Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Interaction Among Social Organization and Settlement Pattern

这一博士论文项目的目标是研究传统社会中村镇的空间分布和建筑，以更好地了解经济、身份和人类社会组织的长期变化。对社会复杂性上升的传统解释往往强调不平等、等级制度和城市外观的作用。在过去的许多情况下，人们利用当地的铜和软石资源等材料从事采矿和专门生产贸易产品。然而，在某些情况下，有限的证据表明，这些活动是由精英控制的，而可能是由当地企业家领导的，而不是有钱有势的外国人。研究将集中在山区的村庄，包括两个重要的铜和软岩开采地点，到目前为止，这表明集中生产的程度低于传统国家形成模型所预测的水平。这项研究为社会如何在山区干旱环境中发展、变化和繁荣提供了重要的见解，包括与只有在特定地质聚居地才能获得的铜等宝贵原材料有关的问题。调查人员将利用考古调查、建筑和地理空间分析来研究铁器时代聚落的分布。这些方法通过关注运动，在区域、地方和聚落尺度上调查生命的空间组织。这使这些方法超越了静态的分布图，并扩大了调查范围，包括过去的人类行为--人们将如何跨越广阔的地区、贸易路线和村庄进行流动？移动的范围和可变性将与人工制品和其他数据来源结合使用，以调查人与人之间社交网络的性质。在国际合作、教育和外展方面的工作将促进旅游业和支持文化遗产的保护。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The goal of this doctoral dissertation project is to examine the spatial distribution and architecture of villages and towns in a traditional society to better understand long-term changes in economics, identity, and human social organization. Traditional explanations for the rise of social complexity often emphasize the role of inequality, hierarchy, and appearance of cities. In many instances past people were involved in mining and specialized production of trade goods using such materials as local copper and soft-stone resources. However, in some cases there is limited evidence these activities were controlled by elites, and instead may have been led by local entrepreneurs rather than wealthy and powerful foreigners. Research will focus on villages in mountainous areas, including two important sites where copper and soft-stone were extracted, that so far indicate less centralized production than predicted by traditional models of state formation. The research offers important insights about how societies developed, changed, and thrived in mountainous arid environments, including in relation to valuable raw materials like copper that are only available in particular geological settlings. The investigators will use archaeological survey, architectural and geospatial analyses to study the distribution of Iron Age settlements. These methods investigate the spatial organization of life at the regional, local, and settlement scale by focusing on movement. This brings the methods beyond static distribution maps and expands the area of inquiry to include past human behavior – how would people move across broad regions, on trade routes, and through their villages? The range and variability of movement will be used in conjunction with artifacts and other data sources to investigate the nature of social networks among people. Working in international collaboration education and outreach will promote tourism and support the preservation of cultural heritage.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.