个项目的重点是一个独特的形式的中产阶级社会，那些被整合在一个新兴的区域系统。该研究评估了当地社会如何融入具有紧急特性的更大宏观系统，并探讨了先前条件和当前的互动模式如何影响他们在面临重大破坏时的复原力。这项研究强调了过去社会政治组织的各种形式，并有助于开发一个词汇来捕捉这些社会所代表的复杂性，以及提供更一般的模型来解释中产阶级社会的社会变革。研究过程中的互动，社区整合和社会反应的大规模变化具有广泛的适用性，并提供相关的研究远远超出了本调查中所分析的society.The研究整合了多尺度的互动模式与弹性理论，以评估特定的模式的社会变革。该研究的重点是在一个宏观区域系统解体后，两个相邻地区明显不同的社会轨迹的潜在因素，并评估不同的社会变革模式在多大程度上可以归因于两个相邻地区先前的地方，宏观区域或外部因素。本研究利用考古资料，从以前的发掘地点和表面收集，并应用陶瓷风格分析和墓葬模式分析作为主要方法来评估如何不同的因素影响当地的发展。该奖项反映了NSF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 award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2)This project focuses on social transformations that occur in “middle-range societies” (societies that according to traditional social evolutionary models fall between bands and states) and the factors that affect the resilience of their social and cultural systems during large-scale socioeconomic changes. While questions of major social transformations, especially collapse and disintegration, are typically framed in the context of states or empires, there is much to be explored about these processes in less complex societies. Middle-range societies -due to their diverse forms of sociopolitical organization and interaction systems - provide an invaluable source of information for researchers who study social responses to large-scale change. This project focuses on a unique form of middle-range society, those that are integrated within an emergent regional system. The research evaluates how local societies become integrated into larger macro-systems with emergent properties and explores how prior conditions and current patterns of interaction affected their resilience in the face of major disruptions. The research highlights the diverse forms of past sociopolitical organization and helps to develop a vocabulary to capture the complexity these societies represent, as well as providing more general models for explaining social change among middle-range societies. The studied processes of interaction, communal integration and social responses to large-scale changes are broadly applicable and provide relevant information for research well beyond the societies analyzed in this investigation.The study integrates a multi-scale interaction model with resilience theory to evaluate specific patterns of social change. The research focuses on the factors underlying the markedly different social trajectories of two neighboring regions following the disintegration of a macro-regional system, and evaluates the degree to which distinct patterns of social change can be attributed to prior local, macro-regional, or external factors in two neighboring areas. The research utilizes archaeological materials from previously excavated sites and surface collections, and applies ceramic stylistic analysis and funerary pattern analysis as the primary methods to evaluate how the different factors affected the local developments. The timing of local developments within the two areas will be monitored via high precision radiocarbon dating.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.