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

本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。在许多情况下，过去的人们参与采矿和利用当地铜和软石资源等材料专门生产贸易商品。然而，在某些情况下，这些活动由精英控制的证据有限，而且可能是由当地企业家而不是有钱有势的外国人领导的。研究将侧重于山区的村庄，包括两个重要的铜矿和软石开采地，迄今为止，这些村庄的集中生产程度低于传统国家形成模型的预测。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，包括与只有在特定地质定居点才能获得的铜等宝贵原材料有关。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，在区域、地方和定居点尺度上调查生活的空间组织。这使得方法超越了静态分布图，并扩大了调查范围，包括过去的人类行为-人们如何跨越广阔的地区，在贸易路线上，并通过他们的村庄？运动的范围和可变性将与人工制品和其他数据源结合使用，以调查人与人之间的社交网络的性质。 在国际合作教育和推广工作将促进旅游业和支持文化遗产的保护。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

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.