Kent V. Flannery

The origins of the village revisited: From nuclear to extended households

In Mesoamerica and the Near East, the emergence of the village seems to have involved two stages. In the first stage, individuals were distributed through a series of small circular-to-oval structures, accompanied by communal or “shared” storage features. In the second stage, nuclear families occupied substantial rectangular houses with private storage rooms. Over the last 30 years a wealth of data from the Near East, Egypt, the Trans-Caucasus, India, Africa, and the Southwest U.S. have enriched our understanding of this phenomenon. And in Mesoamerica and the Near East, evidence suggests that nuclear family households eventually gave way to a third stage, one featuring extended family households whose greater labor force made possible extensive multifaceted economies.

The Prehistory of Southwestern Iran: A Preliminary Report.

Current research on the prehistory of the Near East is proceeding at a pace unmatched since the ‘golden era of archaeology’ immediately preceding World War II. Iran, because of its great archeological potential and its stable political situation, has become a prime target for new investigations. Expeditions from the United States, Great Britain, Denmark, France, and Japan have all made substantial contributions to knowledge of Iranian prehistory in the last five years. One recurrent problem in the new research, however, is a lack of coordination and communication between expeditions, which means that many opportunities for useful cooperation are lost. For example, in 1961 we surveyed in some 15 valleys in western Iran, plotting the distribution of pre-Uruk settlements. Unbeknown to us, at least one American and one Danish survey team crossed our path, duplicated many of our survey runs, and excavated one of the sites found on our project. We later learned that we, in turn, had duplicated several survey runs made previously by a British team, who were interested mainly in later sites but would have been happy to share their data on sites in our range of interest. Had all of us known what our colleagues were doing, we could have saved ourselves many hours of duplication. This situation is worsened by the fact that many surveys and test-excavations remain unpublished, and diagnostic artifacts remain undescribed. With regard to pottery sequences, the urgency of the problem has recently been stressed by one of our colleagues (Young 1966: footnote 28).

Process and Agency in Early State Formation

Most pristine states formed in the context of competing chiefdoms, when one of the latter succeeded in incorporating its rivals into a larger polity. Some of the processes evident during state formation include chiefly cycling, biased transmission, territorial expansion, and the gaining of competitive advantage. In some archaeological circles, however, it has become fashionable to reject ecological, demographic, and technological processes, and seek agent-based or ideological explanations for state formation. This essay, delivered as the tenth McDonald Lecture, examines five agents who modified ideologies and created states from chiefdoms. It concludes that process and agency are complementary, rather than antithetical, perspectives; thus the latter is unlikely to make the former obsolete.

Farming Systems and Political Growth in Ancient Oaxaca Physiographic features and water-control techniques contributed to the rise of Zapotec Indian civilization

The Valley of Oaxacas large flat floor, high water table, low erosion rate, and frost-free floodplain give it a higher agricultural potential than that of most surrounding areas. The development of the pot-irrigation system early in the Formative period gave it a head start over other valleys, where the low water table did not permit such farming; Oaxaca maintained its advantage by assimilating canal irrigation, barbecho, infield-outfield systems, flood-water farming, and hillside terracing as these methods arose. With the expansion of population in the high-water-table zone of the high alluvium, competition for highly productive land and manipulation of surpluses may have led to initial disparities in wealth and status; competition probably increased when canal-irrigation systems were added during the Middle Formative, improving some localities to the point where one residental group owned land more valuable than that of its neighbors.

The origin of war: New 14C dates from ancient Mexico

New 14C dates from archaeological sites in Oaxaca, Mexico, support R. C. Kellys observation that intervillage raiding may begin as soon as a region has segmentary societies. The oldest defensive palisade dates to 3260–3160 B.P. in conventional radiocarbon years, only a few centuries after village life was established. Over the next millennium raiding evolved into war, with residences and temples burned, captives killed, and populations moving to defensible hills. 14C dates are now available for the first use of hieroglyphic writing to record a captives name, military victories leading to the consolidation of the Zapotec state, the first skull rack, and the building of a fortress in conquered territory.

The coevolution of ritual and society: New 14C dates from ancient Mexico

New 14C dates from Oaxaca, Mexico, document changes in religious ritual that accompanied the evolution of society from hunting and gathering to the archaic state. Before 4000 B.P. in conventional radiocarbon years, a nomadic egalitarian lifeway selected for unscheduled (ad hoc) ritual from which no one was excluded. With the establishment of permanent villages (4000–3000 B.P.), certain rituals were scheduled by solar or astral events and restricted to initiates/social achievers. After state formation (2050 B.P.), many important rituals were performed only by trained full-time priests using religious calendars and occupying temples built by corvée labor. Only 1,300–1,400 years seem to have elapsed between the oldest known ritual building and the first standardized state temple.

Precolumbian use of chili peppers in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico

Excavations at Guilá Naquitz and Silvias Cave, two dry rockshelters near Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico, yielded the remains of 122 chili peppers dating to the period A.D. 600–1521. The chilies can be assigned to at least 10 cultivars, all belonging to the species Capsicum annuum or Capsicum frutescens. The specimens are well enough preserved to permit an evaluation of the criteria used to separate wild and domestic chilies and to distinguish among cultivated races. In addition, they provide the opportunity to assess the reliability of starch grains for documenting the presence of chilies in archaeological sites where no macrobotanical remains are preserved.

On the logic of archaeological inference: Early Formative pottery and the evolution of Mesoamerican societies

The 2005 articles by Stoltman et al. and Flannery et al. to which Neff et al. (this issue) have responded are not an indictment of instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) but, rather, of the way Blomster et al. (2005) misuse it and of the hyperbolic culture-historical claims they have made from their INAA results. It has long been acknowledged that INAA leads not to sources but to chemical composition groups. Based on composition groups derived from an extremely unsystematic collection of sherds from only seven localities, Blomster et al. claim that the Olmec received no carved gray or kaolin white pottery from other regions; they also claim that neighboring valleys in the Mexican highlands did not exchange such pottery with each other. Not only can one not leap directly from the elements in potsherds to such sweeping culture-historical conclusions, it is also the case that other lines of evidence (including petrographic analysis) have for 40+ years produced empirical evidence to the contrary. In the end, it was their commitment to an unfalsifiable model of Olmec superiority that led Blomster et al. to bypass the logic of archaeological inference.

Ecological Theory and Cultural Evolution in the Valley of Oaxaca [and Comments and Reply]

A number of researchers have recently challenged the usefulness of cultural ecology for explaining pre-Hispanic ultural evolution in the Valley of Oaxaca. We address those criticisms and attempt to show how a rather traditional ecological model is at least consonant with the data. Our aim is not so much to demonstrate the greater explanatory power of our model in comparison with the arguments of the researchers of the Valley of Oaxaca projects as to show that the published data do not permit he rejection of either.

“THERE WERE GIANTS IN THOSE DAYS”: Richard Stockton MacNeish, 1918–2001

On January 16, 2001, on a gravel road in the Maya Mountains of Belize, one of archaeologys most prolific and colorful superstars was fatally injured in the crash of his rental car. Having endured for 82 years despite cancer, heart attacks, a near-drowning, and double bypass surgery, the seemingly indestructible “Scotty” MacNeish was taken from us by accident. Had he lasted 102 years, I would still consider his death premature.