Robert D. Drennan

Grand challenges for archaeology

Abstract This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.

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.

Early Complex Societies in NE China: The Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Research Project

Abstract The Chifeng region in SE Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region was positioned strategically between the early dynastic centers in the agriculturally productive Yellow River basin and the steppe land to its north and west where a pastoral nomadism developed. The Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Research Project is focused on this region where no historical documents were written but where excavated mortuary materials suggest the existence of more complexity than reported in Chinese texts of the period. Our first three field seasons (1999–2001) have already begun to provide information on the period from ca. 6000 B.G. through ca. A.D. 200 and the project has begun to collect information necessary to organize previous archaeological data and reconstruct the social, political, cultural, and economic patterns for the region.

Chiefdoms in northern South America

The multiple and varied trajectories of chiefdom development in northern South America (and adjacent Central America) offer a rich opportunity for evaluating generalizations about the processes of chiefdom development. Sequences of the south coast of Ecuador, the Alto Magdalena, Calima, the Muisca region, Barinas, and the Tairona region are well enough documented to attempt to use in this way. Although centralized hierarchical societies develop in all these regions, there are many differences in the character of centralization and hierarchy and in the pacing of the development, and none of the traditionally proposed forces of social change is entirely adequate to account for these cases. Attention to the role played by competition between aspiring chiefs and their factions offers promise for more satisfactory generalizations that could be evaluated through further comparative study.

A Refinement of Chronological Seriation Using Nonmetric Multidimensional Scaling

A method of chronological seriation and a system of collecting data for it were devised to cope with certain practical and theoretical inadequacies of other methods. The method and collecting system are described in the context of solving problems encountered in the course of a particular archaeological study. It is believed that the method described here will be of use to others. Finally, some implications of this kind of seriation for the way in which ceramics change are discussed.

Archaeology as a social science

Because of advances in methods and theory, archaeology now addresses issues central to debates in the social sciences in a far more sophisticated manner than ever before. Coupled with methodological innovations, multiscalar archaeological studies around the world have produced a wealth of new data that provide a unique perspective on long-term changes in human societies, as they document variation in human behavior and institutions before the modern era. We illustrate these points with three examples: changes in human settlements, the roles of markets and states in deep history, and changes in standards of living. Alternative pathways toward complexity suggest how common processes may operate under contrasting ecologies, populations, and economic integration.

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.

Social Inequality and Agricultural Resources in the Valle de la Plata, Colombia

The absence of substantial economic inequality or restricted control of basic resources was a distinguishing feature of chiefdoms or ranked societies in the cultural evolutionary literature of the 1960s (e.g., Fried 1967; Service 1962). The social hierarchies of these relatively simple complex societies were thought to have their basis in something other than accumulation of wealth or the elite’s economic control of the means of production. The social hierarchy was sometimes conceived as a vehicle through which members of the elite could provide effective management.

Betwixt and Between in the Intermediate Area

The great diversity in early subsistence practices and in the later development of complex patterns of social, political, and economic organization is one of the Intermediate Areas greatest riches for comparative anthropological study. Archaeological research there is now in the midst of the conceptual shift needed to take full advantage of the opportunities offered.