With support from the National Science Foundation, co-PI's Dr. Brigitte Kovacevich and Dr. Michael Callaghan will carry out a two-year research project including archaeological field and laboratory work focused on the site of Holtun, Guatemala with an international team of scholars. This research will focus on the development and maintenance of social inequality. Inequality is a defining characteristic of all prehistoric complex societies and and is of contemporary relevance because it characterizes all societies which exist in the world today. Archaeologists speculate that it first became formalized within and between households, although little is currently known about how households contributed to emergent ideologies and were innovators and creators of that ideology.
The objective of this research is to determine how households contributed to social inequality at the Preclassic-period (900 BCE-150 CE) site of Holtun, Guatemala. The investigators central hypothesis is that social inequality developed at Holtun circa 300 BCE, and social complexity circa CE 25, with the support of both emergent elite and commoner households at the site through the medium of communal ritual and the economy associated with it. The central hypothesis will be tested by, 1) identifying and studying the development of social inequality through variation in Middle Preclassic-period (600-300 BCE) household inventories, 2) identifying and studying the differential contribution of households to communal ritual and economic activity through time, and 3) identifying the source and changes in ritual practice and symbols within and between households through time. Principal methods include excavation into domestic and monumental architecture, and analysis of artifacts using both traditional and contemporary approaches including: ceramic and lithic typological classification, petrography, lithic microwear analysis and replication studies, faunal analysis, X-ray Fluorescence, stable-isotope analysis of human bone, Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis, and soil geo-chemistry studies.
This project will promote teaching, training, and learning by employing graduate, undergraduate, and Dallas-area high school students to engage in archaeological research, training, and experimental studies. The research includes underrepresented groups, specifically women in science. While the number of women attaining doctoral degrees in the social sciences has risen, women in archaeology still have not achieved equal employment and representation in the field. The research also incorporates Latino high school students from one of Dallas Counties poorest cities and provides training for an international team including Guatemalan undergraduates. The results of this research will be broadly disseminated to the international community at conferences and meetings. Results will be published in annual archaeological site reports and available online at a project website through SMU's server with data available to the public on tDAR and/or the Open Science Framework.
