Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Role of Material Culture in Determining Social Affiliation

This doctoral dissertation project utilizes the concept of globalization, or the process of interaction and integration among diverse people, to investigate the spread and adoption of customs over space and time. While it is tempting to draw broad comparisons between many groups that share commonalities in practices, belief systems, and material culture, globalization can potentially transform groups into blended communities with complex identities. Globalization as a social process is most often used to describe the modern world, but versions of this phenomenon can be recognized throughout history. Like modern processes, premodern examples represent the spread of cultural traits on impressive scales that fostered transformative interaction and restructuring. This study addresses globalization by analyzing how changes in ceramic manufacturing can be indicative of how ‘global’ craft knowledge was transferred within regions and the degree at which these practices were integrated with local traditions. Beginning around AD 1000, one region experienced a period of globalization (“Mississippianization”), which affected many aspects of religious and daily life. While ongoing archaeological research of the mid-continental United States often focuses on a pattern of discrete cultural attributes spread from a central location, premodern globalization was more likely a variable process that led to differing local versions of a shared culture based in part upon each group’s political, environmental, and social settings. The project focuses on this era of critical social change, as well as the centuries preceding and following, (AD 600-1550). To understand the fusion of global and local practices, this project studies how cultural transformations unfold through daily technical potting choices at the macroscopic, microscopic, and elemental levels. This project integrates chemical data collected via laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and mineralogical data collected via ceramic petrography and X-ray diffraction (XRD). Instead of concentrating on prestige items, this study shows that everyday objects, including very small sherds, can be used to understand the adoption and adaptation of past traditions. These compositional studies assess the array of ceramic manufacturing practices, which will inform regarding continuity, change, and amalgamation of natural resource utilization and technological choices over space and time. 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.