This Social and Behavioral Sciences Minority Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship will fund a two-year independent research project with the goal of furthering the academic career of an underrepresented group in science. The proposed research has two primary components: examining changing cooking technologies, and exploring the potential of a collaborative Indigenous archaeology methodology. It involves comparative case studies in Turkey and North America with fieldwork in two locations: Catalhoyuk, Turkey and the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Reservation of Michigan. In each case, the aim is to better understand the production, use-life, and social significance of cooking paraphernalia and the changing practices associated with them through time. Significant cultural changes occurred during the time periods of examination in each location, and the study focuses on how these transformations are reflected and/or driven by changing foodways. The proposed research in Turkey expands on previous analyses of clay cooking balls from Catalhoyuk to include comparative examination of ovens and hearths from 6 Neolithic sites in the same region. The resulting analysis will provide a rigorous yet rich, contextualized examination of changing cooking practices of hunter-gatherer and early farming communities in Anatolia. The proposed research in Michigan will be the first stage of a new, long-term fully collaborative endeavor with the Saginaw Chippewa Indian community. The Fellow will assemble a community team, and work with them to develop an archaeological research design that aims to examine pre- and post-contact cooking techniques in Michigan from 1000 BC to the present. In both Turkey and Michigan, projects include an Indigenous archaeology component to examine collaborative methodologies through case studies in both regions that will be carried out in conjunction with the cooking research outlined above. The aim is to put theoretical models of archaeological collaboration into practice, and to measure their effectiveness in producing knowledge that is useful to stakeholders and the archaeological community. In Turkey this involves collaborating with Turkish community members, teachers, and other stakeholders to develop a long-term community-led heritage plan, with the aim of making the Catalhoyuk research accessible and useful to them. In Michigan, the aim is to blend Western and Indigenous epistemologies to develop a detailed plan for future archaeological research that satisfies both Indigenous collaborators and the archaeological science community. The results will provide comparative data for using an Indigenous collaborative methodology, within and outside of an Indigenous land-base. With this postdoctoral opportunity the Fellow will produce data that forms the basis of numerous journal articles and two books. Completing these projects is critical for the development of the Fellow's long-term research plans, and will significantly advance my career goals. Dr. Hodder and the scholarly community at Stanford are integral to the Fellow's research in areas of heritage management, multi-locality, and post-colonial and decolonizing theory, and are critical resources for the proposed research.
