The corporate group as an archaeological unit

Although corporate groups have featured in the anthropological literature for a century, and have more recently been proposed as a potentially useful unit for archaeological analysis (L. Freeman, 1968, In Man the hunter, edited by R. Lee and I. De Vore, pp. 262–267. Aldine, Chicago), application of the concept in archaeology has largely remained hypothetical, and little theoretical modeling has been attempted. In spite of this neglect, it is argued here that the corporate group is potentially one of the most useful and important aspects of the archaeological record that can be dealt with. This conclusion is derived from a detailed ethnoar-chaeological analysis of over 150 households in the Maya Highlands, in which it became apparent that social, economic, and demographic characteristics of households were only loosely associated with a wide variety of material culture expressions. In contrast, such inferences seemed to be much more reliable when households were grouped into “hypothetical corporate groups” and group averages were compared. In addition, theoretical considerations based on economics and on interactions also indicate that the analysis of corporate groups shold be more rewarding and potentially more accurate than the analysis of individual households. Archaeologically, corporate groups can be defined where residential coherency and internal hierarchies are demonstrable. Because corporate groups can be viewed as signaling major changes in the structuring of society, and in the evolution of social and political complexity, the investigation of conditions under which corporate groups emerge should be of major theoretical significance to the entire discipline of archaeology. Moreover, because of the close logical links to material culture and the environment, theoretical modeling should be particularly amenable to archaeological testing. In sum, corporate groups provide an unusually fertile problem area which archaeologists can hope to attack with at least a promising degree of success.