Food and complex societies

In complex societies individuals from distinct social, economic, gender, or age groups often consume different foods because of various economic, political, and ideological factors. The food system not only involves what is consumed but includes the labor and technology that goes into the production and preparation of food as well as how certain foods are distributed and eventually discarded. Food systems within and among complex societies are thus tightly intertwined with social differentiation and the political economy and participate in defining and maintaining differential social relations.     

Negotiating Equality through Ritual: A Consideration of Late Natufian and Prepottery Neolithic A Period Mortuary Practices

Mortuary rituals, specifically secondary mortuary practices with the socially sanctioned removal of all or some parts of the deceased, are a powerful means of social integration during periods of social, economic, or environmental change. Integrating ethnographic data on the social impact of secondary mortuary ceremonies with archaeological evidence from the Late Natufian and Prepottery Neolithic A periods of the south-central Levant, this study explores how the development and maintenance of intentional secondary mortuary rituals, such as with the removal and reburial of skulls, served as powerful communal acts that symbolically and physically linked communities and limited the perception or reality of social differentiation. Continuity within, and meanings behind, secondary mortuary practices during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene prompts the researcher to reevaluate previous interpretations of the relationship(s) among the appearance of formalized social inequality, food production, and the definition of personal relations within Levantine Neolithic communities.     

Perceptions of Consumption: Constituting Potters,Farmers and Blacksmiths in the Culinary Continuum in Eastern Tigray,Northern Highland Ethiopia

Despite the integrated and co-dependent nature of crafting vessels and tools and the production of cuisine, the entangled identities of artisan, farmer and cook are rarely envisioned as part of a ‘culinary continuum’ in which the production of culinary equipment, food and cuisine constitutes different categories of people. Studies of cuisine tend to focus on the role of cuisine in negotiating social status and power in feasting contexts or in constituting normative social identities of gender, personhood and ethnicity. Presented is a study of potters, blacksmiths and farmers in eastern Tigray, Ethiopia. Similar to marginalized and casted occupational specialists in many societies across Africa, eastern Tigray’s potters and smiths are marginalized, avoided and demeaned in contexts where food, drink or sex is shared. Normative gender identities are constituted in the enculturation of boys as they learn to grow food and in girls as they learn to cook. Men and women perform these gendered tasks in daily life using separate gendered technological practices and spaces. Potters and blacksmiths transgress normative gender expectations by using technological skills and space differently. The embodiment and performance of their respective crafts are perceived to transform them into different ontological categories of men and women who also are attributed with the dangerous capacity to consume fertility, landscape and people.     

The Emergence of Social Complexity in the Chibchan World of Southern Central America and Northern Colombia,AD 300–600

The societies of southern Central America and northern South America, a region historically occupied by Chibchan-speaking peoples, have long been acknowledged as valuable sources of information on chiefdoms and other forms of prestate social organization. Most studies, however, have focused on chiefdoms that are known ethnographically or ethnohistorically with an emphasis on the sixteenth century and the immediate precontact period. This paper reviews archaeological evidence from an earlier period in an attempt to elucidate general patterns associated with the earliest appearance of social inequality. The centuries between AD 300 and 600 are characterized by the first widespread use of prestige goods manufactured from gold and jade, special cemeteries for the interment of elites, and a rich iconography. Detailed consideration of recent research relevant to the events of this period highlights some of the problems inherent in the archaeological identification of hierarchy, chiefdoms, leadership, and other features of prestate complex societies.     

Style and information: An analysis of Susiana ceramics

Style is viewed as a mode of communication that signals social group identification and helps to maintain boundaries between social groups. A theoretical framework is developed which relates changes in social messaging in the stylistic mode to changes in the sociopolitical organization of chiefly societies. Observable changes in style are specified for situations in which sociopolitical organization becomes more complex through an increase in horizontal differentiation of social units, as well as those in which complexity increases through vertical differentiation. A methodology for quantifying changes in stylistic complexity, using two measures of redundancy and the information statistic H, is outlined. A specific proposition relating changes in sociopolitical and stylistic complexity in chiefly societies is tested using painted ceramic bowls from several late sixth and fifth millennium B.C. sites on the Susiana Plain in Iran.     

