The Prehistory of Iberia

Debating Early Social Stratification and the State

María Cruz Berrocal, Leonardo García Sanjuán, Antonio Gilman, María Cruz Berrocal, Leonardo García Sanjuán, Antonio Gilman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415885928
• eBook ISBN: 9781135098018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The origin and early development of social stratification is essentially an archaeological problem. The impressive advance of archaeological research has revealed that, first and foremost, the pre-eminence of stratified or class society in today's world is the result of a long social struggle. This volume advances the archaeological study of social organisation in Prehistory, and more specifically the rise of social complexity in European Prehistory. Within the wider context of world Prehistory, in the last 30 years the subject of early social stratification and state formation has been a key subject on interest in Iberian Prehistory.

This book illustrates the differing forms of resistances, the interplay between change and continuity, the multiple paths to and from social complexity, and the 'failures' of states to form in Prehistory. It also engages with broader questions, such as: when did social stratification appear in western European Prehistory? What factors contributed to its emergence and consolidation? What are the relationships between the notions of social complexity, social inequality, social stratification and statehood? And what are the archaeological indicators for the empirical analysis of these issues? Focusing on Iberia, but with a permanent connection to the wider geographical framework, this book presents, for the first time, a chronologically comprehensive, up-to-date approach to the issue of state formation in prehistoric Europe.

Part I

Introducing Social Stratification and the State in Iberian Prehistory

1 Debating Early Social Stratification and the State in Iberian Prehistory

An Introduction

María Cruz Berrocal, Leonardo García Sanjuán, and Antonio Gilman

This book originated in the session “The Prehistory of Iberia (Neolithic to Iron Age) and the Debate on the Formation of Hierarchical Societies and the State” organized by two of us (María Cruz Berrocal and Antonio Gilman) and held at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology conference in Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada) in March 2008. When we envisioned the publication of the session papers, the scope and the number of contributions was enlarged, and the book became the present The Prehistory of Iberia: Debating Early Social Stratification and the State.

Over the past 150 years, the origin and early development of social stratification and the state has been one of the most prominent areas of debate within the social sciences. This is hardly surprising, since one of the most striking features of contemporary human society is the extent and scope of social inequality and its inevitable companion, economic exploitation. The issue of social inequality and, especially, acute social inequality (class societies, caste society, empire states) fascinates the layperson as much as the specialist. Political agendas are shaped by views on the nature and causes of social and economic inequality. Thus, understanding how ancient states came into being can provide critical insights about the role of the state in the present day.

The origins and early development of social stratification and the state is essentially an archaeological problem, for it occurred in prehistoric times. Archaeological research on the immense diversity of human social organization has revealed that stratified or class societies are preeminent in today’s world as a result of complex dynamics and long-term social struggles. This subject is part of a long academic tradition represented by an extensive literature in anthropological archaeology and historical sociology (e.g., Engels 1972 [1884]; Childe 1936; Adams 1966; Fried 1967; Service 1975; Haas 1982; Patterson and Gailey 1987; Gledhill et al. 1988; Haldon 1993; Price and Feinman 1993; Yoffee 2005; Falconer and Redman 2009; Flannery and Marcus 2012).

Over the last thirty years, early social stratification and state formation have been key subjects in Iberian later prehistory. Iberia is in fact a good laboratory for the study of the rise of early social stratification and the state. Its geographical and ecological diversity as well as its mountainous character favored a remarkable cultural fragmentation and social diversity throughout its later prehistory. Interest in the rise of social stratification and the state as research topics in Iberian prehistoric archaeology also reflects the prevalence of Marxist and materialist approaches, particularly among Spanish archaeologists. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Spanish prehistory departments hired a generation of scholars largely educated during the dictatorship of General Franco and, therefore, receptive to left-leaning ideologies—see Vázquez Varela and Risch (1991) for a review.

