Prehistoric Communities Of Practice

The goal of this project is to study past development of food strategies, cultural boundary and identity formations, and socio-economic organizations of communities of specialized farmers and maritime fisherfolks. By studying these early complementary food producing communities, researchers seek to better understand how different food strategies coalesced to develop more complex and integrated societies.

One of the most impacting events in world history—food production and its consequences—led to significant changes in landscapes and human populations, eventually supporting the spread of a settled lifeway and the rise of great civilizations in the ancient world. Yet, food production was more than just a matter of subsistence and landscape changes.

It also led to dramatic shifts in social, ritual and symbolic practices, including challenges such as the maintenance of social cohesion in the face of variable community formations, increased social scale and differentiation, environmental changes, new technologies to meet new economic demands, and the need for different ways of developing new institutions to manage the changing nature of different risks. However, managing those challenges through growing collective action and new community norms and institutions may have been as problematical as arriving at successful food production, especially when societies combined different food strategies, which required different means of negotiation and organization to deal with new challenges beyond those of a single mode of production such as agriculture.

Research at archaeological sites is best suited to study these changes and challenges through time because they retain the empirical evidence of past food technologies, people’s social and technological organization strategies, and the practices and institutions they formed to deal with those changes and challenges.

Archaeological knowledge of early food production, inter-community integration, technological exploration, innovation and development, and the antecedents and consequences of these activities remains unclear. The offshore coastal waters provide some of the most diverse and abundant marine resources and adjacent shorelines offer one of the most appropriate places to study the socio-economic challenges and interactions that developed between early fishing and farming communities.

Such situations representing the evolution of a settled lifeway, population expansion, different labor demands, greater dependence on marine resources and terrestrial foods, major climate fluctuations provide opportunities to study social movements toward civilization. This research focuses on how these fishing and agriculture communities built social cohesion by non-violent means and how they symbolically expressed their changing social and cultural identities with new food production strategies.

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.