Brian Hayden

Nimrods, piscators, pluckers, and planters: The emergence of food production

Abstract The central thesis of this article is that Mesolithic/Archaic technological innovations enabled some hunter/gatherers to create an abundant and stable resource base which could not be adversely affected by socioeconomic competition using food resources. In contrast to earlier hunter/gatherers, highly competitive individuals with accumulative personalities emerged in the new resource-rich communities, and they used the competitive feast as a means of developing, extending, and consolidating their power. It is in the context of these “accumulators” and the feasting complex that the first domesticates generally appear and diffuse most readily. This view stands in contrast to many models that posit domestication occurring in marginal hunting/gathering groups experiencing severe resource stress. The view of the first domesticates as prestige items used by accumulators to outclass their rivals explains the otherwise mystifying nature of many of the first domesticates, including dogs, gourds, chili peppers, and avocados.

Where the garbage goes: Refuse disposal in the Maya Highlands

Abstract Secondary refuse disposal behavior is structured by three major concerns in the Maya Highlands: economy of effort, potential value of refuse, and potential hindrance by refuse. According to the needs of each household and the nature of the refuse, material slated for discard may be sorted and dumped in separate locations, within or outside compounds. Archaeologists should be aware of this refuse structure in seeking specific types of refuse as well as in comparing refuse from households, or other types of excavational units. At the household level, recognition of the toft area (the area immediately surrounding the household and related outbuildings) is especially important in acquiring representative samples of “hard” types of refuse. Analysis of neighborhood dumps is strongly advocated as one of the more economical, meaningful, and representative ways of dealing with refuse accumulations. Because of several randomizing and dispersive processes operating at the household level, as well as sample size considerations, simple diversity measures are recommended for comparing household assemblages.

Pathways to Power

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.

Practical and prestige technologies: The evolution of material systems

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.

The corporate group as an archaeological unit

Abstract Although corporate groups have featured in the anthropological literature for a century, and have more recently been proposed as a potentially useful unit for archaeological analysis ( L. Freeman, 1968 , In Man the hunter , edited by R. Lee and I. De Vore, pp. 262–267. Aldine, Chicago), application of the concept in archaeology has largely remained hypothetical, and little theoretical modeling has been attempted. In spite of this neglect, it is argued here that the corporate group is potentially one of the most useful and important aspects of the archaeological record that can be dealt with. This conclusion is derived from a detailed ethnoar-chaeological analysis of over 150 households in the Maya Highlands, in which it became apparent that social, economic, and demographic characteristics of households were only loosely associated with a wide variety of material culture expressions. In contrast, such inferences seemed to be much more reliable when households were grouped into “hypothetical corporate groups” and group averages were compared. In addition, theoretical considerations based on economics and on interactions also indicate that the analysis of corporate groups shold be more rewarding and potentially more accurate than the analysis of individual households. Archaeologically, corporate groups can be defined where residential coherency and internal hierarchies are demonstrable. Because corporate groups can be viewed as signaling major changes in the structuring of society, and in the evolution of social and political complexity, the investigation of conditions under which corporate groups emerge should be of major theoretical significance to the entire discipline of archaeology. Moreover, because of the close logical links to material culture and the environment, theoretical modeling should be particularly amenable to archaeological testing. In sum, corporate groups provide an unusually fertile problem area which archaeologists can hope to attack with at least a promising degree of success.

The Proof Is in the Pudding: Feasting and the Origins of Domestication

Feasting has been proposed as the major context and impetus behind the intensification of production leading to the domestication of plants and animals. This article examines the way feasting contributes to fitness in traditional societies through the reduction of risks involving subsistence, reproduction, and violent confrontations. As other authors have noted, the risk‐reduction strategies used by simple foragers differ significantly from risk‐reduction strategies used by transegalitarian hunter‐gatherers and horticulturalists. These differences are examined in more detail and are related to the emergence of feasting in transegalitarian societies. Surplus‐based feasting is proposed as an entirely new element in community dynamics, probably first developed during the Upper Paleolithic in Europe, but becoming much more widespread in the world with the development of Mesolithic technology. Because feasting entails survival and risk‐reduction benefits, it creates inherently inflationary food‐production forces. These elements first appear among complex hunter‐gatherers and logically lead to the intensification of food production, ultimately resulting in the domestication of plants and animals.

