Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Social Interaction, Community Formation, and Interaction in Borderlands

This doctoral dissertation research project examines how societies living on the edges of more complexly organized groups engage with the material culture of these groups and, by extension, with the groups themselves. Around the globe, the expansion of complex societies into adjacent peripheral areas has resulted in substantial, long-term impacts through processes such as colonization and globalization.

Previous research has examined these processes through a focus on how cultural cores engage with adjacent areas. Yet, choices by inhabitants within these peripheral areas on how to interact with one or more cultural cores may provide key insights into identity formation in borderland regions. By understanding how past borderland groups engaged materially with cultural cores, this project contributes to ongoing discussions of the relationship between social identity and cultural heritage in borderland regions.

In addition to training a doctoral student, the project will improve the display of archaeological materials at several institutions along in the borderlands in the Southwest and will contribute to the education of contemporary inhabitants and culturally affiliated Indigenous communities in the area. This project will generate data of interest to archaeologists, museums, and local communities and will also provide innovative comparative methods and improve existing theoretical approaches to understanding edge regions.

The research investigates the processes of cross-cultural interaction in a peripheral intermediate society by focusing on how settlements in the periphery engaged with several cultural cores. The data for this project comes from ten excavated village sites and additional surveyed sites in a borderland region. Using physical and geochemical analysis of ceramic artifacts, radiocarbon dating, and settlement-based architectural and mortuary analyses, the researchers will evaluate four different models of edge regions and assess changes over time in the study area.

They will also employ Bayesian statistical modeling to improve the radiocarbon dates and establish a robust chronology for individual sites in the area to understand how local communities responded to the establishment of a socio-politically complex polity.

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.