The Development of Pre-State Communities in the Ancient Near East

Studies in Honour of Edgar Peltenburg

Diane Bolger, Louise C. Maguire, Louise C. Maguire

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781842178379
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mediorientale

This book explores the dynamics of small-scale societies in the ancient Near East by examining the ways in which particular communities functioned and interacted and by moving beyond the broad neo-evolutionary models of social change which have characterised many earlier approaches. By focusing on issues of diversity, scale, and context, it considers the ways in which economy, crafts, technology, and ritual were organised; the roles played by mortuary practices and households in the structure and development of ancient societies; and the importance of agency, identity, ethnicity, gender, community and cultural interaction for the rise of socio-economic complexity. The contributors to this volume are well-known archaeologists in the field of Near Eastern studies; all are currently engaged in fieldwork or research in Cyprus, the Levant, or Turkey. The variety and depth of the research they present here reflect the richness of the archaeological record in the 'cradle of civilisation' and convey the vibrancy of current interpretive approaches within the field of Near Eastern prehistory today.

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INTRODUCTION: THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRE-STATE COMMUNITIES IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

Diane Bolger and Louise C. Maguire

Archaeological research on the small-scale societies which preceded the emergence of the earliest states in the Near East has a long and complex history which we cannot hope to review in detail in this brief introduction. However, it is important to situate the papers in this volume within a broad theoretical and methodological framework that distinguishes them from earlier approaches based on generic typologies of social organisation and unilinear trajectories of socioeconomic development. In the first section of this chapter we summarise those earlier approaches and review the challenges to unilinear models of social change which have continued to emerge over the last 20–30 years. In the second section we consider some of the more recent approaches to the study of pre-state societies in the Near East which have effectively replaced the earlier models and which provide a backdrop for the subsequent chapters of the book; these are introduced in the third and final section.

Challenging Traditional Models of Social Transformation in Pre-state Societies

Neo-evolutionary categories of social organisation, as developed by anthropologists such as Service (1962, 1971) and Fried (1967) and further elaborated by Harris (1979) and Johnson and Earle (1987), were based on a broad social typology (bands-tribes-chiefdoms-states) that became highly influential in archaeological research during the 1970s and 1980s. While this tendency continued to some degree during the 1990s (e.g. Maisels 1990; Earle 1997), it began to fall out of use during the late 1980s as doubts arose among archaeologists concerning the ability of a limited number of abstract societal types to account for the great degree of variability and heterogeneity in past societies (for general accounts of these developments, see Trigger 1989, chap. 9; and Renfrew and Bahn 2000, chap. 5; for more specific critiques, see McGuire 1983; Shennan 1993; Yoffee 1979; 1993; 2005; and Verhoeven, this volume). An increasingly widespread attitude to neo-evolutionism among archaeologists today is perhaps best expressed by Yoffee, who has called it “an illusion of history” (2005, 231).

Critics of neo-evolutionism objected not only to the abstract or even fictive categories of analysis that comprise the band-tribe-chiefdom-state model, but also to the unilinear direction of social change inherent in neo-evolutionary thought. The assumption that cultures inevitably pass through a sequence of stages or steps from simple to complex, pre-state to state, and that this occurs in a progressive stadial fashion, is no longer accepted by archaeologists today other than in the most general terms. In addition to the fact that evolutionary models cannot be sustained in the face of the detailed evidence that has accumulated over the last quarter of a century, neo-evolutionism can be regarded as a ‘meta-narrative’ that reflects the ethnocentric bias of Western thought (Rowlands 1989, 36). As Yoffee, Feinman and others argued, archaeologists needed to find alternative trajectories to social inequality and complexity and to understand transitions between the two within specific historical contexts (Yoffee 1993; Feinman 1995, 273–294; see also Bender 1989, 87). It is now widely acknowledged that social change among early societies such as those of the ancient Near East is likely to have been recursive and disruptive rather than unilinear, and that for a variety of reasons change occurred at different rates and in different ways from region to region and even from locality to locality (e.g. Renfrew 1984, 358–359; Shanks and Tilley 1987, 175–185; Price and Feinman 1989; Peltenburg 1993; Miller, Rowlands and Tilley 1995).

