Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Village Organization in Non-complex Societies

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This project investigates the transition from seasonal to permanent settlement among hunter-gatherers by studying how foraging populations organized their settlement and social relations at large ceremonial centers. Ceremonial centers with impressive monuments and extensive domestic zones have often been interpreted as early villages, making them among the first permanent settlements in their respective regions. Characteristics of early villages such as year-round occupation, integrative social institutions, and incipient forms of complex social organization usually developed in contexts of regional population pressure and circumscription, which limited the ability of people to move freely across the landscape. Limitations on mobility are thought to be a necessary part of this process to counteract the pressure to disperse due to social conflict that accompanies daily life in densely populated, permanent settlements. However, Eastern North America seems to be an exception, as hunter-gatherer populations in this region came together to form large, monumental centers resembling villages in the absence of strong external constraints on mobility. Does the emergence of hunter-gatherer ceremonial centers in Eastern North America represent an alternative trajectory for the development of sedentism and social complexity? Contemporary American society is subject to some of the same tensions that characterized the beginnings of sedentary village life, such as that between autonomy and communalism, making the topic of how and why people in the past voluntarily aggregated into large, dense, and permanent social groups an important area of inquiry. Research conducted as part of this study will provide archaeological education and training opportunities for local volunteers and students.The project will investigate hunter-gatherer ceremonial centers in Eastern North America to outline how the process of settlement aggregation occurred and how it may have differed from other world regions. The researchers will focus on one large ceremonial center. This site witnessed the development of several large mound centers that have been characterized as early villages. Despite its exceptional size, the site has received comparatively little attention from archaeologists and the nature of its settlement is still largely unknown. Integrating data from excavation, radiocarbon dating, botanical analysis, and ceramic provenance will permit the evaluation of differing models of settlement, mobility, and social organization. These data will then be compared with other ceremonial centers and early villages from North America and other parts of the world to better understand the various trajectories that led hunter-gatherer populations to develop large, permanent settlements and complex societies.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.