Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The Nature of Hinterland Communities

该奖项允许尼古拉斯Belluzzo先生调查前接触的内地社区在夏威夷岛。波利尼西亚的研究人员长期以来主要研究社会和社会政治形成过程。 以前的学术研究往往集中在核心，主要是中心的考古记录，模型突出精英的权力战略和权威。然而，最近的学术研究越来越多地关注于理解社会中常见的非精英角色和机构。由于地处皇家中心之外，内陆社区在地方和区域范围内的权威概念，以及这种概念与皇家中心有何不同，我们就更不清楚了。鉴于内地社区在历史文献和人种学文献中的代表性较低，考古方法可以很好地增强夏威夷社会政治形成的空间全面记录。通过部署和重新定义腹地的概念，这个项目侧重于机构，权威来源，夏威夷社区在多个尺度的社会等级制度的具体关注。该研究重新构建了从资源开采区到意向性社区的内陆社区的概念，这些社区积极地协商当地和区域的互动。作为一个多学科的努力，Belluzzo先生将与土壤科学家，古植物学家，传统夏威夷知识体系的权威，以及国家土地管理者合作，在建立跨学科研究关系的同时，开展整体研究。这项研究将夏威夷土地视为既不是边疆也不是边疆，而是位于多个权力和权威来源之间的位置。通过超越单一的核心-外围互动，研究将采用“自下而上”的方法调查夏威夷岛南部考区的非精英夏威夷腹地社区。这将突出机构和地方当局如何创造互动社区不完全从属于精英中心或政治核心。这项研究将采用一种基于地理的方法来评估夏威夷传统的麦卢卡土地划分，麦卢卡位于环境不确定地区两个较大政治区的交叉点。这一地区将进行评估，以确定社区，机构和权威使用人种学，环境，生态和考古数据的变化。Nick Belluzzo和他的研究团队将通过考古调查，档案研究和测试挖掘相结合来收集数据，以生成考古和环境数据集。地质统计分析将得出权威和古老的夏威夷州的区域关系的模式。具体而言，这项研究将比较的变化和区域多样性的定居点和农业实践的记录，从更农业生产力的核心地区直接，集中的统治下的期望。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award permits Mr. Nicholas Belluzzo to investigate a pre-contact hinterland community on the island of Hawai'i. Researchers in Polynesia have long studied chiefly society and processes of sociopolitical formation. Previous scholarship has often focused on archaeological records of core, chiefly centers, with models highlighting elite power strategies and authority. However, more recent scholarship increasingly focuses on understanding the common, non-elite role and agency in society. By virtue of their position beyond the margins of the royal centers, even less is known about how hinterland communities conceived of authority at both the local- and regional-scales or how this conception differed from the royal centers. Given that hinterland communities are less well represented in historical literature and ethnographic documentation, archaeological approaches are well situated to augment a more spatially comprehensive record of sociopolitical formation in Hawai'i. By deploying and re-defining the concept of hinterland, this project focuses specific attention on the agency, sources of authority, and social hierarchy of Hawaiian communities at multiple scales. The study re-frames depictions of hinterland communities from zones of resource extraction to intentional communities agentively negotiating local and regional interactions. As a multi-disciplinary effort, Mr. Belluzzo will collaborate with soil scientists, paleobotanists, authorities in traditional Hawaiian knowledge systems, and State land managers to develop a holistic research study while establishing cross-disciplinary research relationships.This research frames hinterlands as neither frontiers nor borderlands, but locations situated between multiple sources of power and authority. By moving beyond monolithic core-periphery interactions, the research will investigate non-elite Hawaiian hinterland communities in the southern Kau District of Hawai'i Island using a "bottom-up" approach. This will highlight how agency and local authority created interactive communities not wholly subordinate to elite centers or political cores. The research will employ a landscape-based approach to assess the traditional Hawaiian land division of Manuka, situated at the intersection of two larger political districts in an environmentally uncertain region. This region will be evaluated to identify variation in community, agency, and authority using ethnographic, environmental, ecological, and archaeological data. Nick Belluzzo and his research team will collect data through a combination of archaeological survey, archival research, and test excavations to generate archaeological and environmental datasets. Geostatistical analysis will elicit patterns of authority and regional relationships in the archaic Hawaiian State. Specifically, this research will compare records of change and regional diversity in settlement and agricultural practices against expectations from more agriculturally productive core regions under direct, centralized chiefly rule. Both the results and syntheses of multiple novel methods will be broadly applicable to modeling social complexity in complex societies world-wide.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.