In response to these and other like-minded criticisms, many archaeologists have chosen to avoid the word ‘evolution’ in their research vocabulary and to replace it with other terms, such as ‘change’ or ‘transformation’ (e.g. Gledhill et al. 1995; Shanks and Tilley 1987), while others have adopted multilinear models of social change which highlight the variable paths to complexity demonstrated by the archaeological record (e.g. Sanders and Webster 1978; Trigger 1985). A relatively small number of archaeologists, however, continue to use ‘evolution’ cautiously in the belief that it still provides a useful framework for discussion if carefully defined (e.g. Stein and Rothman 1994; Yoffee 2005). In the present volume the word ‘development’ has been adopted deliberately to circumvent the more problematical connotations of ‘evolution’. ‘Development’, however, is not without its own connotations of progress, so it should be stated from the outset that the use of that term in this book is not intended to imply a uni-directional trajectory of social change. The view that ‘simple’ societies develop inevitably into increasingly complex forms of social organisation needs to be investigated rather than assumed; current approaches in archaeology acknowledge that there were variable pathways to social complexity and that more often than not these were circuitous.

The gradual move in archaeological interpretation away from broad evolutionary models of social complexity has been accompanied by a shift in focus from over-arching systems or processes of social behaviour that emphasise similarities between synchronous cultures, to smaller scale research that demonstrates diversity both within and between them. At the same time, there has been a tendency in recent years to question the notion that external forces are primary causes of social change; while factors such as environment, population, climate and technology are important ingredients in social complexity it is now widely felt that they cannot, in and of themselves, explain social change (see Bender 1978 for an early example of this view). A further widespread criticism of ecosystems-based research is the contention that it provides a deterministic view of social development that tends to leave people out of the equation (see, for example, Bender 1978; 1989; Shanks and Tilley 1987; Brumfiel 1992; Hodder 2004).

Taken together, the challenges to neo-evolutionary models briefly summarised above have resulted in the emergence of new approaches to the study of past societies that are not based exclusively on theories borrowed from other social sciences (particularly social anthropology), a phenomenon which frequently “condemned the past to resemble some aspect of the present” (Yoffee and Sherratt 1993, 8). While it is generally agreed that ethnographic evidence can provide valuable insights into the behaviour and experiences of prehistoric communities, it cannot and should not be applied uncritically. During the last 20 to 30 years, increasing numbers of archaeologists have underscored the need to develop theories and methodologies that are more in keeping with the nature of their own concerns, such as the study of material culture and an understanding of long-term changes in human history (e.g. Plog 1974, preface and chap. 1; Renfrew 1984, 13; Yoffee 1993, 74; Gledhill et al. 1995, 27); at the same time, greater emphasis has been placed on interpreting the evidence within social, rather than exclusively environmental or economic frameworks. We address some of these new perspectives in greater detail in the following section.

Current Approaches to Pre-state Societies: Diversity, Scale and Context

Over the last few decades the study of pre-state communities in the Near East has moved significantly beyond the abstract, stadial models of the 1970s and ‘80s to adopt more nuanced approaches based on the detailed evidence that has emerged from the numerous surveys and excavations in the region. These efforts have revealed the inability of broad typological categories (such as band, tribe, chiefdom, state) to explain the variability of social organisation and social relations present in the archaeological record and have encouraged the formulation of new, socially-oriented research agendas centred on issues of diversity, scale and context.

