Integration of Complex State Societies

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Ancient empires grew by expanding their territories; studying how frontiers became provinces offers insights into local agency and the limits of state control in such regions. Direct control of provincial zones is a common imperial strategy that archaeologists have documented globally, and often involves either resettling local populations to new localities or installing an elite from the capital to oversee the new territory. Some documented cases offer an alternative structure, in which provincial regions retained more autonomy provided they adopted the state ideology and exported substantial local resources to the core. Archaeological research in provincial regions can document long-term change through time and address the nature of imperial control by focusing on impacts of state policies on the everyday lives of people. Where documentary evidence is available, the archaeological record can also provide a counterpoint to the state propaganda that these documentary records offer. In this project researchers will work with international colleagues to investigate habitation at a provincial center and its dynamic relationship with the Angkor empire. Their field-based investigations weave capacity-building and student training into the research project, and community engagement will involve multiple activities that include the co-production of a comic book describing the project. The team will focus their field-based investigations within site occupation areas to understand the amount of state control versus local autonomy at a household level. In doing so, their work will facilitate a deeper understanding of the nature and structure of state power. Research will take place in an empire's outlying region. This region was of perennial interest to the state, having some of the region's most arable land. Yet how this provincial area articulated with the capital remains unclear. The team will conduct field investigations at the site to determine its scope and occupational history, attending to changes in material culture, diet, and the local environmental through time. An international team of specialists will track artifactual, geochemical, and zooarchaeological proxies produced through this research to study core-provincial dynamics and the nature of state control.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.