Philip L. Kohl

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.

The Use and Abuse of World Systems Theory: The Case of the Pristine West Asian State

Recently archaeologists working in the Anglo-American regional tradition of archaeology have become increasingly critical of neo-evolutionary formulations for the development of complex society that stress internal, frequently ecological factors to the exclusion or near-exclusion of features relating to interaction and exchange among disparate societies at different levels of cultural development. Frieds concepts of a “pristine” social formation or society considered almost in isolation from other societies has been criticized as never operative or too ideal and misleading a type to be useful. Whether one prefers to refer to “peer polity,” “cluster,” or some other form of intersocietal interaction (Renfrew 1982a; Price 1977), the basic fact remains that the development or cultural evolution of any society is dependent upon its relations with other societies; that cultures are open, not closed, systems; and that studies – be they based on excavations of a site or settlement data from surveys of precisely defined, well-demarcated, but bounded areas – that fail to consider broader patterns of interaction are necessarily incomplete and partial. A boundary problem, in short, exists for prehistory that is every bit as real as that which besets later historical studies or analyses of the contemporary world. One stimulating solution to this problem of defining the proper unit for social analysis, which, to date, has seen relatively limited application in prehistory, is the model of a world system developed by I. Wallerstein and his followers for explaining the emergence and current state of the modern world.

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.

The Uruk Expansion: Cross-cultural Exchange in Early Mesopotamian Civilization [with Comments and Reply]

Comments and Reply] Author(s): Guillermo Algaze, Burchard Brenties, A. Bernard Knapp, Philip L. Kohl, Wade R. Kotter, C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, Glenn M. Schwartz, Harvey Weiss, Robert J. Wenke, Rita P. Wright and Allen Zagarell Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 30, No. 5 (Dec., 1989), pp. 571-608 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743567 . Accessed: 06/10/2014 22:44

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.

Trade and Politics in Proto-Elamite Iran [and Comments and Reply]

During the Proto-Elamite period, 3300-2800 B.C., a political and economic hegemony seems to have arisen in the southwestern highlands of Iran. The power of this hegemony was derived from its control over the major trade routes between the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia; its extent is defined by shared styles in ceramics, art, and architecture and by the use of a distincitive system of writing and recording. Proto-Elamite influence grew rapidly during the last centuries of the 4th millennium B.C. and declined equally rapidly when maritime trade through the Persian Gulf was established several centuries later. This reconstruction is supported by independent evidence-the ratios of imported to exported materials-from Farukhabad, a site outside the Proto-Elamite sphere of influence in lowland western Iran. This paper emphasizes the role that long-distance trade can play in the rise and decline of prehistoric complex societies. Proto-Elamite hegemony was a political and social phenomenon but was based on exploitation of an economic situation. The important factor was not change in mode of production or control over means of production such as arable land or natural resources, but control over trade.

The Bronze Age: Unique instance of a pre-industrial world system?

This paper considers the crosscultural trade of the 3d millennium b.c. across the region between the Euphrates and the Indus from the perspective of worldsystem theory. This theory was developed for the international economics of the past few centuries, but in the 3d millennium b.c., when neither labour nor land was a commodity, economic processes were totally different. The Bronze Age was, however, unique even in ancient times in that the great river valley civilizations relied on metal for production and that metal (copper, tin, lead, etc.) was scarce and had to be procured from afar, from less developed regions. Thus trade involved not just luxuries but also basic requirements, interaction between societies at contrasting levels of technology and social organization, and organization by ruling elites. While making the point that Bronze Age economies were not inchoate versions of our own, the paper examines the nature of trading cultures and traded items, the technologies of transport, trade initiatives, comparative metallurgical development, and other features in an attempt to determine whether the trade underdeveloped some partners.This paper considers the crosscultural trade of the 3d millennium b.c. across the region between the Euphrates and the Indus from the perspective of worldsystem theory. This theory was developed for the international economics of the past few centuries, but in the 3d millennium b.c., when neither labour nor land was a commodity, economic processes were totally different. The Bronze Age was, however, unique even in ancient times in that the great river valley civilizations relied on metal for production and that metal (copper, tin, lead, etc.) was scarce and had to be procured from afar, from less developed regions. Thus trade involved not just luxuries but also basic requirements, interaction between societies at contrasting levels of technology and social organization, and organization by ruling elites. While making the point that Bronze Age economies were not inchoate versions of our own, the paper examines the nature of trading cultures and traded items, the technologies of transport, trade initiatives...

