Status Differentiation within the Context of Subsistence Change

The study of intergenerational wealth transmission as a key component in the development of social inequality constitutes a major advance in recent anthropological theory. Using this body of work, archaeologists have begun to investigate how institutionalized social differentiation became widespread. The research team will reconstruct the social dynamics of foraging communities at the cusp of making the transition to food production, a critical stage for understanding later emergent sociopolitical complexity. Whereas archaeologists have devised various ways to quantify material wealth, this project will contribute bioarchaeological, isotopic, and paleogenomic lines of evidence to approach embodied and relational wealth, thus, providing new approaches to measuring and understanding the multiple dimensions of social and cultural change. Moreover, at a local level and in close collaboration with local institutions and organizations the project will carry out an active outreach program focused on fostering the preservation of cultural heritage and promoting sustainable eco-tourism. By involving research specialists and multiple undergraduate and graduate students this interdisciplinary investigation will provide key insights into how egalitarian mobile hunter-gatherer communities transitioned into increasingly hierarchical sedentary food-producing societies. Institutional mechanisms for facilitating wealth transmission are fundamental for reproducing social inequality leading towards increasing sociopolitical complexity. The project focuses on a period during which many mobile foraging egalitarian communities adopted an increasingly sedentary and institutionally hierarchical lifestyle based on food production. How intergenerational wealth transmission facilitated this process remains an open question. By collecting data about multiple dimensions of wealth from mortuary remains and using multivariate methods, this study will characterize the factors involved in institutionalizing social differentiation among foraging communities. Specifically, material wealth will be assessed by measuring the quality and quantity of burial investment and offerings, embodied wealth by directly examining skeletal indicators of nutrition, stress, and social identity, and relational wealth by analyzing the provenience of the offerings, isotopic signatures of mobility, and within and between group associations using ancient DNA. Finally, these results will be compared using multidimensional scaling and generalized linear models to determine the structure and degree of social differentiation. 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.