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

该项目主要研究发生在“中等社会”（根据传统的社会进化模型，处于族群和国家之间的社会）中的社会转型，以及在大规模社会经济变化中影响其社会和文化系统弹性的因素。虽然主要社会变革的问题，特别是崩溃和解体，通常是在国家或帝国的背景下提出的，但在不那么复杂的社会中，这些过程还有很多需要探索的地方。中等社会——由于其社会政治组织和互动系统的多样化形式——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。该项目关注的是一种独特的中等社会形式，这些社会融入了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涌现特性的更大的宏观系统，并探索了先前的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恢复力。这项研究强调了过去社会政治组织的多样化形式，并有助于开发一种词汇来捕捉这些社会所代表的复杂性，同时也为解释中等社会的社会变化提供了更通用的模型。研究的互动、社区整合和大规模变化的社会反应过程具有广泛的适用性，并为本调查所分析的社会之外的研究提供了相关信息。本研究将多尺度互动模型与弹性理论相结合，以评估特定的社会变迁模式。本研究聚焦于宏观区域系统解体后两个相邻区域显著不同的社会轨迹背后的因素，并评估了两个相邻区域不同的社会变化模式在多大程度上可归因于先前的本地、宏观区域或外部因素。本研究利用先前发掘的遗址和地面收藏的考古资料，并以陶瓷风格分析和丧葬图案分析为主要方法，评估不同因素对当地发展的影响。这两个地区的当地发展时间将通过高精度放射性碳定年法进行监测。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 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.