'.. Slaying oxen and Killing Sheep,Eating Flesh and Drinking Wine ..': Feasting in Late Bronze Age Hazor

Abstract

Communal feasts, events of ritual activity that involve shared food and drink consumption and display in religious and secular elite contexts, received considerable attention in anthropological and archaeological literature in recent years. In those studies, the focus was on the identification of feasting in the material record of ancient societies, and an attempt was made to decipher the complex social and political meanings inherent in such contexts. In this study, the aim is to identify and interpret traces of feasting activities in the context of Canaanite society of the 14th–13th century BCE. The site of Hazor, the largest Canaanite kingdom, serves as a case study for this discussion. Archaeological correlates of commensal feasts, uncovered in the extensive excavations of the site, are presented and discussed within the general picture of the Canaanite palatial system.     

INEQUALITY BEFORE THE BRONZE AGE: THE CASE OF CHALCOLITHIC CYPRUS

The emergence and nature of social inequality has been the topic of a substantial amount of research in recent years, with one group of scholars concluding that social inequality increased significantly with the rise of urbanism on the basis of the application of Gini measures, and another group arguing that social inequalities existed long before urbanism and that not all urban societies were class societies. Here, we present the case of Chalcolithic Cyprus, a decidedly pre-urban period for which we have quantifiable evidence that might indicate social inequality. On the basis of this dataset we will re-evaluate recent postulates on the emergence and nature of social inequality.     

Zooarchaeology in Complex Societies: Political Economy, Status, and Ideology

The zooarchaeology of complex societies provides insights into the interrelated social and economic relationships that people and animals created. I present a synthesis of zooarchaeological research published since the early 1990s that addresses political economy, status distinctions, and the ideological and ritual roles of animals in complex cultures. I address current approaches and applications as well as theoretical shifts in zooarchaeological practice. Research indicates there is great variability across space and time in how past peoples used animals to generate economic surplus, to establish status differentiation within societies, and to create symbolic meaning through sacrifices, offerings, and in feasts. The study of human/animal interactions in complex societies can contribute to fundamental questions of broad relevance regarding political and social life.     

Jiangzhai: Social and economic organization of a Middle Neolithic Chinese village

The Early Yangshao period (5000–4000 BC) village of Jiangzhai is the most completely excavated and reported of any early agricultural community in the middle reaches of northern China’s Yellow River Valley. This comprehensive dataset can better our understanding of early agricultural village societies and complex society development, especially the emergence of economic inequality. Analyses of Jiangzhai’s architectural remains and their arrangement; estimates of household population, storage capacity, and animal consumption; and analyses of household artifact assemblages are used to reconstruct the social and economic organization of this important Neolithic settlement. Our analyses suggest that differences in economic organization at the household level are responsible for patterns of intra-settlement economic differentiation previously attributed to higher-order “corporate” institutions. Rather than a segmental society composed of redundant homologous units, Jiangzhai displays substantial variability among residential sectors and constituent households in terms of activity emphases and surplus accumulation. Substantial intrasite variation in socioeconomic organization has previously been thought characteristic only of more complex Late Neolithic societies in the middle Yellow River Valley region.     

The Cultural Complexities of Learning and Development in A Post-Modern World

The books under review focus on the role culture plays in studies of childhood socialization, learning, schooling in global contexts, and educational change. Key chapters highlight schooling practices not well known in Western culture. Both books advocate understanding and respecting cultural differences while emphasizing that cultures are dialectally reshaping and reorganizing in response to rapidly changing economic, political, and social forces. The challenge facing societies in the age of global communication is to preserve unique cultural heritages while acknowledging shared human values that may transcend the boundaries of a given world.     

Feasting landscapes and political economy at the Early Horizon center of Huambacho, Nepeña Valley, Peru

The present contribution examines feasting practices at Huambacho (800–200 cal. B.C.), an Early Horizon elite center of the Nepeña Valley, Department of Ancash, Peru. Feasts are approached as long-term strategies essential to the political economy of human societies. Drawing upon data from public architecture, material culture and food remains, the study closely considers feasts as political actions and investigates the organization and social meaning of these special events. At Huambacho, I contend that the diacritical aspects of feasting practices, such as the use of exclusive spaces and special paraphernalia, contributed to the dual celebration of communal identity and prosperity, and the creation and reproduction of social inequalities. The research highlights the dual centripetal and centrifugal dynamics of Early Horizon feasts and demonstrates the role of the Huambacho center in advertising the success of the local community based on new forms of production and innovative rules of commensal hospitality.     

