Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award:Examination of Multiple Chronologies

Absolute time, or chronology, is fundamental to interpret the past. However, the disregard for how past societies actually experienced time results in a discrepancy between generalized models of socio-cultural change and the diverse experience of life’s rhythms, thus perpetuating the creation of dehumanized histories. How people organize around life’s rhythms, whether as members of a generation or as a society responding to broader environmental or socio-cultural challenges, profoundly impacts the decisions made in the present, thus shaping the course of actions in the long-term.

Archaeology is well positioned to solve this tension between absolute and lived time by offering a long-term perspective on the unfolding of human experience. This project will undertake research that uses radiocarbon dating to investigate people’s lived experience of time in past communities.The project also speaks to a wider anthropological conversation regarding the understanding of time as a social construct and the artificial separation between society and “clock time”.

The research includes broad scientific collaboration and encourages training in archaeological science among students and scholars.

The project will investigate how to identify different dimensions of lived time from material remains, which will offer a new approach for archaeologists studying socio-cultural changes in the unwritten past. This archaeological study, covering a remarkable duration, offers an ideal opportunity to analyze how alternative lived rhythms contribute to socio-cultural stability in the long-term.

Contrary to previous approaches, this work will interpret the radiocarbon-based chronology of sites by referring to real lifespans, such as those derived from age at death and generational distance observed in collective burials, thus humanizing the history of single sites. This humanization of chronology will also consider alterations in climatic stability, as demonstrated by previous studies, and the interruption of daily life as documented by layers of abandonment in site stratigraphies.

Relevant samples suitable for high-resolution radiocarbon analysis will be collected from museum collections and ongoing excavations. In addition to producing a robust radiocarbon dataset, the project will ultimately enhance the possibilities of archaeological chronology and help close the gap between short-term and long-term perspectives.

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.