The movement of population from rural towns to large centers remains one of the most common but striking trends in human settlement. Researchers have had little trouble in formulating explanations for this population nucleation in market societies. However, these market-based approaches have proven of little utility in societies - - or segments of societies - - not dominated by market institutions. Because these societies were generally non-literate and left no written records, archaeology provides the only means to study long-term demographic change in such societies.
Viviana Siveroni will investigate chronological settlement trends in a non-market population of the prehispanic Andes in the Nasca Valley, Peru. Recent archaeological research has revealed massive regional changes between AD 550 and AD 950, including: (a) the abandonment of many rural homesteads and settlements as people flocked to large centers; (b) the end of a long-standing ideology and ceremonial practice (including that associated with the famous Nasca "lines"); and (c) an increase in social stratification even as political decentralization grew. Nothing is known of the changes at the household or community levels that accompanied these broad regional changes. Siveroni will investigate potential changes by excavating and comparing residential areas from a rural village (Las Carretas) dating to early in this period to those at a center dating to late in the period (Huayuri). Her work will explore community religious practices, social structure, and political organization, while focusing on potential shifts in economic activities. One critical goal of the research is to explore the relationship dynamics between population nucleation and reorganization of the household economy.
The importance of this project is that Siveroni will assess several theoretical models in which household and communal level processes are themselves the cause of regional population nucleation. This research thus represents an attempt to link levels of analysis in a new way. Processes such as population nucleation must be observed and studied at the regional level, but their causes may reside at the sub-regional level, even the level of the household or individual actor. Documenting human motivations and social processes in a world not governed by rational market forces is an important contribution of this kind of explanatory archaeology; placing this work squarely in current debates in locational geography and political science.
