Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Colonial Associated Community Interaction

The goal of this project is to investigate socioeconomic variation in the impacts of culture contact, focusing specifically on conquest and colonization. Archaeologically, material culture provides a perspective that allows researchers to observe how people in the past coped with external stresses when facing broader sociopolitical changes. Previous research has argued that Quality of Life (QOL) embedded in inequality is a factor in how households incorporate or reject material elements from new traditions after culture contact.

Their project will focus on ceramic hybridity, a common phenomenon in colonial societies where potters incorporate foreign cultural elements into the traditional ceramic production sequence. The project will contribute to the anthropological understanding of culture contact demonstrating that a great amount of cultural continuity is commonly overlooked when studying processes of conquest; and it will contribute to the methodological issue of identifying the agency of underrepresented groups in the past who did not leave their mark in the written records, usually created by colonizers.

The project will demonstrate how inequality interacts with changes brought by colonization such as land use, forced labor, and health among unequal households, thus serving as an example to shed light on how inequality interacts with how people cope with catastrophes in the present. How are we different from populations who experienced epidemics in the past?

What were the unfair circumstances that made it more difficult for unequal households back then? What can we learn?

The project will investigate cultural continuity of indigenous populations between the prehispanic and colonial eras. It will consider how unequal QOL impacted the ways in which households incorporated elements of European and African styles. It is argued that strongly negative impacts of colonization on QOL, as in populations that labored at sugar plantations, encouraged continuity in material culture to reaffirm indigenous identity.

Populations that were not as negatively affected are therefore expected to have adopted a wider range of foreign styles. The project will use household inventories to assess the impacts of colonization from an archaeological perspective of QOL of indigenous communities at various points in time. The project will include members of the local communities, both in fieldwork and in the dissemination of the knowledge produced, also contributing to education working with archaeology students.

This research will result in a more nuanced understanding of localized experiences when facing broad scale stress.

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.