Welcome!  I am a 2003 archaeology and ethnoarchaeology Ph.D. graduate of the UCLA Anthropology Department.  My dissertation, focused on the Gianyar Regency of Bali (Indonesia), explores causal linkages between the development and spread of irrigated rice agriculture and the evolution of Balinese political institutions.  Special attention is paid to the use of materialized ideological statements in power negotiations between polity and non-polity social groups.

At present, this web page is intended to serve as a basic hub providing access to several resources:

• My Academic CV / Resume.
• Galleries of photos from my Bali work.
• My Dissertation:
• Abstract of the Dissertation (a web page).
• Complete Text of the Dissertation, with most figures (a 1.1 MB PDF file download).
• 3 Figures (3.2, 4.1, and 5.1) removed from the PDF file to keep file size managable.
• The Bibliography, as a resource for other researchers (a web page).
• Pre-publication versions of these articles and papers:
• The Co-evolution of Agricultural and Sociopolitical Systems in Bali (a 200K  PDF file download).
• New Dramas for the Theatre State: The Shifting Roles of Ideological Power Sources in Balinese Polities (an 80K PDF file download).
• Refuge Sites and the Hawaiian Economy of Forgiveness (a 24K PDF file download).
• An inactive Dam Improvement Proposal for Subak Gunung Mekar Merta Sari Desa Bunutin, Kintamani, Bangli (a web page).
• My public e-mail address: schfelder@aol.com
• A page of useful links.
• If I get it working again, I may add a private archive of documents and graphics for collaborative work.  Access may require a secret password.

What I'm doing:
    Recent ethnographic and computer work by the ethnographer Stephen Lansing suggests that a process of self-organization could have been responsible for the emergence of Bali's yield-enhancing autonomous "complex adaptive system" of agromanagerial water temples. In my dissertation I am evaluating the possibility that 19th century Bali's ritual-focused Hindu polities and highly "heterarchical" organizational patterns may in part have been results of self-organization processes which occurred among community irrigation societies.  I am currently examining this possibility by tracing the spread of irrigated rice agriculture through time, using archaeological site distributions and analyses of extant canals and paddy field systems as my guides.  Compiling and synthesizing the required data will substantially improve our knowledge of Balinese culture history over the past two millennia; on a more theoretical level, I will be investigating the plausibility of a picture of the past in which, through the self-organization of new institutions, whole societies can be transformed by changes in the interaction patterns among agents in a single sector -- the agricultural sector in this case, though not perhaps in all.
    As of early 2001, articles discussing aspects of my Bali work have appeared in the Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association and (with Vernon Scarborough and Stephen Lansing) in Research in Economic Anthropology.  Forthcoming articles are slated to appear in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology and elsewhere (see my vita).  A post-dissertation research program using survey and excavation to further investigate first  millennium AD transformations in Bali's political and economic systems is in its early stages, with Dr. Elisabeth Bacus (Institute of Archaeology, University College London) and Dr. I Wayan Ardika (Universitas Udayana, Denpasar) as my co-directors.  The first phase of this project is being funded by the National Science Foundation under the umbrella of an interdisciplinary project entitled Biocomplexity: Emergence of Cooperation from Human-Environmental Interactions in Bali, which is under the overall direction of Dr. J. Stephen Lansing of the University of Arizona.
    My research interests include Indo-Pacific pre- and protohistory, complex adaptive systems, causality in social change, ethnohistory, complex heterogeneity, agricultural technology, sources of legitimacy, and functions of religion and cosmology.  My UCLA master's thesis, The Politics of Absolution: Restricted Access and Ritual Subordination at the Hawaiian Pu`uhonua, analyzes the social roles of reputed refuge sites throughout the Hawaiian Islands.