Household Craft Production in the Prehispanic Urban Setting of Mayapán,Yucatan, Mexico

The complexity of the organization of craft production mirrors multiple aspects of the larger political economies of premodern states. At the late Maya urban center of Mayapán, variation in the social contexts of crafting within a single settlement defies simple classificatory models that once held sway in the literature of nonWestern state societies. Most surplus crafters were independent and affluent commoners; notable exceptions include artisans working under direct elite supervision or elites who were directly engaged in crafting. Although household workshops concentrated around the city’s epicenter, others were dispersed across the site in unassuming residential neighborhoods or near outlying monumental groups. We consider the significance of pronounced household and regional economic interdependencies founded on well-developed surplus crafting practices, imported raw materials, market exchange, and tribute obligations at Mayapán. As for other premodern states, craft production also gave rise to greater opportunities for wealth differentiation within the commoner class. Producers in this urban political capital contributed in significant ways to a stable political economy by supplying goods that were required at all levels of the social hierarchy.     

Mobility,Land Use,and Leadership in Small-Scale and Middle-Range Societies

Over the past century, the fields of archaeology and anthropology have produced a number of different theoretical approaches and a substantial body of data aimed at ways to understand hunter-gatherer, horticultural, and agropastoral societies. This review considers four recent edited volumes on foraging and food-producing societies. These books deal in innovative ways with a broad array of issues, including transitions in human prehistory and history, mobility, land use, sharing, technology, social leveling strategies, leadership, and the formation of social hierarchies. Small-scale societies include hunter-gatherers or foragers, while middle-range societies may include complex hunter-gatherer (ones with storage and delayed return systems), horticultural, and agropastoral societies, some of them with institutionalized leadership, status hierarchies, and differential access to power and resources. An important set of themes in these books includes diversity in adaptations to complex social and natural environments, the significance of (1) matter, (2) energy, and (3) information in small-scale and middle-range societies on several continents, the persistence of foraging, and the development of inequality. The roles of sharing, exchange, and leadership in small-scale and middle-range societies are explored, as are explanations for social, economic, and political transformations among groups over time and across space.     

Intensification and Social Complexity in the Interior Lowlands of Papua New Guinea: A Comparison of Bedamuni and Kubo

Kubo and Bedamuni are linguistically, culturally, and technologically related societies of the interior lowlands of Papua New Guinea. They occupy similar environments and have access to essentially the same resources. They differ in population density (Kubo 0.4 people/km², Bedamuni 7/km²), subsistence orientation (Kubo are hunter-gatherer-like, Bedamuni are farmers who hunt) and intensification of plant food production (Kubo lower, Bedamuni higher). Relative to Kubo, Bedamuni are shown to exhibit increased differentiation within and between production units, greater integration within and between residential units, and heightened forms of evaluation within and between cultural systems. Each of these general characteristics is illustrated by particulars that refer, for example, to role differentiation, rights of access to land and resources, dispute resolution, mechanisms of inter-community cohesion, and exegesis with respect to subsistence practices and cultural identity. In turn, differences between the two societies in terms of these general characteristics sustain an interpretation that Bedamuni is a socially more complex society than Kubo. The awkward notion of complexity is examined; it is understood to comprise two independent dimensions—the “involvement of parts” (which is itself multidimensional) and the “individuation of form.” The latter dimension has received too little attention in discussion and definitions of complexity.     

