Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Interaction Among Social Organization and Settlement Pattern

The goal of this doctoral dissertation project is to examine the spatial distribution and architecture of villages and towns in a traditional society to better understand long-term changes in economics, identity, and human social organization. Traditional explanations for the rise of social complexity often emphasize the role of inequality, hierarchy, and appearance of cities. In many instances past people were involved in mining and specialized production of trade goods using such materials as local copper and soft-stone resources. However, in some cases there is limited evidence these activities were controlled by elites, and instead may have been led by local entrepreneurs rather than wealthy and powerful foreigners. Research will focus on villages in mountainous areas, including two important sites where copper and soft-stone were extracted, that so far indicate less centralized production than predicted by traditional models of state formation. The research offers important insights about how societies developed, changed, and thrived in mountainous arid environments, including in relation to valuable raw materials like copper that are only available in particular geological settlings. The investigators will use archaeological survey, architectural and geospatial analyses to study the distribution of Iron Age settlements. These methods investigate the spatial organization of life at the regional, local, and settlement scale by focusing on movement. This brings the methods beyond static distribution maps and expands the area of inquiry to include past human behavior – how would people move across broad regions, on trade routes, and through their villages? The range and variability of movement will be used in conjunction with artifacts and other data sources to investigate the nature of social networks among people. Working in international collaboration education and outreach will promote tourism and support the preservation of cultural heritage. 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.