Christian E. Peterson

Communities, settlements, sites, and surveys: Regional-scale analysis of prehistoric human interaction

The study of developing complex societies can fruitfully focus on the human interactions that define communities, which have always been at the heart of settlement pattern research. Yet little attention has been paid to how communities of varying scales can actually be identified in archaeological survey data. Most often sites have simply been assumed to correspond to communities, although this practice has been criticized. Methods are offered to delineate communities at different scales systematically in survey data, and their implications for field data collection strategies are explored comparatively for cases from northeast China, Mesoamerica, and the northern Andes.

Degrees and Kinds of Inequality

Much recent archaeological literature has stressed the variety of forms that early non-egalitarian societies may take. This variety has been characterized as “horizontal” variation (Drennan 1996, Feinman 2000) in contrast to the “vertical” dimension of social ranking most emphasized in the traditional cultural evolutionary literature. Much of cultural evolutionary thinking has, of course, a strongly unilineal character, and refocusing on horizontal variation has enabled fuller recognition of the very multilineal character of the emergence of hierarchical societies.

Hongshan chiefly communities in Neolithic northeastern China

The Hongshan societies of northeastern China are among East Asia’s earliest complex societies. They have been known largely from elaborate burials with carved jades in ceremonial platforms. The most monumental remains are concentrated in a “core zone” in western Liaoning province. Residential remains are less well known and most investigations of them have been in peripheral regions outside the core zone. Recent regional settlement pattern research around the well known ceremonial site of Dongshanzui has begun to document the communities that built and used Hongshan core zone monuments and to assess their developmental dynamics. The core zone, like the Hongshan periphery, appears to have been organized into a series of small chiefly districts within which ceremonial activities were important integrative forces. Their estimated populations of less than 1,000 are not much larger than those of districts in the periphery, and the evidence does not suggest that these districts were integrated into any larger political entity. The greater elaboration of core zone monumental architecture is thus not attributable to demographically larger communities or to larger-scale political integration. Future research should focus on documenting the organization of statuses and economic activities within these core zone communities to assess potential differences from peripheral communities in these regards.

Centralized Communities, Population, and Social Complexity After Sedentarization

The emergence of centralized supra-local communities followed a number of different pathways, and varied considerably in its pacing in different regions. The establishment of settled agricultural life often set the stage for the emergence of these larger scale and more complex societies by creating the larger, denser populations without which they could not have occurred. The variation observed in the degree and nature of centralization as well as the extremely long time lag between the onset of the Neolithic and the emergence of supra-local centralized communities in some regions, however, make it clear that regional demographic and political centralization is neither a unitary phenomenon nor an automatic consequence of the Neolithic demographic transition. Larger more centralized communities do, nonetheless, owe specific debts to initial Neolithic processes in their regions, since central aspects of their distinctive regional characters are already present in the earliest sedentary agricultural villages that precede them. At least some of these characteristics were quite possibly inherited, in turn, from even earlier hunting and gathering bands.

Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica

How wealth is distributed among households provides insight into the fundamental characters of societies and the opportunities they afford for social mobility. However, economic inequality has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have written records, which adds to the challenge of placing current wealth disparities into a long-term perspective. Although various archaeological proxies for wealth, such as burial goods or exotic or expensive-to-manufacture goods in household assemblages, have been proposed, the first is not clearly connected with households, and the second is confounded by abandonment mode and other factors. As a result, numerous questions remain concerning the growth of wealth disparities, including their connection to the development of domesticated plants and animals and to increases in sociopolitical scale. Here we show that wealth disparities generally increased with the domestication of plants and animals and with increased sociopolitical scale, using Gini coefficients computed over the single consistent proxy of house-size distributions. However, unexpected differences in the responses of societies to these factors in North America and Mesoamerica, and in Eurasia, became evident after the end of the Neolithic period. We argue that the generally higher wealth disparities identified in post-Neolithic Eurasia were initially due to the greater availability of large mammals that could be domesticated, because they allowed more profitable agricultural extensification, and also eventually led to the development of a mounted warrior elite able to expand polities (political units that cohere via identity, ability to mobilize resources, or governance) to sizes that were not possible in North America and Mesoamerica before the arrival of Europeans. We anticipate that this analysis will stimulate other work to enlarge this sample to include societies in South America, Africa, South Asia and Oceania that were under-sampled or not included in this study.

A place of pilgrimage? Niuheliang and its role in Hongshan society

Abstract The complex of Niuheliang, in north-eastern China, with its concentration of ceremonial architecture and unusual art, has been considered the most highly developed polity of the Hongshan period, representing the integration of a large territory. In contrast, the supposed absence of residential remains has been advanced to suggest that it was a vacant ceremonial centre. Systematic survey of the area is now helping to clarify relationships between ceremonial sites and occupation patterns. Densities of utilitarian pottery sherds were used to map settlement and estimate population levels in relation to the locations of ceremonial architecture and concentrations of ritual pottery. This reveals that despite unproductive soils, the area had a relatively high, although scattered, population, focused in part on ritual locations. The results support a role for Niuheliang as a place of pilgrimage, but within a nexus of settled communities that sustained its ceremonial activities.

Corrigendum: Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/nature24646

Comparative Analysis of Neolithic Household Artifact Assemblage Data from Northern China

Household refuse is ideally suited for the comparative study of social and economic inequality. Compositional variation revealed by nonmetric multidimensional scaling of artifact assemblage data from multiple households is readily interpreted as evidence for qualitative differences in social prestige, wealth, and productive activities. Different configurations of these variables reflect differences in social structure and the underlying bases of inequality between communities. Comparing the average of the Euclidean distances from which each scaling was produced provides a direct and quantitative means of assessing differences in the magnitude of assemblage differences interpreted as social inequality between cases. Gini indices calculated from the same household artifact assemblage data provide a similarly direct and quantitative means of measuring differences in wealth inequality between communities. In this paper, household artifact assemblage data from three Neolithic settlements in three different areas of northern China are analyzed. Our analysis reveals differences between some of China’s earliest complex societies in terms of the kinds and degrees of inequality represented.