Large Database to Explore Rise of Social Complexity

For over a decade archaeologists have been developing empirically based models and explanations for complex, multiple-cause-and-consequence, real-world processes. This project will advance understanding of the origins of the state and urbanism by testing an innovative model that employs recently developed analytical tools and an unusually rich and large dataset.

Instead of focusing exclusively on one state or city, this new approach 1) tracks multiple important institutions—states, cities, districts, local communities, temple organizations, markets, and agricultural institutions—as these varied and developed over a span of millenia; and 2) simultaneously tracks these institutional changes across multiple, neighboring societies that had differing cultures, languages, and natural environments yet are known to have maintained a high level of inter-societal interaction. The investigators will assemble newer and older archaeological data on more than 6000 archaeological sites from over 150 municipalities.

The sites are from multiple time periods and include hunter-gatherer rock art, early villages, towns, cities, fortifications, houses, public architecture, and irrigation canals, and agricultural terraces. This information was originally gathered by multiple research groups. The studies had the same basic underlying methodology, permitting a high degree of comparability.

This project will build and make publicly available one the most comprehensive archaeological datasets in the world useful for a variety of topics including demography, cultural ecology, craft specialization and economic practices, warfare, the Neolithic Revolution, communities, urbanism, agriculture, resilience, political evolution, collapse, ordinary lives, wealth inequality, and the development of religious institutions. The project will archive and curate the information in useable formats so that it will be available not just to researchers but to teachers, students, local communities, cultural heritage stakeholders, etc., for years to come.

The central research hypothesis is that 1) urbanism, the state, and other important social institutions developed concordantly over time because of inter-societal interaction, but 2) differently in each regional society because of variation in the key agricultural variables of soil and water and differences in the way these resources were socially managed. Model construction will use a multiscalar (site, local, regional, multiregional) method, and recent archaeological applications of institutional analysis and collective action theory.

Assembling and curating the information archive requires bringing older data (over 100,000 pages of field notes, artifact descriptions, maps, and photographs) up to modern standards, especially in the area of georeferencing, to enhance its availability, accessibility, utility, and value for scientific research, educational, and management purposes. The online archive created by this project will benefit instruction at K-12 and University levels, by providing datasets and modules of real-world situations for use in teaching basic concepts such as number, scientific method, spatial and temporal scales, and continuity and change over time, and more advanced applications in statistics, demography, GIS, and ecology.

Finally, this work will engage scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates in training, creation of the archive, and use of these resources, particularly those from underrepresented groups.

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.