This book is, therefore, part of a long-standing tradition of research. At the same time, however, it is an explicit attempt to provide a fresh look at an old subject. As editors of this book, we assumed that the process of state formation (pristine or secondary) is historically contingent and particular to each region and time. This essential historicity rejects the idea of the state as one unique, universal structure, therefore denying it as a natural outcome of human social evolution. At a theoretical level, this book asks why some Iberian prehistoric societies may have, while others may have not, organized themselves as states based on social stratification, economic exploitation, and coercion. In this approach, emphasis is given to the complexity and nonlinear nature of the archaeological record, and therefore to the many and varied historical trajectories in which social stratification, political hierarchization, and economic exploitation have occurred.

Thus, this book connects with one of the main debates of contemporary archaeology: the resistance factor. It is not without reason that Pierre Clastres and his “société contre l’Etat” (Clastres 1974) is a widely quoted reference by the contributors of this book in theoretical support for their archaeological reconstructions, mostly intended to question the existence of the state during Iberian prehistory. We interpret this as a critical turn in the context of Spanish prehistoric studies. Drawing on Clastres (and authors such as James C. Scott) enables one to add anarchist theory to this vigorous discussion by drawing attention to how any attempt to institutionalize economic exploitation creates a dynamic of resistance.

The recent popularity of resistance as a topic is rooted in widespread concern about globalization and neoliberalism; in Orser and Funari’s words, “the growing realization by some archaeologists that many of the developing civil rights movements around the world were anchored in traditions of resistance that often had long-standing historical roots” (2001: 2). Historical archaeology has largely taken the lead in this approach studying colonial and slavery contexts (e.g., Wilkie and Farnsworth 2005). Its point is, first, the “identification of the origins of modern practices showing that people have a history that had never been acknowledged or verified. Paying attention to resistance also is an effort to show that modern exploitative relationships are not necessary: they, too, may ‘have a history which can illuminate how they are arbitrary and can be undone’ ” (Matthews et al. 2002: 127). The theme of resistance makes it possible for archaeologists to tell the history of subaltern groups. This trend goes back to microhistory (Ginzburg 1976), draws on J. C. Scott’s work (1979, 1985, 1990, 2009), and is rooted in historical materialism (Sivaramakrishnan 2005).

Such approaches have mostly been developed in the hegemonic Anglo-American academic environment and have had only limited influence on Spain. This volume is, then, a convergence caused by common intellectual roots (and especially in an interest in the origins of oppressive social relationships and institutions, the state being regarded as one of them) and a desire that archaeology be socially meaningful.

Besides Clastres, another important source of inspiration for many of the contributors is Marshall Sahlins, the most repeatedly mentioned author throughout the book. Sahlins’s understanding of the dynamics of pre-state societies (e.g., Sahlins 1972) and of the importance of historical contingency in social evolution (e.g., Sahlins 1995) provides a useful alternative to the rather dogmatic, stage-oriented historical materialism that has dominated much of recent Spanish archaeological thought. Sahlins, like Clastres and Scott, is a historicist whose work engages with historical materialism and, as such, provides a useful source of ideas for the history-rooted set of archaeologists (see Cruz Berrocal, this volume) that contributed to this volume.

The editors explicitly requested that authors deal with the core subject of the book by making the best use possible of recent scientific evidence—hence to “wrestle with the data and push their limits, sometimes going beyond them” in Peter Peregrine’s (2000) words—and by using new theoretical approaches, not with the aim of developing global models but to bring the rich Iberian archaeological record into the wider discussions of recent archaeological theory. The result, we are confident to say, is both encouraging as well as symptomatic of a turn forward in Spanish archaeology. This is manifested in the great interest in various topics that have been important in postprocessualist archaeological theory. Because they work within a historical materialist framework, the authors show how ideas such as postcolonialism, contact, agency (including individual agency), collective action, material culture, memory, manipulation of the past, and social practice can be treated without falling into the relativism and idealism that characterize most recent discussions of them (cf. Rosenswig 2011).

Chapters two and three chapters explore these issues from a general viewpoint. While Antonio Gilman presents a critical account of the pervasive Iberian debate over the state, largely establishing the editors’ position on the subject, María Cruz Berrocal deals with the historical character of Spanish archaeology. These two chapters can be connected with Chris Scarre’s closing chapter, which deals with the difficult task of extracting a streamlined conclusion from the case studies, further putting them in relation to the problem of social stratification in European Prehistory at large.

