Introduction to Archaeology
Anthro 304 / ARY 301 Spring 1997Prof. Samuel M. Wilson
Department of Anthropology, University of Texas
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Lecture -- Complex society, sedentism, and population growth
Please read Marshall Sahlins: The Original Affluent Society
This following stuff is really rough -- I wanted to get the url up for Sahlins, however.
- Definitions: Complex society refers to the Scale and Nature of the Society" in Renfrew & Bahn's terms
- political organization above the village level
- enduring hierarchies of social status
- States emerged in many places at many times; are there common causes?
- Impact of evolutionary thought on theories of human history
- Factors related to the emergence of states -- Òprime moversÓ
- Multivariate causality
- 19th-Century ideas of the reasons for differences between people
- evolutionary explanations for archaeological remains
- evolutionary explanations for the differences between living groups that they represented stages along a continuum of development that they validated racist assumptions
- increasing line chart
- The idea that there is only one path of development and every group is on it somewhere
- Used travellersÕ accounts and early descriptions of ÒprimitiveÓ people to come up with a three-age system
- Savagery (hunting and gathering)
- Barbarism (early village agriculture)
- Civilization (complex societies)
- Sought to understand change by looking at how societies attained the material necessities of life, which he characterized as Òsocial formationsÕÓ and their Òmodes of productionÓ
- Tribal ownership
- Primitive communism
- Ancient (Greek and Roman) and Asiatic modes of production
- Feudal or estate ownership
- Updated Morgan and MarxÕs interpretations with new data in the 1940s
- Focussed on critical ÒRevolutionsÓ
- Neolithic Revolutions
- Urban Revolution
- Agreeing that a broadly similar pattern of changes took place in many areas, the debate centered on the most important causes
- Population Growth
- Circumscription
- Warfare
- Trade
- Managerial Needs
- A critical variable in nearly all models for complex society emergence Circumscription (env. or social)
- A twist added by Robert Carneiro, in part to explain cases (e.g. Peru) in which there was little evidence of large populations
- Warfare Conflict and early complex societies often go together ... cause or effect?
- Trade
- In cases of abundant food, what services might the ÒelitesÓ provide that makes them worth having? monopolies on crucial or desired resources can help lead to social and political hierarchy
- Managerial needs . . . ...a reason to have some sort of political organization. E.g. the Òhydraulic hypothesisÓ and the need for irrigation
- Individual entreprenuriel efforts
- Presupposes sedentary life with associated increases in population
- General versus Particular explanations
- Can an overarching model be found, or does each case require a specific explanation?
SMW 1/97