Doctoral Dissertation Award: Enhancing the Concept of Geographical Borderlands

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.