Religion, Politics, and Prehistory

This article illustrates the dangers of mixing religious certitudes and political activities with the study of the remote prehistoric past by critically reviewing the works of one of the 20th century’s most prolific and (once) influential prehistorians, Oswald Menghin. Menghin’s reconstructions of the past were inspired by a moral crusade against the perceived evils of materialist evolutionism, an agenda that during the 1930s assumed an explicitly political dimension consistent with Nazi ideology. His subsequent exile to Argentina was not a simple retreat to a safe haven but an opportunity for him to confirm a universal world history extending back into the Palaeolithic that purported to link major cultural developments in the New World with earlier developments in the Old. Menghin’s theories, which today appear dated and mistaken, were once widely accepted and developed by scholars of the Vienna culture‐historical school of ethnography, one of the main theoretical sources for culture‐historical archaeology. The latter approach, the dominant archaeological practice in many European and Latin American countries, is here reevaluated in the light of this mistaken legacy, and it is argued that “peoples without prehistory” deserve to have theirs rediscovered and reconstructed through archaeological research. The paper concludes by discussing the constraints of archaeological evidence for identifying correct readings of the past and by calling attention to the difference between religious and political convictions and scientific theories that are openly subjected to testing and empirical refutation.

The Transcaucasian “Periphery” in the Bronze Age

Fashionable interpretative models in late twentieth-century American archaeology often resemble earlier constructions that dominated the literature at the beginning of the century (see Schortman and Urban, Chapter 1, this volume). Neo-evolutionary schema that compare and type societies at similar “levels of development” and view them as universally passing through broadly defined, though essentially identical, “stages” of sociocultural complexity consciously recall nineteenth-century unilinear evolutionary models, despite their more nuanced qualifications and insistence upon multilinear paths of development. Criticisms of such neo-evolutionary models also recall the earlier critiques of evolutionism by the Boasians, as well as by so-called modified diffusionists like Childe. Again, the vocabulary today differs—concepts are more refined and subtly expressed—but the basic criticism of evolutionism remains: cultures do not pass through identical evolutionary stages for they are open-ended systems caught up in historical processes larger than themselves that inevitably interrupt, modify, facilitate, impair, or destroy their internal evolutionary development. Consideration of “interregional interaction” necessarily entails, in terms of the older terminology, the treatment of diffusionary processes in which societies or “archeological cultures” become involved in networks of contact, conflict, or exchange that differentially affect all the participant societies.

Invariant Homo politicus and the Biological Constraints on Cultural Evolution

Bronze Age Economics and Understanding Early Civilizations make fundamental contributions to our understanding of the emergence of social complexity and political inequality. Earle and Trigger are deservedly honored scholars, and their books encapsulate in many respects their distinguished contributions to archaeological anthropology. They write from highly informed, comparative, cross-cultural evolutionary perspectives that stress the structural parallels or similarities among disparate chiefdoms and early civilizations as these societies develop and leaders emerge to seize and expand political and economic control. Earle focuses more on the environmental settings to which the societies adapt, while Trigger discusses the ideologies of early civilizations not just in terms of how these features were politically manipulated by strategizing elites but also in terms of how they explained natural reality. For Trigger such understanding is not just an epiphenomenal trick but fulfills a basic human need. Bronze Age Economics consists of 14 chapters, 12 of them previously published by Earle or coauthored with his students and revised for this collection. As Earle notes, these articles extend back to the 1970s and cover the principal areas in which he has conducted his comparative field studies: Hawaii, Andean South America, and northwestern Europe. The book’s title, which is intended to recall Marshall Sahlins’s justly famous Stone Age Economics (1972), is misleading in two respects. First, the book largely deals with societies in Polynesia and the New World that did not truly experience a Bronze Age in the sense that bronze tools and weapons became