Dissertation Research: Social Power and Domestic Labor in Yoro, Honduras

在Rosemary Joyce博士和Julia Hendon博士的指导下，冯国经先生将为他的博士论文收集数据。他将在洪都拉斯约罗地区的遗址进行挖掘，这些遗址可以追溯到古典晚期和末期古典时期。正是在这一时期，玛雅人和相关社会达到了文化发展的顶峰。冯国经将挑选一系列可能代表国内院落的土丘。他将剥离大片的横向区域，以揭示空间背景中的人工制品，并使用这些区域来重建每个区域内的活动组织。在此基础上，他将试图确定食品准备活动的作用以及在根据其他证据似乎代表精英和非精英的背景下这一活动的相对重要性。然后，他将试图确定食物准备在发展和维持地位差别方面所起的作用，并确定这些洪都拉斯社会内部差别的程度。他将使用人种学模型作为这种分析的基础，并将结果与从附近玛雅遗址获得的结果进行比较。洪都拉斯对研究中美洲的考古学家非常感兴趣，因为它标志着玛雅社会和非玛雅社会之间的边界。虽然洪都拉斯玛雅史前的轮廓是众所周知的，但他们的非玛雅邻国的性质却鲜为人知。如果事实上非玛雅人没有表现出如此强烈的社会复杂性，它提供了一个考古学家可以研究沿边境地带相互作用的环境。冯先生将研究的遗址不是玛雅人，他的工作应该会让人们对这些遗址的复杂程度以及它们与玛雅人互动的性质有新的认识。这项研究之所以重要，有几个原因。它将提供许多考古学家感兴趣的数据。通过将重点放在食物准备和对其发生的更广泛背景的审查上，它将有助于开发一种方法，考古学家可以在世界许多地区的许多情况下使用这种方法。该项目还将帮助培训一位有前途的年轻考古学家。

Under the direction of Drs. Rosemary Joyce and Julia Hendon, Mr Christopher Fung will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct excavations at sites which are located in the Yoro region of Honduras and which date to late Classic and Terminal Classic times. It was during this period that Mayan and related societies reached their height of cultural development. Mr. Fung will select a series of mounds which probably represent domestic compounds. He will strip large lateral areas to uncover artifacts in spatial context and use these to reconstruct the organization of activities within each. On this basis he will attempt to determine the role of food preparation activities and the relative importance of this in contexts which, on the basis of other evidence, appear to represent elites and non-elites. He will then attempt to determine the role which food preparation played in the development and maintenance of status differentiation and also determine the degree to which these Honduran societies were internally differentiated. He will use ethnographic models as the basis for such analysis and will compare the results to those obtained from nearby Mayan sites. Honduras is of great interest to archaeologists who study Middle America because it marks a frontier between Mayan and non-Mayan societies. While the outline of Mayan prehistory in Honduras is well known, the nature of their non-Mayan neighbors is less well understood. If in fact the non-Mayan counterparts do not exhibit such a strong degree of social complexity, it provides a situation in which archaeologists can examine interaction along a frontier zone. The sites Mr. Fung will study are non-Mayan and his work should yield new insight both into their level of complexity and the nature of their interaction with the Maya. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists. By its focus on food preparation and examination of the broader context within which this takes place, it will help to develop an approach which archaeologists may employ in many situations in many parts of the world. The project will also assist in the training of a promising young archaeologist.