Were luxury foods the first domesticates? Ethnoarchaeological perspectives from Southeast Asia

There are important reasons for considering the first domesticated plants and animals as luxury foods primarily used in feasting. Using Southeast Asian tribal society as a case study, it is demonstrated that all the domesticated animals and the most important of the domesticated plants constitute forms of wealth that are primarily or exclusively used in feasting contexts. In addition, numerous studies have demonstrated that feasting generates powerful forces that intensify and increase resource production of luxury foods as well as staples. Such forces ultimately can lead to the domestication of wild species and the transformation of luxury foods into staple foods.

Evaluating Lithic Strategies and Design Criteria

A wide range of factors has recently been proposed to explain lithic assemblage organization and tool morphology. These factors include: reliability, maintainability, risk, mobility, versatility, and flexibility. Discussion of all these factors has tended to remain on an abstract level with anecdotal analyses or non-lithic ethnographic observations used for support. The present chapter analyzes a complete assemblage from the Interior Plateau of British Coumbia with the aim of trying to explain assemblage organization and tool morphology. Design theory provides a powerful analytical framework for dealing with these problems. Results demonstrate that basic considerations such as requirements of task performance, raw material availability, and processing volumes play the most important roles in determining assemblage organization and morphology. In trying to apply more recently proposed factors to the explanation of tool morphology, we found many of them to be highly ambiguous and perhaps non-operational. In addition, theoretically expected outcomes of these models sometimes did not match archaeological lithic patterns. In other cases, their usefulness seems akin to considerations of “prestige display” in lithics, i.e., most useful as special case factors and most relevant in carefully defined situations (e.g., hunting gear). Nevertheless, all these concepts can be accommodated in a broad design analysis framework, emphasizing constraints, design considerations, and reduction/resharpening strategies.

The Plateau interaction sphere and late prehistoric cultural complexity

The Plateau culture area of northwestern North America fits the criteria of an interaction sphere. Understanding the general cultural dynamics responsible for the creation of interaction spheres has been poorly developed in archaeological and ethnological theory. Data from the Plateau Interaction Sphere are used to argue that the main factor responsible for the emergence of interaction spheres in transegalitarian societies is the development of an elite class. Elites who seek to maximize their power and wealth at the tribal level do so in part by establishing trading, marriage, ideological, military, and other ties to elites in other communities and regions. They use these ties to monopolize access to desirable regional prestige goods and to enhance their own socioeconomic positions. In conformity with expectations derived from this model, the data from the Plateau demonstrate that interaction sphere goods are predominantly prestige items and that these concentrate in communities that have the greatest potential to produce surplus and to develop socioeconomic inequalities. These same features also seem to characterize well-known interaction spheres elsewhere in the world.

Big Man, Big Heart? A Mesoamerican View of the Emergence of Complex Society

The issue of whether elites in societies with developing socioeconomic complexity emerge as a functional response to the needs of the community or emerge in response to opportunistic possibilities of self-aggrandizement is of critical importance to an understanding of the emergence of complex hierarchical societies. Existing ethnographies do not provide adequate observations to enable the competing models to be tested. Original fieldwork was therefore conducted in the Maya area, focusing on communities that had been extremely isolated in the earlier part of this century and that had experienced crises in which elites could be expected to materially aid the community if the primary reason for their existence was a “functional” one. We interviewed a wide range of older individuals representing different statuses in formerly isolated traditional communities. The results are unequivocal. Elites, or incipient elites, provided no aid to their communities in times of crisis other than actions that were designed to enhance the advantages of the elites. We argue that the Maya cargo system constitutes a special case of the broader category of competitive feasting systems found among many ranked societies throughout the world, and that the competitive feast is the main mechanism by which ambitious individuals acquire disproportionate goods, influence, and power.