Robert McC. Adams

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.

Some Hypotheses on the Development of Early Civilizations

Gross parallels in patterns of development of early civilizations have long invited closer inspection. Attempts to formulate these processes of growth into a single general statement of cause and effect have been out of fashion in anthropology for many years now, but interest has remained high in the general problem of comparison. Leaving aside studies concerned particularly with progressive changes in styles or technologies, the greatest promise seems to attach currently to studies focused on the growing network of formal, supra-kin institutions which characterized each of the early civilizations for which archaeological or historic documentation exists. The approach taken here has much in common with that of V. Gordon Childe (1942, 1952), and certainly leans heavily on the rich store of archaeological insight he has made available for the Old World.

Accelerated Technological Change in Archaeology and Ancient History

Discontinuous, sometimes violent change is universal. In the short term, it threatens all living systems, even if in the long term transformative change may offer the best or only hope of assuring their successful adaptation to new conditions and hence survival. This applies as much to human as to natural history. In this chapter, I discuss three instances of one type of discontinuous change that serves as a conceptual tool for archaeological and historical research on ancient societies.

Forums, Not Temples

Converging forces for change reflect the increasing dependence of most museums on public participation and support, as well as the rising scholarly, curatorial, and exhibition standards expected of them. Museums accordingly cannot escape, and instead are tending to become a focus for some of the multicultural divisions and tensions that are characteristic of our times. The role of institutional authority and expertise is an increasingly contingent and contested one, not only among sponsoring bodies and specialists but necessarily also shared with many contending public interests and constituencies. The ends of widening public education and cultural enrichment are best served by recognizing the diverse audiences and many legitimate aspirations and interests that museums can help to meet in a broad array of alternate ways.

Illicit International Traffic in Antiquities

If scientific archaeology has any meaning, the value of museum objects for scholarship is closely tied to full knowledge of their origin, history, and context. Archaeological fieldwork has become a recognized scientific methodology only as it has moved from being a bundle of treasure-hunting and preservative techniques to being a systematic attempt to place the findings of excavations in a spatial, temporal, and functional framework of maximal accuracy.

The Development of Political Institutions

One of the main lines of comparative sociological analysis that descends from Max Weber concerns the institutionalization of political authority. The intervening years have seen a substantial broadening of the theoretical and methodological framework, principally through the development of social anthropology as a discipline, and an even more prodigious improvement in the quantity and quality of the available evidence with which the systematist must deal. Weber was content, in the main, to outline broad contrasts between rational-legal authority, on the one hand and traditional authority, on the other, sketching only on a more tentative basis his suggested patriarchal and patrimonial subdivision of the latter. Yet it is principally the somewhat indefinite congeries of traditional systems which have borne the brunt of the enlarged focus of work by more recent scholars. It is all the more striking, therefore, that Eisenstadts vigorous new synthesis of one immense category of political systems-if indeed it is a unitary category-should conform so closely to at least the spirit of a Weberian analysis.