Students Receive NSF Dissertation Improvement Grants

Dan Seinfeld

Dr. Mary Pohl will supervise Daniel Seinfeld’s dissertation project that examines the relationship between food consumption patterns and the origins of social and political complexity among the ancient Maya at the site of San Estevan, northern Belize. The transition from the Middle (900–300 B.C.) to the Late Formative period (300 B.C.–A.D. 300) witnessed the development of hierarchical rulership at sites throughout Northern Belize, including San Estevan. During this time villages developed into cities that were ruled by an elite class who built monumental architecture and espoused an ideology claiming privileges because of supernatural connections. Mr. Seinfeld’s work will clarify how agricultural and dietary practices may have changed with these developments by tracking food consumption patterns during the Middle through Late Formative periods at San Estevan. This investigation will involve paleobotanical (ancient plant remains) and molecular analyses of materials excavated from domestic middens dating to the Middle and Late Formative periods at the site.

The project will employ an innovative combination of paleobotanical and molecular techniques to study ancient food consumption. Analysis will integrate data from paleobotanical macroremains with two forms of molecular analysis (bulk stable carbon isotope analysis and compound-specific stable carbon isotope analysis) aimed at detecting maize residues absorbed in ceramics. These analyses work because maize (a C4 plant) has a distinct isotopic signature (?13C of –14‰) from most other terrestrial plants in the area (which is a mostly C3 plant environment with a ?13C of –27‰). Changes in agricultural consumption patterns will be determined by comparing the results of paleobotanical and molecular analyses on materials from Middle and Late Formative period midden contexts.

The project’s intellectual merit is to improve our understanding of how agricultural and dietary practices relate to wider changes in a culture’s ideology and sociopolitical organization. The innovative combination of methods used to explore ancient food consumption patterns may be used in future studies.

This project will have broader impacts beyond its immediate research goals by contributing to the wider academic community and by training graduate and undergraduate students. The current project is part of a wider research endeavor at San Estevan involving faculty and students from multiple universities studying political economy and subsistence at the site. Results will be presented in a dissertation that will be available online along with a database of the analytical results. Data from this dissertation project will also be disseminated to the wider academic community through publications and conference presentations in the United States and Belize. The availability of the data will benefit researchers conducting comparative studies of subsistence practices. To complete this project, Mr. Seinfeld will receive training in paleobotanical analysis and advanced molecular analysis techniques. The project will also provide training opportunities for undergraduate volunteers to assist in sorting paleobotanical macroremains and preparing samples for molecular analysis.

Timothy Parsons

Migration or Adoption?
Modeling the Late Copper Age on the Great Hungarian Plain

In the big picture, my dissertation project examines how large, regionally similar material culture patterns develop on the local level. Archaeologists have been studying large, homogeneous material culture groups for a long time, and have often questioned how and why such patterns develop over wide areas relatively quickly. One explanation has been the migration of new people into a region, bringing their material culture with them – this works in many cases, such as with the Linearbandkeramic (LBK) in Europe and Clovis in North America. However, in other cases such as the Early Copper Age Tiszapolgár culture on the Hungarian Plain, local models of indigenous change better fit the patterns of settlement and material culture.

My dissertation work focuses on changes at the beginning of the Late Copper Age on the Hungarian Plain, around 3500 BC. At this time, the relatively homogenous, large Baden culture appears on the Plain. I am testing two models of Baden development: 1) that Baden developed out of local populations’ intensified involvement in an interregional interaction sphere; and 2) that changes occurred through migrations or movement on to the Plain, or that a diffusion of material culture and other behaviors drastically affected material culture, settlement, and social organization. I suggest that intensified macroregional interaction throughout Hungary and the surrounding region resulted from an increase in the ease of mobility as horse-riding and the use of wheeled carts became common place. As a result, the Baden material culture became ubiquitous on the Hungarian Plain as it did throughout much of central Europe.

I will test the models by describing how settlement patterns changed between the Neolithic and Bronze Age, as well as how ceramics were designed and produced between the Middle Copper Age and the Early Bronze Age. Although ceramic design can change often and drastically, ceramic manufacturing and processing techniques are more conservative and less likely to change over time. By identifying any changes in manufacturing and production technology over time, it will be possible to identify the presence of a migratory population on the Plain. If manufacturing techniques remain the same over time, it is more likely that local populations became involved in foreign networks and adopted foreign material culture design while maintaining the more conservative, culturally embedded aspects of ceramic production.

