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

这个博士论文项目的目标是研究传统社会中村庄和城镇的空间分布和建筑，以更好地理解经济、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。在许多情况下，过去的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货物。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，相反，这些活动可能是由当地企业家而不是有钱有势的外国人领导的。研究将集中在山区的村庄，包括两个开采铜和软石的重要地点，到目前为止，这些地方的集中生产不如传统的国家形成模型所预测的那样多。这项研究提供了关于社会如何在山区干旱环境中发展、变化和繁荣的重要见解，包括与铜等珍贵的原材料的关系，这些原材料只有在特定的地质定居点才能获得。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定居点的分布。这些方法通过关注运动来研究区域、地方和聚落尺度上的生活空间组织。这使得这些方法超越了静态分布图，并扩大了调查的范围，包括过去的人类行为——人们如何在广阔的地区、贸易路线和村庄之间移动？运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，以调查人们之间社会网络的性质。开展国际合作、教育和外联活动将促进旅游业和支持文化遗产保护。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。

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.