Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award. The role of Hillforts in Integrating Settlement and Mobility

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This doctoral dissertation project examines long-standing questions about settlement and mobility during a key period of social transformation from 1450-800 BC (conventionally known as the Late Bronze to Early Iron Age [LBA-EIA]). Specifically, it evaluates the potential ways in which hillforts–a traditional type-site in the region–influenced where people lived and how they interacted with one another. Previous scholarship demonstrates the complex roles played by such burial tumuli in shaping social organization, cohesion, group-identity formation, and trade during the LBA. However, little progress has been made in understanding hillforts as part of the region’s broader settlement pattern. Existing interpretations present hillforts as places of refuge during times of sociopolitical conflict. While these highly-defensible and strategically-located sites certainly fulfilled this purpose, preliminary research as well as hillfort location and prominence on the landscape point to a multitude of other roles and interactions hillforts facilitated through time. Through its ability to tap into the longue durée, archaeology provides a unique lens to understanding the social, political, and environmental influences that affect settlement strategies. The project involves local community members, and students as well as the international research community and the public. Various stakeholders are integrated into the project through four primary venues; public archaeology days and guest lectures, participation of archaeology students in the project, publication of research findings in peer-reviewed journals, as well as free and accessible content presented via various social media platforms. The research team focuses on the potential ways in which hillforts influenced settlement and mobility in prehistory. Previous research in the area has demonstrated that its prehistoric inhabitants were transhumant, migrating seasonally from the coast to the interior. Combining the collection of data from systematic excavation, controlled surface collection, magnetometry, as well as chemical and artifact analyses, the researchers conduct rigorous evaluation of changes in patterns of land use, mobility and exchange during this dynamic period. This interdisciplinary dataset explores the various roles of hillforts in influencing settlement and mobility in the region in the context of complex social, political and environmental factors. The team generates new comparative methods for the study of multiscalar settlement pattern analyses, by combining absolute dating techniques, systematic survey data, excavation, isotope analysis, and large-scale GIS analysis.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.