Stephanie Litka

Under the supervision of Dr. Michael Uzendoski, I focus on the political economy of language use and identity among Maya tourist workers in the Yucatan Peninsula. The Riviera Maya is a popular destination for leisure and heritage tourism, due to its coastal location and array of archaeological sites found in the region. I specifically concentrate on the town of Coba, Quintana Roo, Mexico, which is a primarily Yucatec-speaking community located adjacent to the famous ruins of its namesake. While most local inhabitants are bilingual in Yucatec and Spanish, many also acquire English (along with other languages) as a means of communication with visitors. For this reason, I am interested in how native employees conceptualize value by reconciling the ´house´ (characterized my more personified forms of economic/social exchange among relatives and community members) with an ever-increasing tourist workspace (characterized by more alienated systems of exchange) through linguistic and cultural means.

On one hand, indigenous workers have historically relied on agricultural means of subsistence before the advent of tourism over the past few decades. However, heritage tourism tends to represent local populations as ´authentic´ and ´traditional´ remnants of an ancient Maya heritage that often overlooks the historical complexities that have modified their culture over time. On the other hand, tourism serves as a means of participating in the global market economy itself, as native employees commodify various elements of their language and culture for the benefit of tourist consumption. It is through the code-switching and manners of speaking, I argue, that the Maya are able to reconcile these seemingly-disparate ideological and physical realms by choosing to incorporate, modify, and/or reject these ideals through daily interaction with locals and tourists alike. In this manner, I highlight how the Maya are both recipients and producers of their culture by constructing a contemporary sense of value and selfhood within the context of international tourism.

For eleven months, I will conduct fieldwork in this village, consisting of semi-structured interviews, language questionnaires, and extensive observations of conversational content in both work and domestic settings. The intellectual merit of this study concentrates on a linguistically-innovative approach to examining the intricate relationships between globalization, social networks, and value systems on both empirical and theoretical levels. My project specifically integrates the fields of anthropology and linguistics by demonstrating how indigenous communities strategically use language to mediate overlapping notions of personification and commodification to construct their sense of being in the modern era.

Hanneke Hoekman-Sites

Under the direction of William Parkinson, Hanneke Hoekman-Sites will examine early dairying practices on the Great Hungarian Plain during the Neolithic and Copper Age (6000-3000 cal BC) to identify how milk product use has changed through time. This study advances the study of economic intensification by examining archaeological residues from prehistoric Hungary. The results of this analysis will yield information about patterns of dairy residue distribution across individual sites and in various vessel types. The impact of this project reaches beyond the confines of residue analysis. By providing information about general trends of animal product use over time, our knowledge about the process of economic intensification in Eastern Europe will be greatly expanded.

Hoekman-Sites’s project investigates a question with immediate effects on our understanding of the Great Hungarian Plain and with broad archaeological implications for the interpretation of social organization and the development of residue analysis methodology. The complex social systems in place across Europe during the Bronze Age grew out of the Neolithic and Copper Age societies through periods of economic intensification and differential exploitation of faunal resources. Understanding the role of animals and animal products in this intensification is crucial to understanding how social stratification developed in this region.

The presence of animal adipose and dairy fat will be identified directly in ceramic vessels using residue analysis. Residues from past use have been shown to remain in unglazed ceramic vessels long after the vessel falls out of use and is deposited into the archaeological record. The ceramic samples were collected from materials excavated by the Körös Regional Archaeological Project and from three local museum collections in eastern Hungary. In all, 339 samples were collected from 10 Neolithic and Copper Age sites. At least 50 samples were collected from each time period. After extracting the residues from each ceramic sherd using methods based on those described in Copley et al. (2003), each sample will be analyzed using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to determine if animal fat is present. After the samples are tested, those that contain animal fat residue will be tested further to determine the type of animal fat present. The second round of testing will differentiate between dairy fat, adipose fat, and porcine fat using compound specific isotopic analysis, which will bring a higher degree of data resolution than the animal fat presence testing alone.

This project will result in valuable knowledge on eastern European economic intensification. This will provide opportunities for future collaboration by illustrating to Hungarian archaeologists how residue studies can be used to further their own research goals. The results of the project will be disseminated broadly. Initially the research will be published in dissertation form, followed by several articles on theoretical, methodological, and broader geographical aspects in peer-reviewed journals. The data will also be available online, which will add to the database of residue studies.