Publisher Summary
Over the years, anthropological studies of culture change have centered on the origins of agriculture and the rise of the state. Social scientists have recognized that if the development of hierarchical governments, marketing systems, and social stratification is to be explicated, then the evolution of pre-state forms of social differentiation and political leadership must be understood. As a consequence, there has been an interest in societies that are organizationally intermediate between mobile hunter-gatherers and bureaucratic states. This chapter focuses on ethnographic and ethnohistoric information from the New World to examine pre-state sedentary societies. It reviews several classificatory schemes that have been used to describe pre-state sedentary societies along with the impact that these schemes have had on current studies in archaeology and ethnography. It presents some suggestions for a less typological approach to the study of long-term change.

2 – Too Many Types: An Overview of Sedentary Prestate Societies in the Americas

It has been commonplace to describe relatively simple forms of nonegalitarian societies as “tribal” or “ranked.” However, these terms were formulated without reference to causal models and they are vague. My goal is to establish a better understanding of how nonegalitarian societies emerged from an egalitarian hunter gatherer base. This topic has captured the attention of a wide range of scholars over the past several decades, and there exist a number of excellent syntheses of the endeavors directed toward understanding the emergence of complexity (Arnold 1993; Coupland 1988; Earle 1987, 1989; Feinman and Neitzel 1984; Johnson and Earle 1987; Tolstoy 1989). The principal contending schools of interpretation in archaeology view complexity as developing due to population pressure, needs for more efficient management of risk or information; economic efficiency (redistribution), the monopoly of long-distance trade routes; manipulation of social or ideological factors; the simple hiving off of daughter communities resulting in community hierarchies; circumscription (social or geographic), coercive exploitation, ritual values, external threats, labor-intensive investment in productive facilities, other means of controlling resources including irrigation; scalar effects related to increasing community sizes or population densities; storage. There are structuralist and cognitive explanations as well. Rather than review these earlier contributions, I will proceed directly to a discussion of some other questions and data that I have gleaned from both archaeological and ethnographic data.

Pathways to Power

The study of recent ‘traditional’ Mediterranean rural economy has long been a predilection of ancient historians and archaeologists working in that area. Traditional practices and production norms have been used by ancient historians in the interpretation of the often enigmatic testimony of the ancient agronomic writers, while archaeologists have used the same information to fill in the many gaps in the material record supplied by the spade. Much of the relevant data on traditional rural economy are gleaned from the accounts of early travellers or of modern geographers, ethnographers and agronomists. But comparanda acquired at first-hand enhance the credibility of archaeologists and ancient historians as fieldworkers, and chance summer encounters with Cretan shepherds or Cycladic fishermen are valuable currency in competitive displays at academic conferences.

Traditional and ancient rural economy in Mediterranean Europe: plus ça change?

Small mammal bone assemblages from the scats of three families of mammalian carnivores are described here as a means of assessing paleontological bone assemblages. These are the Viverridae, Canidae, and Mustelidae. Marking behavior by the carnivores or their use of latrine areas can produce concentrations of bone comparable with those produced from owl pellets, but the nature of the bone assemblages is very different. Skeletal element preservation has a characteristic pattern related to the relative strength of the individual elements, so that the strongest elements are the ones that best survive the physical abrasion of the predator's teeth. Bone breakage is greatest in canids and least in some viverrids. Digestion of the bone occurs to a certain extent with all carnivores, with moderate rounding but little corrosion of either bones or teeth in viverrid-derived bone assemblages, very great rounding and severe corrosion of bone and tooth enamel (but little corrosion of tooth dentine) in canids, and moderate rounding and slight to moderate corrosion of bone and tooth dentine (but less of enamel) in mustelid-derived bone assemblages. Tooth marks are generally rare except in canid-derived bone assem- blages. These patterns may enable the identification of predators responsible for the accumulation of fossil predator assemblages, and a consideration of the hunting and other behavior of that type of predator then permit the identification of possible biases in the fossil fauna. In the viverrids, for instance, the mongoose selected for large prey size and against cranial elements, while the genet took all prey sizes available to it and all body parts. Larger canids such as foxes and coyotes took both large and small species, but proportionally more of the most common prey species were present. Skulls were underrep- resented. The small canid, the bat-eared fox, selected for the smallest prey species available to it but took all body parts. Mustelids took all sizes of prey, although not necessarily in proportion to their abundance in the habitat, and large species were underrepresented. If the predator type is known, therefore, for a fossil assemblage, these biases can be taken into account in assessing the paleoecological significance of the fauna. An example from the Olduvai Pleistocene deposits is given.

