Doctoral Dissertation Research: Early Development of Territorial Strategies

该项目探讨了早期复杂社会中领土发展中政治、经济和空间之间的关系。领土，被理解为空间的政治组织，是前现代社会和当代社会特征的基础。如今，保护主义观点和全球主义观点之间仍然存在争论，前者认为政治和地区可以在孤立的情况下自行发展，后者则更多地关注更大范围甚至全球范围内的合作与竞争问题。这场辩论还提出了基于民族国家的领土概念以及政治和经济体系之间的空间对应关系（或缺乏这种对应关系）的问题。通过在复杂社会发展的早期阶段解决这些关系，该项目将通过评估经济和政治相互作用在社会和区域不平等加剧中的相对权重，为当前的辩论做出贡献。该项目将处理领土问题，不仅与具体资源有关，而且嵌入更广泛的社会网络，其中联系和联系可能与资源本身一样重要。该项目将通过评估次级场址的地点是否与控制通道或通讯路线有关，检验关于领土战略的两种备选假设：1)早期的政治将自己定位在可以利用广泛的贸易网络而不试图控制一个确定的地理空间的地方，或者2)早期的政治试图通过在其自身位置之外的潜在替代路线上建立依赖的次要站点来扩大其地理优势，从而增加对贸易网络的访问甚至控制。为了验证这些假设，该项目将使用(1)聚落模式和空间建模来确定站点位置是否与区域和区域间的通信路线相关；(2)记录站点之间的建筑布局模式，以构建等级结构并推断政治依赖性；(3)分析人工制品分布，以推断资源通量、站点之间的关系，并确定额外的区域联系。有了这些数据，该项目将能够描绘早期政体的空间组织特征，并深入了解早期复杂社会发展背后的机制、它们的空间关系和空间的政治建构，最终有助于我们理解塑造当代政治景观的过程。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 project investigates the relationships among politics, economics, and space in the development of territories in early complex societies. The territory, understood as the political organization of space, is fundamental for the characterization of both pre-modern societies and contemporary ones. Nowadays, there are still debates between protectionist views that argue that polities and regions can thrive by their own in isolation, and more globalists ones that focus on issues of cooperation and competition at a larger, even global, scale. This debate also raises questions on the territorial notion based on the nation-state and the spatial correspondence, or lack of it, between political and economic systems. By addressing these relationships at an early stage in the development of complex societies, the project will contribute to the current debate by assessing the relative weight of both economic and political interactions in the rise of social and regional inequalities. The project will address issues of territoriality, not only related to specific resources, but embedded in a broader social network where connections and links may be as important as the resources themselves.The project will test two alternative hypotheses regarding territorial strategies by assessing if the locations of secondary sites are related to the control of accesses or communication routes: 1) early polities locate themselves where they can take advantage of the broad trade networks without an attempt to control a defined geographical space, or 2) early polities tried to increase their access to, and even control, trade networks by expanding their geographical dominance through the establishment of dependent secondary sites in potential alternative routes beyond its own location. To test the hypotheses, the project will use (1) settlement patterns and spatial modeling to identify if site location was associated with regional and interregional communication routes, (2) record architectural layout patterns among sites to construct a rank hierarchy and infer political dependency, and (3) analyze artifact distributions to infer resource fluxes, relationships among sites, and identify extra regional connections. With this data, the project will be able to characterize the spatial organization of an early polity, and gain insight on the mechanisms behind the development of early complex societies, their spatial relationships, and the political construction of space, to ultimately contribute to our understanding of the processes that have modeled the contemporary political landscape.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.