Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Role of Multiple Power Levels in Governance

This doctoral dissertation project investigates how local leaders negotiate with an overarching imperial power through developing distinctive leadership positions and practices. Examining an ancient imperial province, the project examines the relationship between pre-empire local leaders who derived originally from the community and new governing intrusive empire elites.

By viewing rule as something that is done through networks of agents and nodes, the work focuses on questions of strategies, allegiance, and spheres of action in understanding how rule is constituted at the grass-roots level. The project examines what aspects of rule are retained by the state and what is ceded to local proxies. How do such local proxies use their positions in the empire to improve their own standing, further their power, or protect their subject populations?

How do the local leaders identify with, or distinguish themselves from, the overarching empire? Such issues have long been central in studying colonialism and remain relevant in contemporary discussions of sovereignty, localized persistence/resistance, and nation building. The broader impacts of this research project include local community participation and educational opportunities training of students and local individuals involved in cultural resource management.

This project investigates governances constructed and contested in one specific archaeological situation. Regional archaeological survey has revealed a layered landscape of governance. In addition to archaeological compounds which derive from a prior tradition a second spatially distinct type, consists of a network of overlain imperial infrastructure.

The research focuses on comparing local leadership as well as imperial sites in terms of activities and position in the larger social and agricultural landscape. The data to address these issues are generated from intensive surface collection at these governance nodes, excavations at four such sites, and prior drone and pedestrian survey. Geographic Information System (GIS) based analysis compares intra-site patterns and inter-site variability in artifact assemblages and features relating to wealth and staple finance, daily practice, communal and mortuary ritual, and stylistic affiliation for a range of governance sites, both local and intrusive.

With information on the variability in activities represented by the different types of governance sites, it becomes possible to situate these sites and their residents in a governance landscape, illuminating how imperial – local governance, broadly defined, was created, distributed and practiced.

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.