Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Examining Social Networks And Communties Of Resistance To New Religious Movements

亚利桑那大学的Barbara Mills博士和亚利桑那大学考古西南分校的Lewis Borck博士将研究人们对新宗教意识形态的传播或扩散带来的文化和组织模式变化的复杂反应。研究人员将研究日常生活和礼仪生活的对象如何塑造过去人群复杂的社会和政治生活。了解过去人们对扩张性意识形态的反应，为评估现代扩张性宗教，包括他们的各种教派提供了比较数据。这不仅将提高对意识形态如何传播的理解，也将提高对群体如何以及为什么加入或抵制新宗教的理解。以前的考古学对扩散的研究侧重于技术，而不是想法或意识形态，这类调查通常依赖于空间数据或社会数据。该项目将整合社会网络和空间扩散模型，向多个领域的研究人员展示整合这两种方法的实用性和准确性。该项目还将与社区成员(土地所有者、社区大学生和公立学校学生)分享有关考古伦理、过去的所有权和深厚的地方历史的信息，这些地区通常没有得到学术界的服务。米尔斯和博克将利用亚利桑那州和新墨西哥州西部的考古数据，研究西南部的人们对13世纪至15世纪(公元1200-1450年)萨拉多教派传播所带来的变化的反应。该项目将通过使用陶瓷分布数据(某些类型的陶器是在哪里制造和使用，然后由考古学家发现)建立阻力模型，来测量接触萨拉多病毒的可能水平以及相应的抵抗萨拉多病毒传播的水平(或缺乏)。他们将把这些数据与一个零模型进行比较，该模型包括一个对物质商品流进行建模的空间组件，以及一个考察想法如何随着时间的推移在网络中传播的社交网络组件。考古学作为一个领域，对于研究困难的长期过程特别有用，例如宗教的传播，因为考古数据主要来自物质对象，而不是可能包含人类偏见的文字或民族志记录。这项研究将产生新的方法来研究思想在时间和空间上的传播，这些方法将对研究过去和现在类似过程的不同研究人员有用。

Dr. Barbara Mills (University of Arizona) and Lewis Borck (University of Arizona and Archaeology Southwest) will examine the complex ways that people react to changing cultural and organizational patterns brought about by the spread, or diffusion, of a new religious ideology. The researchers will study how objects of daily and ceremonial life shaped the complicated social and political lives of past groups of people. Understanding how people in the past reacted to an expansive ideology provides comparative data to evaluate against modern expansive religions, including their various sects. This will improve understanding not only of how ideology spreads, but also of how and why groups join or resist a new religion. Previous archaeological research on diffusion has focused on technology rather than ideas or ideology, and such investigations typically relied on either spatial data or social data. This project will integrate social network and spatial diffusion models to demonstrate to researchers in many fields the utility and accuracy of integrating the two approaches. This project will also share information about archaeological ethics, ownership of the past, and deep local history with community members (landowners, community college students, and public school students) in areas often underserved by academia.Dr. Mills and Mr. Borck will use archaeological data from across all of Arizona and western New Mexico to examine how people in the late prehispanic Southwest reacted to changes associated with the spread of the Salado religious cult during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries (A.D. 1200-1450). This project will measure the probable level of exposure to and the corresponding level (or lack) of resistance to the spread of Salado by modeling resistance using ceramic distribution data (where certain kinds of pottery were made and used, and then found by archaeologists). They will compare these data against a null model that includes a spatial component that models the flow of material goods, as well as a social network component that examines how ideas spread through a network over time. Archaeology as a field is particularly useful for examining difficult, long-term processes such as the spread of religion, because archaeological data primarily derive from material objects, rather than textual or ethnographic records that may incorporate human bias. This research will generate new methods for studying the spread of ideas across time and space, and these methods will be useful to diverse researchers examining similar processes in the past and the present.