Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Community Input to Architectural Construction

This doctoral dissertation research investigates how labor was organized to produce and maintain architecture. When people construct buildings, they work together in groups that may consist of friends, relatives, neighbors, or professionals. Examining the organization of architectural labor can reveal how people interact with their communities and how they manage their time and resources.

Information on architectural production can also supplement studies of social organization, economic and non-architectural labor strategies, and site occupation histories. This research expands on traditional archaeological studies of architecture with a special focus on the earthen materials used in construction. Earthen plasters and mortars have the potential to provide significant information about the technological and materials knowledge of builders.

In focusing on earthen materials in addition to other elements of architecture, this research will establish analytical and sampling strategies that can guide historic preservation planning, produce a record of site condition baselines useful for monitoring and stabilizing the non-renewable archaeological record held in trust for the public by the National Park Service (NPS), and supplements previously conducted architectural analyses. Detailed analyses of plasters also contribute to broader discussions on the impact of environmental variability on cultural resources.

The study provides training for the doctoral student, who is a member of the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and will also provide training in architectural documentation and operation of laboratory equipment for an undergraduate student.

The doctoral student will document and examine architectural elements (including walls, roofs, floors, doorways, plasters, and hearths) to identify patterns in material use, construction techniques, and plaster recipes at two cliff dwellings in Navajo National Monument, on the Navajo Nation. Both villages were occupied for less than forty years. The co-PI and an undergraduate student assistant studying archaeology will document and photograph the architecture.

After completion of the documentation, small samples of selected earthen construction materials (such as plasters and mortars) will be collected and analyzed using a combination of geochemical and petrographic methods. The goal of the laboratory analyses is to refine knowledge of the technological choices made by the people who lived at these sites, the extent to which people shared their construction knowledge and plaster recipes with their neighbors, and to evaluate the diversity of materials used in construction.

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.