Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Reflection Of Social Structure In Community Organization

在匹兹堡大学布莱恩·汉克斯博士的监督下，并与塞尔维亚共和国的地方机构合作，吉尔戈·达科维奇先生将开展一项研究计划，研究定居模式、区域人口和资源集中控制的长期过渡。以前的学术研究强调丰富的埋葬证据作为理解更广泛的社会进程的主要手段。相比之下，这项研究计划将确定人口如何在区域和当地社区规模的景观中组织起来，以及这些趋势如何随着时间的推移而变化。这将是对塞尔维亚共和国的空间格局和人口动态进行区域规模调查和数据分析的首批重大研究之一。因此，这项研究为与塞尔维亚学术机构在方法和理论方面进行重要的学术交流提供了一个至关重要的机会，并为培训有机会参与考古研究设计，实地方法和数据分析新发展的学生提供了机会。完成后，该研究将提供一个重要的新的比较案例研究，作为一个开放源数据集，对史前晚期欧洲社会，索引的社会，经济和政治组织的新形式的出现。这项研究将有助于人类学研究的社会，经济和政治进程的方式很少用于该地区，并产生和解释数据集在多个尺度（家庭，定居点和区域）允许一个更强大的和经验支持的模型历时性的社会变化。这将有助于区域学术研究，也有助于更广泛地研究早期人类社会发展社会复杂性的轨迹。考古实地研究将在位于欧洲喀尔巴阡盆地的北方塞尔维亚巴纳特地区进行，在那里，平等主义社区似乎在公元前2000年早期让位于全新的等级社会组织形式。研究问题包括：（1）史前晚期社区的空间和人口规模是什么？(2)定居点是否可以被确定为资源集中、手工业生产和超地方交换的证据？(3)这些定居点是否显示出人口的大幅增长，或者人口仍然分散在地方和区域规模较小的农场？(4)是否有证据表明定居点的围栏和防御工事，这是如何与更集中的网站？(5)区域规模的定居模式是否表明定居点靠近重要的自然资源和与远距离交换相关的区域河流？计划的实地工作活动包括：（i）80平方米的区域规模行人调查。（ii）人工制品的表面收集和统计分析，（iii）有针对性的近地表地球物理测量（土壤磁化率和磁通门梯度测量），（iv）有针对性的测试坑挖掘，以及（v）使用ArcGIS软件对地形、环境和测量数据进行空间分析。这项实地研究将填补目前知识的关键空白，并产生一个新的多标量数据集，以更好地模拟史前晚期社区，并研究与经济和政治集中化有关的整个景观中的人口组织。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Under the supervision of Dr. Bryan Hanks of the University of Pittsburgh, and in collaboration with local institutions in the Republic of Serbia, Mr. Gilgor Dakovic will conduct a program of research examining long-term transitions in settlement patterning, regional demography, and centralized control of resources. Previous scholarship emphasized rich burial evidence as the primary means for understanding broader scale social processes. In contrast, this program of research will identify how populations were organized across the landscape at regional and local community scales and how these trends changed through time. This will be one of the first major studies to use regional scale survey and data analysis of spatial patterning and demographic dynamics in the Republic of Serbia. This research, therefore, provides a crucial opportunity for important academic exchange in methods and theory with Serbian academic institutions and in training students who will have the opportunity to participate in new developments in archaeological research design, field methods and data analysis. At completion, the study will provide an important new comparative case study, available as an open source dataset, on late prehistoric European societies that indexes the emergence of new forms of social, economic and political organization. The research will contribute to anthropological studies of social, economic and political processes in a way seldom utilized for this region and produce and interpret datasets at multiple scales (household, settlement and regional) allowing for a more robust and empirically supported model of diachronic social change. This will contribute to regional scholarship but also to broader studies on trajectories of developing social complexity in early human societies. Archaeological field research will be undertaken in the Banat region of Northern Serbia, located in the Carpathian Basin of Europe, where it appears that egalitarian communities gave way to completely new forms of hierarchical social organization by the early second millennium BCE. Research questions include: (1) What is the spatial and demographic scale of late prehistoric communities and how does this change over time? (2) Can settlements be identified with evidence of centralization of resources, craft production, and supra local exchange? (3) Do such settlements exhibit substantial demographic growth or are populations still dispersed in smaller farmsteads at the local and regional scales? (4) Is there evidence of settlement enclosure and fortification and how does this co-vary with more centralized sites? (5) Does regional scale settlement patterning indicate settlement proximity to important natural resources and regional river waterways associated with long-distance exchange? Planned fieldwork activities include: (i) a regional scale pedestrian survey of 80 sq. km, (ii) surface collection of artifacts and statistical analysis, (iii) targeted near surface geophysical surveys (soil magnetic susceptibility and fluxgate gradiometry), (iv) targeted test pit excavations and, (v) spatial analysis of topographic, environmental and survey data using ArcGIS software. This field research will fill current critical gaps in knowledge and generate a new multi-scalar dataset to better model late prehistoric communities and examine the organization of populations across the landscape in relation to increased economic and political centralization.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.