Small mammal bone accumulations produced by mammalian carnivores

Design theory provides a useful means for analyzing both practical and prestige technologies, although the goals and constraints of each are very different. The aggrandizer model of prestige technology postulates that prestige items were essential elements in aggrandizer strategies and that prestige items emerged only under conditions of sustainable food surpluses and included the most important innovations of the last 30,000 years such as metal working, pottery, sophisticated art, and domesticated plants and animals. The aggrandizer model also accounts for the transformation of some prestige technologies into practical technologies.

Practical and prestige technologies: The evolution of material systems

The emergence of a hereditary elite class in Bronze Age Europe is now widely interpreted in terms of the redistributive activities of a managerial ruling class. This fuctionalist account of elite origins goes against a uniformitarian understanding of what ruling classes do in complex societies. It also is poorly suited to the concrete evidence for Bronze Age cultures in Europe. The rise of hereditary, superordinate social strata in prehistoric Europe is better understood as a consequence of the development of capital-intensive subsistence techniques. Plow agriculture, Mediterranean polyculture, irrigation, and offshore fishing limited the possibility of group fission and thereby gave leaders the opportunity to exploit basic producers over the long term. The observations that capital-intensification preceded elite emergence and that areas with greater intensification exhibited greater social inequalities confirm this nonfuctionalist account of the development of stratification in later prehistoric Europe.

The Development of Social Stratification in Bronze Age Europe [and Comments and Reply]

Literature loss has a dual meaning. In the research process, it refers to the difference between what exists in some published form and what is likely to be found in a literature search. On an institutional level, it refers to the declining ability of American research libraries to maintain comprehensive collections in the wake of the extraordinary growth and price inflation of scholarly literature since the I970s. Recent technological innovations in the library field provide the means not only to measure literature loss on an institutional level but also to alleviate it in one's own research work. An application of this technology to the field of anthropology is presented here in two parts: (i) an analysis of the growing gap in anthropology between book publication output and the aggregate holdings of 70 institutions in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and (2) a discussion of the relevance of the new technology to the closely related question of information retrieval in the research process. Underlying any analysis of literature loss is the problem of assessing the size of the universal stock of academic books in a given field. That problem has no definitive solution or any prospect of one. Moreover, even if accurate book-publication figures could be compiled worldwide, it would hardly make sense to consider them as realistic or worthy goals for research library collection development. The ancient ideal of the Library of Alexandria-to hold everything ever published-has been considered impossible and undesirable since the early part of this century. For the purpose of the analysis presented here-to assess the financial performance of American research libraries within reasonable bounds-book-publication output is derived from the Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) Union Catalog (OLUC) bibliographic database. The decision to use this database recognized the utter infeasibility of attempting to locate the publication lists of hundreds of university and trade publishers, scholarly societies, research bodies, and the like, and involved the simplifying assumption that just about any book that appeared over the past decade in the Americas or in Europe would have shown up in the OCLC-OLUC system, which contains the shared cataloging of more than 4,800 libraries, including the Library of Congress, in 26 countries. That part of book output that is held in at least one of the 70 ARL institutions is derived from a different database, the OCLC/AMIGOS Collection Analysis Computer Disk (CACD), developed in I989, which records ARL holdings by year of publication. Figure i compares the aggregate holdings of 70 ARL institutions with total book output in all areas of anthropology for the period I978-87.2 Line A shows that output fluctuated from a high of I,II3 titles in I980 to a low of 934 titles in i982. On average, I,008 titles were published annually, with a standard deviation of 40. Line B shows that holdings in anthropology of the 70 ARL institutions fluctuated from a high of 694 for titles published in I980 to a low of 507 for titles published in I987. On average, 6o6 titles were acquired per year of publication, with a standard deviation of 56. Overall, ARL holdings in anthropology dropped from 66% of book output in the late I970S to 53% in the late I980s. Underlying the deteriorating position of American research libraries are certain inflationary tendencies built into the scholarly communications system. During the I978-87 period, the average price of a hardbound book on anthropology increased I67%, from $18.23 to $30.49 (Bentley I99I:404), and the cumulative inflation rate for institutional subscriptions to anthropology and sociology joumals increased 327%, rising to 45I% by I99I (Carpenter and Alexander I99I:59). Line C demarcates the mainstream literature, books held by at least io% of ARL institutions, from the gray

Charles A. Schwartz

Papers

The Development of Social Stratification in Bronze Age Europe [and Comments and Reply]

Literature Loss in Anthropology