Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The effect of Long Term Migration on Community Processes

本项目探讨了前殖民时期政治分层群体移民对当地非分层社区的影响，并重点关注这些相互作用发生的过程。在整个人类历史上，移民一直在发生，在过去和今天一样重要，特别是在文化认同、人群之间的互动、土地和安全等问题上。伴随着人们的移动而来的不仅仅是实践和思想，还有以不同方式占据区域和空间的身体和物体。这种巨大的社会和文化变化的结果发生在世界各地的整个时间和空间，考古学的兴趣特别集中在政治制度和生存模式的变化上。然而，过去的这些考古研究常常假设变化是无所不在和单方面发生的。这种假设最小化了当地人口的自主性和能动性，他们对这些变化和移民人口采取行动、相互作用和作出反应。本研究考察了一个这样的转变，它突出了这些大规模变化，并为这些变化提供了一个案例研究，在这种情况下，这些变化的特征是人口、定居主义、农业、贸易网络、共享的图像和意识形态、加剧的政治分层、加强的纪念碑建设，以及酋长领地和主要中心的出现和高峰。这个案例涉及移民对这些当地非分层社区的影响，以及他们如何适应最早的农业民族的到来。研究人员集中研究了同一地区的两个考古遗址。通过关注地方和区域尺度变革的证据，该项目为定义农业生活方式传播的社会和政治过程和实践提供了独特的见解。研究人员评估了几个相互关联的考古数据领域，包括在农业证据出现之前、期间和之后，这些遗址的生存、手工艺、遗址组织和区域组织。其中一个目标是确定当地人是欢迎这种新做法还是积极抵制这种做法。通过整合考古发掘、放射性碳测年、植物分析和博物馆收藏的数据，该项目使研究人员能够评估不同的可能模型。通过对社会和文化习俗进行更完整的记录，该项目为更广泛地研究复杂的社会政治现象（如农业集约化和社会不平等的做法）所涉及的过程和变化提供了信息。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 explores the impact of immigration of politically stratified groups on local non-stratified communities during the precolonial period and focuses on the processes under which these interactions occurred. Migrations have occurred throughout human history and were as important in the past as they are today, particularly with concerns such as cultural identity, interactions between groups of people, land, and security. Along with the movement of people come not just practices and ideas, but physical bodies and objects that occupy area and space differently. The results of such massive social and cultural changes occur throughout time and space all over the world, with archaeological interest particularly focused on changes in political institutions and subsistence patterns. However, these archaeological studies in the past have often assumed that changes occur ubiquitously and unilaterally. This assumption minimizes the autonomy and agency of the local populations who are acting, interacting, and reacting to these changes and to the immigrant populations. This study examines one such shift that highlights and provides a case-study for these large-scale changes which in this case was characterized by an increase in population, sedentism, agriculture, trade networks, shared iconography and ideologies, intensified political stratification, intensified monumental construction, and the emergence and peak of chiefdoms and chiefly centers. This case relates to the impact of immigration on these local non-stratified communities and how they adapted with the arrival of the earliest agricultural peoples. The researchers focus on two archaeological sites in the same region .By focusing on evidence for local and regional-scale transformations, this project provides unique insights into the social and political processes and practices that defined the spread of the agricultural lifeway. The researchers evaluate several interrelated domains of archaeological data including subsistence, crafting, site organization, and regional organization from these sites before, during, and after evidence of agriculture appears. One goal is to determine whether local people welcomed this new practice or actively resisted doing so. By integrating data from archaeological excavations, radiocarbon dating, botanical analyses, and museum collections this project permits the researchers to evaluate different possible models. By producing a more complete record of social and cultural practices the project informs the broader study of processes involved and variation in changes to complex socio-political phenomena such as practices of agricultural intensification and social inequality.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.