Doctoral Dissertation Research: Resilience and Social Transformation in Middle-Range Societies

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2)

This project focuses on social transformations that occur in “middle-range societies” (societies that according to traditional social evolutionary models fall between bands and states) and the factors that affect the resilience of their social and cultural systems during large-scale socioeconomic changes. While questions of major social transformations, especially collapse and disintegration, are typically framed in the context of states or empires, there is much to be explored about these processes in less complex societies.

Middle-range societies -due to their diverse forms of sociopolitical organization and interaction systems - provide an invaluable source of information for researchers who study social responses to large-scale change. This project focuses on a unique form of middle-range society, those that are integrated within an emergent regional system. The research evaluates how local societies become integrated into larger macro-systems with emergent properties and explores how prior conditions and current patterns of interaction affected their resilience in the face of major disruptions.

The research highlights the diverse forms of past sociopolitical organization and helps to develop a vocabulary to capture the complexity these societies represent, as well as providing more general models for explaining social change among middle-range societies. The studied processes of interaction, communal integration and social responses to large-scale changes are broadly applicable and provide relevant information for research well beyond the societies analyzed in this investigation.

The study integrates a multi-scale interaction model with resilience theory to evaluate specific patterns of social change. The research focuses on the factors underlying the markedly different social trajectories of two neighboring regions following the disintegration of a macro-regional system, and evaluates the degree to which distinct patterns of social change can be attributed to prior local, macro-regional, or external factors in two neighboring areas.

The research utilizes archaeological materials from previously excavated sites and surface collections, and applies ceramic stylistic analysis and funerary pattern analysis as the primary methods to evaluate how the different factors affected the local developments. The timing of local developments within the two areas will be monitored via high precision radiocarbon dating.

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.