Antonio Gilman

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

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.

Grave Shortcomings: The Evidence for Neandertal Burial [and Comments and Reply]

Evidence for purposeful disposal of the dead and other inferences of ritual behavior in the Middle Paleolithic are examined geoarchaeologically. Cave geomorphology, sedimentology, and taphonomy form the basis for a reexamination of the Neandertal discoveries most often cited in this connection: La Chapelle-auxSaints, Le Moustier, La Ferrassie, Teshik-Tash, Regourdou, and Shanidar. Logical incongruencies are identified between the published observations and the conclusion that Neandertals were being buried by their conspecifics.

Bronze Age World System Cycles [and Comments and Reply]

This essay explores the geographical extent of the world system and dates its cyclical ups and downs during the Bronze Age and, in a preliminary way, the early Iron Age. The scope of these twin tasks is exceptionally wide and deep: wide in exploring a single world system that encompasses much of Afro-Eurasia, deep in identifying systemwide conomic and political cycles since more than 5,000 years ago.

Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique [and Comments and Reply]

Archaeology isbecoming a broader, more catholic discipline. The positivist foundation of new archaeology is being questioned, and alternative radical approaches are being championed. In an attempt to assess the validity of these new directions, this paper reviews the historical association of spatial archaeology with human geography and examines the radical critique in each discipline. It concludes that radical archaeology does not offer a viable methodology for explaining past cultural patterning and calls instead for a behavioral archaeology, modeled in some respects upon behavioral geography, which takes careful account of individual behavior and is committed to general theory in the explanation of cultural evolution.

The Balance of Trade in Southwestern Asia in the Mid-Third Millennium B.C. [and Comments and Reply]

Trade frequently is considered an important and distinct subsystem that is integrated within a prehistoric cultural system. This paper rejects this interpretation and attempts a structural analysis of a specific trading network that existed in southwestern Asia in the mid-3d millennium B.C. in order to uncover the motivational factors and contradictions operative in trading relationships. An ideal dichotomy between sparsely populated, resource-rich highland centers and densely settled lowland cities is proposed, and the evolutionary significance of the relationship that developed between these areas is discussed.

Assessing Political Development in Copper and Bronze Age Southeast Spain

Southeast Spain (Figure 4.1) has yielded a rich and distinctive later prehistoric cultural succession. Its essential features were defined over a century ago by the brothers Henri and Louis Siret, Belgian mining engineers in charge of the operations in the Sierra Almagrera in the province Almeria. Their classic workLes Premiers Ages du Metal dans le Sud-est Espagnol (Siret and Siret, 1887), and Louis Siret’s continuing work in the region until his death in 1934, provided the basic corpus of information and the overall intellectual approach that informed the writing of the later prehistory of Spain until the 1970s. Within this framework the increasing social complexity exhibited by the sequence in southeast Spain was the product of diffusion from the eastern Mediterranean. In the past 25 years, this sequence has been reinterpreted from a variety of functionalist perspectives as a process of autochthonous evolution. The debates concerning the causes of this development illustrate the challenges involved in assessing prehistoric economic and political institutions.

Labor Control and Emergent Stratification in Prehistoric Europe [and Comments and Reply]

Prevailing theories on the emergence of stratified societies in prehistoric Europe, which focus on the differential control of material wealth and resources by an elite minority, are deficient in failing to define the socioenvironmental circumstances under which the differential control of resources might initially have been established. An altemative model is offered that generates stratification from the patron-client relationships known to occur ethnographically incertain circumscribed, high-risk environmental settings. Implications of the model find partial support in an examination of settlement and sociopolitical trends during the European Neolithic.

Prehistoric European Chiefdoms

Inequality is a somewhat slippery concept. As Price and Hayden stress in their contributions to this volume, any society is liable to contain potential aggrandizers; and the constraints that suppress these ambitious individuals altogether are imposed only by relatively few societies, all of them (in the ethnographic record, at least) operating in extremely harsh environments, where risk pooling is imperative, and individual accumulation is counterproductive. As a result, one can find some foreshadowing of the characteristics of fully developed “complexity” in almost any simple society. Within the household, as Blanton indicates in his contribution, inequality is pervasive, and households are the charters for society. “Marginalization,” the dimension of inequality emphasized in Arnold’s contribution, likewise occurs at all social scales: within households as well as between them, within settlements and between them, within polities and between them, and so on. The whole thrust of Boasian relativism was to stress these continuities in the social evolutionary scale: the similarities to be found in societies of vastly different scales suggested their essential parity as historical outcomes.

The Economic Systems of Ancient Oaxaca: A Regional Perspective [and Comments and Reply]

Archaeological data from a regional settlement pattern survey of the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, are used to monitor how scarce goods and resources were allocated to members of society through eight phases from 600 B.C. to A.D. 1520. The goal is to determine how distinct historical social structures performed economically in terms of the goods and resources recoverable archaeologically. Measures utilized include land use and settlement characteristics, domestic architectural space, public architecture, pottery, obsidian, and a number of other artifact classes. The results show consistent linkages between specific land use and population variables and specific artifactual items in ways suggesting that political control, or lack thereof, structured the economy in patterned ways. Other factors, including urbanization and boundary permeability, are influential but not as persistently involved as political power. These results show how regional-scale archaeological data can be used to sharpen theoretical understanding of the evolution of political/economic systems.

The Communist manifesto, 150 years later

The Communist manifesto does not have much to say about the pre-capitalist societies most archaeologists deal with, and still less about the primitive societies that interest most prehistorians. (Nothing from the Manifesto makes its way, for example, into the useful compendium brought together by Godelier (1973).) Much of what Marx and Engels had to say directly about antiquity consists of unpublished sketches and passing references, and even the systematic treatment of The origins of the family, private property and the state (1884) must be considered provisional: the changes that reading Morgan (1877) had on the discussions of the Formen (1857–58) and the Anti-Duhring (1878) can only suggest that the accumulation of positive evidence in the course of a century and a half of archaeological research would have caused Marx and Engels to revise substantially every one of their specific claims.