Doctoral Dissertation Award: Enhancing the Concept of Geographical Borderlands

本论文研究项目的目标是调查生活在环境和文化边界内和周围的社区之间相互作用的复杂性。今天，通过全球信息流、贸易和世界各地的人员流动，人类之间的联系日益紧密。随着人们跨越国界，重新协商自己的身份，现代世界面临着文化和种族界限的模糊，考古学家发现，历史上的文化边界并不像以前定义的那样严格。总结和定义“有凝聚力”的文化单位是很困难的，因为即使在任何给定的社区中，人们的生活方式也存在细微差别。通常，位于任何边界的社区都被视为不那么复杂或不那么重要，仅仅是因为他们生活在人工划定的单元边缘的农村地区。考古学，作为通过物质遗迹研究人类文化的学科，开辟了一条新的道路来理解生活在所谓的边界地带内和周围的人们之间的相互作用。这项研究将这个空间概念化为社区关系网络，以便通过程度而不是严格的边界来理解连通性。反过来，这将使研究人员更准确地了解社区在过去和现代世界是如何相互作用的，而不考虑边界的位置。研究小组将采用社会网络分析（SNA）来检查位于环境和文化边界内和周围的社区之间的关系。研究人员分析了尼欧肖人和他们的邻居。尼奥肖人居住在俄克拉荷马州东北部的欧扎克高原。像今天的许多俄克拉何马人一样，尼奥肖社区占据了两个生态截然不同的地区的边缘：大平原和东部林地。他们不仅发展了技术和社会实践来应对他们所处环境的独特挑战，而且在与边境地区以外的其他群体接触时，他们还与多元文化世界进行了谈判。对陶瓷制造和设计的大型区域网络分析将在两个层面上绘制出Neosho社区与其邻居之间的关系。第一个将研究人们如何装饰他们的陶器，在设计上的相似性通常对应于社区，表明他们属于特定的政治或社会群体。第二部分将考察人们是如何制造这些罐子的，从粘土加工到罐子本身的生产，这标志着一个人对另一个人的直接学习和教学。这些数据结合有关食物残留物的数据，因此将检查跨越边境地区的社区关系的复杂性。研究小组将证明，多方面的网络分析是通用的，适用于研究过去和当代边境地区的相互作用，同时也提供了研究不足的过去文化的数据。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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。

The goal of this dissertation research project is to investigate the complexities of interactions between communities living within and surrounding environmental and cultural borderlands. Humans today are increasingly interconnected through global flows of information, trade, and the movement of people throughout the world. As the modern world is confronted with the blurring of cultural and ethnic boundaries as people cross borders and renegotiate their identities, archaeologists are discovering that cultural borders throughout history are not as rigid as previously defined. It can be difficult to summarize and define “cohesive” cultural units, because even within any given community, there are nuances in how people live their lives. And often, communities located at any border are seen as less complex or important, simply because they live in rural zones on the edge of artificially drawn units. Archaeology, as the study of human culture through material remains, forges a new path towards understanding interactions between people living within and surrounding supposed borderlands. This study conceptualizes this space as networks of community relationships in order to understand connectedness by degrees rather than rigid boundaries. This in turn will let researchers more accurately understand how communities interacted in the past and in the modern world regardless of border placement.The research team will employ a social networks analysis (SNA) to examine relationships between communities located within and surrounding an environmental and seemingly cultural borderland. The researchers analyze the Neosho people and their neighbors. Neosho communities resided on the Ozark Plateau of northeastern Oklahoma. Like many Oklahomans today, Neosho communities occupied the edges of two ecologically distinct regions: the Great Plains and Eastern Woodlands. Not only did they develop technological and social practices to deal with the unique challenges of their environment, they also negotiated multiple cultural worlds as they came into contact with other groups outside of this borderland area. A large regional network analysis of ceramic manufacture and design will map out these relationships between Neosho communities and their neighbors at two levels. The first will examine how people decorated their pottery, where similarities in designs often correspond to communities signaling their membership to a specific political or social group. The second will examine how people manufactured those pots, from clay processing to the production of the pot itself, which signals direct learning and teaching from one person to another. In combination with data on food remains, these data will thus examine the complexities of community relationships spanning a borderland zone. The research team will show that multifaceted network analyses are versatile and adaptable for studying past and contemporary borderland interactions while also providing data on an understudied past culture.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.