Doctoral Dissertation Research: Insight into Long Term Societal Interaction

This doctoral dissertation project investigates culture contact, conflict, and shifting regional dynamics in the American Southwest. The goal of this project is to understand how the cultural groups came to take their present-day forms by adapting to shifting political, social, and environmental pressures. It asks specifically what changes were related to exogenous forces, and what were the result of strategic choices made in a shifting social landscape. The project trains a graduate student in scientific methods of archaeological data collection and analysis. The study contributes to broader anthropological questions about how new groups form through adopting, rejecting, or blending different cultural practices. The project includes field surveys and uses drone-based mapping to document architectural features, perform GIS line-of-sight studies to assess visibility between fortified settlements, applies ceramic analysis and petrography to distinguish locally produced from imported pottery, uses dendrochronology to date construction episodes, and interviews local community members about their oral histories of these sites. These methods help to unravel patterns of movement, defense, refuge, and regional exchange systems, offering a more complete understanding of the complex landscape of the American Southwest. 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.