Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Mechanisms Of Integration In Early States

研究大规模的、政治上一体化的社会发展、运作和变化的方式，是当今社会科学家研究的一个重要领域。考古学特别适合为这一努力做出重大贡献，因为它可以通过分析物质遗迹来研究长期复杂的社会。然而，考古学家在重建早期国家时倾向于强调胁迫而不是合作，尽管有证据表明领导人和他们的臣民倾向于谈判制度化政治权威的条款。考虑到这些想法，本项目将研究生活在农村社区的人们与政治中心领导人建立的社会控制机制合作，独立行动或竞争的过程。这项研究意义重大，因为它超越了简单地识别过去的社会复杂性，解决了为什么不同的国家遵循历史路径，从而有助于描述领导者和追随者如何参与发展，维护，复制和改造复杂政体的模型。传统上，在前哥伦布时期的中美洲，从墨西哥中部到萨尔瓦多萨尔瓦多地区的研究，从一个“自上而下”的角度，重点是战略的领导人集中和维持他们的权威，审查早期国家的政治整合。这些模型中隐含的假设是，农村社区由平民居住，他们的唯一目的是在政治统治者的命令下提供城市消费。另一种“自下而上”的视角，从农村社区的角度审视政治整合，需要严格测试是什么原因导致中央集权政治的形成，持续和崩溃。这个项目通过研究在墨西哥沿海瓦哈卡的下里奥维德山谷在最终形成时期（公元前150年-公元250年）出现的复杂政体的组织来解决这个问题。下佛得角的第一个国家由CE 100开发，其主要中心位于Rio Viejo遗址。目前的证据表明，里奥别霍州是不稳定的，因为政治在公元250年崩溃，该地区的人口分散到小定居点。本研究探讨了在何种程度上的统治者在里约Viejo保持控制边远地区进行实地研究，在塞罗德拉弗根，位于山谷的腹地的农村社区。Cerro de la Virgen是研究外围社区和Rio Viejo之间谈判的理想场所，因为该网站在形成时期结束时的社会动荡中持续存在。该项目包括四个月的挖掘和实验室分析，旨在确定政治，经济和宗教资源是否在地方或区域一级受到控制。考古学分析将针对公共和家庭建筑，以研究社区和家庭环境中的资源控制，考古学分析将提供多种假设的测试，即Río Viejo国家的崩溃是因为其领导人未能将农村人口融入更广泛的政治体系。

Examining the ways in which large-scale, politically integrated societies develop, operate, and change forms an essential area of research for social scientists today. Archaeology is particularly well suited to make significant contributions to this effort because it can study complex societies over extended periods through the analysis of material remains. However, archaeologists have tended to emphasize coercion over cooperation in reconstructing early states, despite evidence that leaders and their subjects tend to negotiate the terms of institutionalized political authority. With these ideas in mind, this project will examine the processes through which people living in rural communities cooperated with, acted independently of, or contested the mechanisms of social control instituted by leaders at political centers. The research is significant because it moves beyond simply identifying social complexity in the past by addressing why different states followed historical paths, thereby contributing to models that describe how leaders and followers participated in developing, maintaining, reproducing and reworking complex polities. Traditionally, research in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, an area that extends from central Mexico to El Salvador, examines political integration in early states from a "top-down" perspective that focuses on the strategies leaders employed to centralize and sustain their authority. Implicit in these models is the assumption that rural communities were populated by commoners whose sole purpose was to provision urban consumption at the behest of polity rulers. An alternative, "bottom-up" perspective that examines political integration from the view of rural communities is needed to rigorously test what causes centralized polities to form, persist, and collapse. This project addresses the problem by examining the organization of a complex polity that emerged in the lower Río Verde Valley of coastal Oaxaca, Mexico during the Terminal Formative period (150 BCE-CE 250). The lower Verde's first state developed by CE 100, with its primary center located at the site of Rio Viejo. Current evidence suggests that the Rio Viejo state was unstable, as the polity collapsed by CE 250, and the region's population dispersed into small settlements. This study explores the degree to which rulers at Rio Viejo maintained control over outlying areas by conducting field research at Cerro de la Virgen, a rural community located in the valley's hinterland. Cerro de la Virgen is ideal for examining negotiations between outlying communities and Rio Viejo because the site persisted through the social upheaval at the end of the Formative period. The project involves four months of excavation and laboratory analyses aimed at determining whether political, economic, and religious resources were controlled at the local or the regional level. Excavations will target public and domestic architecture to examine resource control within communal and household settings, and archaeometric analyses will provide multiple tests of the hypothesis that the Río Viejo state collapsed because its leaders failed to integrate rural populations into the broader political system.