Diversity

A renewed appreciation by Near Eastern archaeologists of the diversity of cultures, patterns of social interaction, and trajectories of socio-economic development has emerged from intensive fieldwork in the region during the last 25 years. This has resulted from a number of factors, not the least of which has been the extensive rescue work carried out by local and foreign teams in association with several large dam projects in south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria, which have led to the discovery of a multitude of new sites whose developmental patterns appear to have differed considerably from those further to the south. It has also resulted from the finer-grained methods of modern archaeological fieldwork with its sophisticated means of recovering, recording and analysing data, and the multitude of specialists capable of generating detailed interpretations of the landscape, environment, technology, diet, material culture, and many other aspects of social life. Dating methods have also been refined, so that the temporal relationships between sites have become more clearly visible. The result of all of these developments has been a greater emphasis on difference and diversity that has made the traditional classification of societies into a limited number of ‘types’ appear to be overly simplistic. Similarly, the diverse nature of the archaeological evidence for the development of complex society has encouraged archaeologists investigating social change among early communities in the Near East to move beyond the broad, programmatic schemes of research based on a single evolutionary model. As we shall discuss later in this section, the ability to achieve a more nuanced understanding of early societies is most successfully achieved by interpreting evidence within particular historical contexts (Hodder 1986). As Gledhill et al. have observed, “In the end there is no way to resolve the issue of state origins without attempting a detailed reconstruction, via archaeological materials, of the critical transitions which gave birth to the first manifestations of ‘civilization’ “(1995, 25).

Scale

The shift in focus from general to specific and from similarity to difference has underscored the importance of scale in archaeological research. As numerous studies over the last few decades have shown, greater attention to the micro-scale is crucial for looking at society from the bottom up rather than the top down (e.g. Renfrew 1984; Renfrew and Bahn 2000, chap. 5); for constructing alternative pathways to the accumulation of wealth, power and social inequality (e.g. McGuire 1983; Bender 1989; Price and Feinman 1995); and for understanding the processes by which complex society emerged and developed (e.g. Rowlands 1989; Stein and Rothman 1994). Consequently, archaeological research has become more specific by investigating particular groups, sub-groups and individuals, and the relationships between them, rather than focussing on abstract categories such as ‘society’ or ‘culture’. Research on the micro-scale can be approached by a variety of methods, such as examining the ways in which various sectors or groups within society functioned or changed, a process Stein and Rothman refer to as ‘organizational dynamics’ (1994, 1); focussing on the social practices of day-to-day existence (Bourdieu’s habitus; see Bourdieu 1977); looking for evidence of individuals (e.g. Knapp and Meskell 1997; Meskell 2002; Meskell and Joyce 2003); or investigating changes in the human life course (Gilchrist 1999, 88–100; 2004; Bolger 2004; 2008). All of these approaches regard the seemingly mundane activities of daily life as essential for understanding the relationships between people and the material world and demonstrate the need to develop theories of social change based on individuals and groups as active agents, rather than passive adapters to extrinsic environmental and economic forces.

Temporal dimensions of scale are equally important. According to Annalist models, social change should ideally be investigated at multiple scales (short, medium and long term trajectories) that operate simultaneously. The coarse chronologies that most prehistorians are compelled to work with seem better suited to the investigation of long-term change, yet as several archaeologists have noted (e.g. Hodder 1986, 93; Feinman 1994; Bolger 2008), few archaeologists have specifically addressed particular social issues over considerable expanses of time. Exclusive focus on short or medium range scales fails to take full advantage of the longer term trajectories that archaeological evidence can illuminate and that are essential for formulating theories of social change on a broader scale. Moreover, while long-term developments cannot directly shape the perceptions and behaviours of individuals over the short term span of a human life, they can serve as “constraining structures” that influence the range of possible behaviours and choices available to individuals and communities in the processes of daily life (Bintliff 1991, 7). These and other innovative applications of Annalist thinking to archaeological interpretation emphasise the multidimensional nature of time and its variability within and between cultures. This view of time effectively serves to ‘humanise’ the more abstract, objective approaches to the past by providing links between long-term trajectories of social change and the shorter, more subjective time scales of individual experience (Gosden 1994, 9).

Context

The interpretation of evidence at different scales is closely related to questions of archaeological context. The view that it is essential to interpret the past in particular historical contexts (Hodder (1986, chap. 7) is now widely accepted, and contextual approaches have proved to be one of the most successful means of overcoming the limitations of broad evolutionary models of social change discussed above. While context in archaeology occurs in a wide range of dimensions, including temporal, spatial, typological and depositional (Hodder 1986, 125), it can also be understood to include the broader cultural and theoretical frameworks in which archaeologists interpret the past. The recognition that archaeological interpretation is a process involving an interactive or dialectical relationship between the archaeologist and the evidence lies at the heart of current research programmes and marks a radical departure with traditional methods of...