Developing Complex Societies in Southeast Asia: Using Archaeological and Historical Evidence

A number of archaeologists are making significant advances in the historical archaeology of Southeast Asia. The papers presented in this issue, and the one that preceded it, provide new insights and exciting directions for future research.     

Objects of Memory: The Ethnography and Archaeology of Heirlooms

With the emergence of chiefdoms, a new ideology of inherited social difference had to be created and sustained over time. One way that inherited social inequalities may have been constructed, legitimated, and maintained is through the transmission of heirlooms or artifacts that objectified a collective ancestral past. Archaeologists have generally viewed heirlooms as anomalies or complications in the archaeological record. In this paper, however, I argue that, if identified, heirlooms have the potential to provide a richer and finer-grained understanding of the human past, in general, and to aid in the determination of hereditary rank, in particular. I discuss and compare the ethnographic evidence for heirloom use in bands, tribes, and chiefdoms, and, based on this evidence, I suggest criteria by which heirlooms might be identified in the archaeological record. Some examples of possible heirlooms from the archaeological literature are also presented. Finally, an evolutionary model for the circulation and disposal of heirlooms is proposed.     

Integrating History and Archaeology in the Study of Contact Period Philippine Chiefdoms

Malay texts, Philippine oral traditions, Chinese tributary records and geographies, early Spanish writings, and archaeological evidence from Philippine sites present divergent views of political structures and political economies in Philippine chiefdoms of the late first millennium to midsecond millennium A.D. While some sources claim a political landscape dominated by a few large-scale, highly centralized polities almost wholly supported through foreign trade, others suggest the presence of more heterogeneous and politically segmented configurations of varying scale and complexity and with eclectic economic bases. These disparate narratives are evaluated in terms of methodological biases, their cultural context, and the historical circumstances of their production.     

Veiqati Vaka Viti and the Fiji Islands Elections in 1999

ABSTRACT

The question of demographic decline in the Marquesas Islands is here reinvestigated through an integrated approach to the particular case of Ua Huka. We first attempt to propose a new population estimate for the period prior to European contact, thanks to an archaeologically based method that relies on the length of sleeping areas available in the housing structures recorded in the valleys. From this estimate, we then use ethnohistorical accounts to reassess local demographic evolution throughout the 19th century. This leads us to partly nuance the impact of Westerners, especially the introduction of diseases, which on Ua Huka appears to have been less critical than other factors such as sociopolitical conditions, including intense warfare, linked to unfavourable environmental conditions.     

Issues on the Diversity and Emergence of Middle-Range Societies of the Ancient Caribbean: A Critique

Caribbean archaeology traditionally has focused on culture history and migrations while social and political issues have been mostly ignored. Recent studies, however, have begun to overcome these deficiencies by paying more attention to some of the intangible aspects of prehistoric groups and by improving field methodology to gather the appropriate data. In general, sociopolitical organizations in the pre-Hispanic Caribbean were both spatially and temporally diverse. Nevertheless, despite advancements in data collection, analyses have been hindered by the use of improper analytical units and scales of analysis, as well as our overreliance on historical data for the reconstruction of social and political organizations. These methodological problems have (1) hidden the variability present in the archaeological record and (2) limited our explanatory potential and understanding of past societies in the Caribbean.     

New Guinea Leadership as Ethnographic Analogy: A Critical Review

Increasingly, archaeologists are recognizing cultural anthropological work in New Guinea as an important source of ethnographic analogy for understanding the initial stages of cultural evolution. This article critically reviews the literature on leadership in contact-era New Guinea. It is intended as an introduction both to different theoretical interpretations of leadership, as these have developed from Marshal Sahlins's Big-man archetype to the present, and to the primary literature on the topic. It points to several implications for archaeological theory, identifies a number of problems in the ethnography and theory of contact-era New Guinea leadership, and concludes with a brief guide to deploying the ethnographic and theoretical literature.     

Heterogeneity, Power, and Political Economy: Some Current Research Issues in the Archaeology of Old World Complex Societies

Recent research on Old World chiefdoms and states has largely retreated from the general comparative explanatory paradigm of the 1970s and has focused instead on more historically oriented analyses of culture-specific developmental trajectories. Both theoretical and empirical work tend to emphasize a heterogeneous, conflict-based model of complex society and political economy. This analytical framework has been quite successful in documenting variation and historically determined patterning in the organization of urbanism, craft production, specialization, and exchange. I present an overview of this research and argue that we now need to reintegrate culturally specific analyses within a modified comparative/generalizing perspective on complexity.     

Refiguring the Archaeology of Greater Cahokia

Revised theoretical constructs and an enlarged database allow substantive revisions to a processual accounting of greater Cahokia. Measures of political consolidation, demographic nucleation, central transformations, and centrifugal dispersions reveal the form, scale, and developmental trajectory of greater Cahokia to have been highly centralized, regional, and punctuated by abrupt and pervasive social changes, respectively. Social restructuring, political rituals, and large-scale labor mobilizations are recognizable among the archaeological remains, as are the pre-Mississippian traditions that tempered regional government. Greater Cahokia was a product of local agricultural populations dominated and accommodated over three centuries. The processes of domination and accommodation, occurring at a time when regional administration was not yet commonplace, left unmistakable regional and panregional signatures.     

Archaeology in the Pacific Islands: An appraisal of recent research

The Pacific Islands or Oceania, typically subdivided into Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, have witnessed a virtual explosion of archaeological research, as indicated by this review of the past 5 years' literature. Most recent work centers on one or more of six major themes. Two themes are concerned with the movement of people into the Pacific region: the discovery of Pleistocene-age sites in island Melanesia and the search for early assemblages evidencing Austronesian dispersals. Substantial efforts have also focused on reconstructing prehistoric economic behavior and on assessing the impacts that colonizing human populations had on isolated and fragile island ecosystems. In the realm of social archaeology, Oceanic studies have contributed to understanding the long-term dimensions of interisland exchange and to the rise of complex, hierarchical sociopolitical systems, especially chiefdoms.     

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.