Identifying high-status foods in the archeological record

More than providing simply nutritive value, food in human societies can be endowed with great social weight. Aspects of any given food system inform, and are informed by, a variety of social, economic, religious, historical, ecological, cultural, and political processes. Moreover, food systems are often intentionally designed and executed to communicate key aspects of a consumer’s identity including class or social status. The manipulation of food systems on the part of socio-political elites or high status individuals is but one example of this phenomenon, the appearance of which is a correlate of increased socio-political hierarchy. As food can come to be used by elites as a socio-political tool in stratified societies, the temptation to use archeologically recognizable differences in foodways as a means of understanding the origin, nature, and functioning of processes of stratification is strong. The obvious difficulty lies in developing theoretically informed methods that reckon food system differences in ways that enable scholars to identify those foods that may have been particularly imbued with social meaning. In this paper, we propose a metric for the identification of elite foods (or, indeed, socially valued foods) using the types of data typically available to archeologists. Based on these proposed criteria, we attempt to unravel the complex and politically charged food system of the stratified societies of the pre-Columbian Greater Antilles with an eye towards refining our understanding of the development and maintenance of prestige and institutionalized power therein.     

Case Studies in Dual Classification as Process: Childbirth,Headhunting and Circumcision in West Timor

The diverse societies of eastern Indonesia have, for some time, been recognised as important contexts for the study of dual classification. In this region the practice of dual classification is evident in a multitude of social forms. It is found in the range of conventional expressions for category distinctions as well as in the formal organisation of ceremonial contexts and structural patterns of society. This paper examines the expression of certain dual classificatory forms as they appear in three types of ritual processes in West Timorese society. My purpose is to show how this type of classification provides a vital conceptual means to both protect the well-being of participants in the conduct of the ritual processes, and at the same time, to effect symbolic and celebratory affirmations of life. I argue that in the manipulation and interaction of the dual categories it is possible to recognise a striking commonality of purpose.     

The emergence of status inequality in intermediate scale societies: A demographic and socio-economic history of the Keatley Creek site,British Columbia

Explaining the emergence of status inequality in human societies is an important priority for many anthropological archaeologists, particularly those whose research includes intermediate scale societies (complex hunter–gatherers and early agriculturalists). Yet, fine grained records of emergent inequality are still exceedingly rare. This paper outlines a fine-grained record of cultural change from the Keatley Creek site, a complex hunter–gatherer village in British Columbia, in which it is possible to recognize the emergence of inequality and its demographic and economic correlates. Results of the study suggest that status inequality emerged abruptly after an extended period of socio-economic stability in the village under conditions of adversely altered resource conditions, demographic packing, and subsistence resource diversification and extensification.     

Food and social complexity at Çayönü Tepesi,southeastern Anatolia: Stable isotope evidence of differentiation in diet according to burial practice and sex in the early Neolithic

The identification of early social complexity and differentiation in early village societies has been approached in the past most notably through the evaluation of rituals and architectural layouts. Such studies could be complemented by an approach that provides data about everyday behaviours of individuals. We took 540 human and animal bone samples for stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis from the Neolithic site of Çayönü Tepesi in southeastern Anatolia. The inhabitants at this site chose to bury their dead in two different ways at different times during its occupation: beneath the floors of their houses, but also inside a public mortuary building known as the Skull Building. This variation provides an opportunity using isotope methods to test whether there was evidence for structuring of daily activities (diet in this case) that might serve to reinforce this change in burial practice. We show that when the inhabitants of Çayönü Tepesi changed their architecture and operated different burial practices in conjunction, this coincided with other aspects of behaviour including socially-constituted food consumption practices, which served to reinforce social identities.     

Hereditary emblems: Material culture in the context of social change

Emblematic artifacts, which signify personal or social identity, are potentially valuable sources of information about social organization. To date, however, there has been little comparative study of the social contexts that give rise to use of different kinds of emblems, nor of the ways in which the social significance of emblematic artifacts may change over time. This paper is specifically concerned with the emergence and changing use of hereditary emblems in stratified societies. The histories of lineage devices in western Europe and Japan exhibit a number of similarities which suggest that, in complex societies, hereditary emblems are likely to appear in the presence of unstable systems of social rank. Once introduced, such emblems may acquire additional, nonhereditary, significance without undergoing noticeable iconographic change. The cases examined here suggest a series of general propositions about evolutionary relationships between hereditary emblem use and socioeconomic factors. Although we currently lack a well-developed methodology for identifying hereditary emblems archaeologically, it is clear that the key to their identification lies not in stylistic analysis, but rather in their contexts of use and patterns of association with other items of material culture. Hypotheses derived from consideration of the evolution of lineage emblems in western Europe and Japan are applied to the interpretation of shield decorations of the Archaic and Classical periods in Attic Greece.