Joan Bernabeu Aubán, Andrea Moreno Martín, and C. Michael Barton present a discussion of the long-term archaeological record in the eastern part of the peninsula, pointing at cycles of more and less social complexity. Their chapter has a quantitative approach to the topic—on the one hand, making a methodological contribution and, on the other, showing the impact of processualism on the traditional culture-historical basis of Spanish archaeology.

Antonio Ramos Millán gives an alternative account to the transition to the state in the Iberian Southeast, the classical locus of discussion for the topic in Spanish Prehistory. He presents an explicit strategy of resistance on the part of Copper Age and Early Bronze Age (Argaric) communities based on his interpretation of their settlement patterns and their use of material culture. He draws on anthropological and postmodern theory in addition to his strong reliance on Marxism. Also dealing with the Southeast and the Argaric record, Gonzalo Aranda Jiménez makes an appealing case of cultural continuity as a strategy of resistance against the dominant state-minded Argaric ideology: by reusing ancient collective burials, people would have made a political statement difficult to miss, and ultimately avoid, by Argaric groups willing to consolidate their hegemonic position in society.

Leonardo García Sanjuán and Mercedes Murillo-Barroso question the existence of a Copper Age state through the study of one of its most paradigmatic archaeological sites, Valencina de la Concepción, also drawing information on different aspects of the record from a large sample of significant sites.

Marcella C. Brodsky, Antonio Gilman, and Concepción Martín Morales present us with a classical piece of research in Spanish archaeology, reworked to fit the book’s guidelines. They also offer a good deal of methodological insights and a quantitative approach. The next chapter focuses on the Balearic Islands, in the Mediterranean, as a relevant comparative case study to bring insights into the Iberian Peninsula. Manuel Calvo Trías, Daniel Albero Santacreu, Jaime García Rosselló, David Javaloyas Molina, and Víctor Guerrero Ayuso make a case for communal-based social organization as opposed to the more individual-based incipient hierarchies in the peninsula, using the islands’ suggestive archaeological evidence—their very specific material culture, burial practices, and navigation routes, among others. Roberto Ontañón’s thorough review of the Cantabrian Late Prehistory is also exhaustive about its theoretical and methodological basis along time. This is especially valuable within the context of this book, since his account, which is very specific about Marxism, is useful to understand other regional traditions of archaeological investigation in Spain, and therefore to contextualize other chapters. Ontañón does something else: he brings to the fore rock art, a much cherished and often undervalued subject in Spanish archaeology that the editors originally wished to vindicate by commissioning Manuel Santos Estévez a chapter specifically dealing with it. Santos Estévez uses a variety of approaches to make sense of rock art of Northwest Iberia, from the formal aspects to those focused on content, and from the micro to the macro, in order to demonstrate that rock art was a likely key device in ideological strategies of social continuity and resistance. His chapter shows rock art as a relevant type of archaeological evidence that is rarely included in the debate of state origins.

Still in the Northwest, César Parcero Oubiña and Felipe Criado Boado present a theoretically sophisticated elaboration on the notion of resistance applied to the Galician archaeological record to detect the social dynamics it went through in Late Prehistory until the Roman conquest. In their view, no hierarchical power succeeded in consolidating itself right until the onset of the Roman Empire.

Inés Sastre and F. Javier Sánchez-Palencia dwell on resistance to the state in the interior areas of this region by focusing on a particular aspect of the record—metalwork—and proposing an innovative interpretation of this evidence, hitherto observed in hierarchical terms. Obviously, as it is the case in the Southeast, the multilineal character of human history is shown in the Northwest in full-fledged fashion.

Also dealing with the Northwest, although including a broader geographical scope broadly understood as the Atlantic façade, Xosé-Lois Armada undertakes a difficult task, since the study of social inequality has not necessarily been a priority in these parts. Thus, Armada is a valuable first approach to the interpretation of a patchy record, based on particular kinds of material culture connected to trade and feasting.

Ana Delgado’s chapter moves the discussion straight into the latest post-colonial theory ap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Note on Spanish Names
• Part I: Introducing Social Stratification and the State in Iberian Prehistory
• Part II: Case Studies
• Part III: Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index