Nov 5 complex hunter gatherers PDF

Preview

Summary

Is now called Foragers to Farmers. Professor James Connelly...

Description

●

●

●

●

●

Evolution of human culture ○ Development of larger settlement ○ Use of storage technologies ○ Innovation in subsistence technologies ○ Expansion of diets to include low ranked foods ○ This is characterized as the Broad Spectrum Revolution The challenge for archaeology is to explain why this happens? ○ Is it population pressure? ○ Or diversity of foods are inherently good? (adoption of different foods) Hunter gatherer ○ One definition ■ Two basic assumptions about hunter and gatherers - they live in small groups and they move around a lot (most basic) ● Not a lot of personal property ● Resource base keeps group size very low ● No exclusive rights to territory ● Food surpluses are small to non-existent (collect and eat) ● Groups are not strongly attached to any single area ● Groups are strongly egalitarian ○ Complex hunter gatherer (1980 definition) (low mobility) ■ Two basic assumptions - the complete opposite from above ● They live in large groups and they do not move around a lot ○ High amounts of personal property ○ Resource base keeps enables larger groups ○ Possess exclusive rights to territory ○ Food surpluses are moderate to substantial ○ Groups are strongly attached to any single area ○ Groups are not egalitarian ■ Not farmers but characteristics of farming societies ○ Shift from high residential mobility to low mobility (home bases) Food and storage ○ Generalized hunter-gatherers usually consume resources as they are harvested called “immediate return” hunter-gatherers ○ Complex hunter-gatherers usually delay consumption or use of harvested resources through storage called “delayed return” hunter-gatherers ■ Can also shift between these as the seasons (store in the summer and eat in the winter) Wealth and possessions ○ Three basic types ■ Embodied (health, knowledge, skills) ● Knowledge about things ■ Relational (social networks) ● Valuable person with ties to others ● Connections to people and places

■

●

●

●

Material (things) ● Personal possessions or access to goods ○ Complex hunter-gatherers can have all three rather than just the first two ■ Accumulation of things can be inherited ■ Implicated in hierarchies ○ Generalized hunter-gatherers generally have few personal possessions ○ Complex hunter-gatherers often have personal or corporate property ○ Grave deposition of objects has an economic effect as well ■ Less items to go around keeps the value high ○ Generalized hunter-gatherers use relatively simple technologies ○ Complex developed sophisticated storage and processing technologies Power and inequality ○ Generalized are strongly egalitarian ■ Social rules put in place ○ Complex are transegalitarian or have institutionalized hierarchies ■ Between inherited or chief power, power to and over ○ Associated with the display of prestige display object ○ Aggrandizers forcefully act or compete to advance their own interests and those of their near kin at the expense of others ■ Try to control wealth ○ Formal egalitarian societies actively repress the actions of aggrandizers since they would disrupt the reciprocal social ties necessary for group survival ○ The emergence of inequality requires that repression to end, allowing aggrandizers to pursue their own ends Significance ○ These types of societies are rare in the ethnographic record ■ Don’t exist in the living record ■ Indigenous before colonialism doesn’t count ○ They challenge the traditional idea that complexity is dependent on agriculture ■ Not true, this came first and effects the story of agricultural ○ They are important for understanding the origins of agriculture especially the role of social complexity and wealth (storage) in the process ○ Provide data on the emergence of institutionalized hierarchies South China ○ Traditional story is that the Neolithic package consists of ■ Pottery ■ Ground stone tools ■ Domestic architecture ■ Villages ■ Cultigens ○ And these arrive and spread more or less in unison ○ Research over the last 30 years has demonstrated that this is not the case ○ World's oldest ceramics - 20 000 BP in a cave setting ○ Hunter gatherers are being adopted and invented that is completely independent

of agriculture Hisotrical sequence ■ Mobile hunter gatherers before 18 000 BP ■ BSR and development of pottery after 18 000 BP ■ After 7 000 BP an influx of farmers who abandoned rice cultivation and became foragers, but maintained close links with farmers ■ After 3 000 BP shift into agriculture ○ What does ceramic technology enable? ■ Ease of cooking of liquids (simmering) compared to hot rocks being added into pits ■ Ease of storage of liquids - easier but not the first (Arctic grass technologies) ■ New medium for symbolic display - decoration, stylistic display ○ Not all hunter gatherers have this technology but it helps define them nonetheless Atacama Desert, Chile ○ What drives the cultural complexity in hunter gatherers? ○ Explaining the emergence of artificial mummification ceremonialism between 7 000 to 5 000 BP ■ Complex mortuary associated with artificial mummification of individuals ○ Period between approx 7-5 000 BP was relatively high and correlated with increased population ○ This period correlated with increased technological sophistication and the emergence of artificial mummification rituals ○ Hunter gatherer groups attaining a maximum size of approx 100 individuals will yield ca. 400 corpses every 100 years ○ The hyperarid context of the Atacama Desert means that these individuals mummify naturally ○ Increased interaction between the living and the dead lead to the selection of cultural behaviours related to artificial mummification ○ Artificial mummification signal control over resources, enhance intra group cohesion, cooperation and identity as a consequence of intergroup competition and warfare Hopewell Complex (not culture) ○ Mound-building societies centered in Ohio - a particular type in a particular region ○ Dates approx from 2100 to 1500 BP ○ Part of a much wider set of interactions stretching from north of Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico ○ Extensive trade and exchange networks providing access to copper, silver, halena, mica and obsidian ■ These raw materials are found all over the Americas, showing the movement of raw materials and the interactions between them ○ Technologically and artistically sophisticated, suggesting development of craftspecialization ○

●

●

○ ○ ○

●

Complex geometric earthworks constructed using thousands of hours of labour The largest earthen enclosures in the world Mathematically precise and astrologically positioned ■ Walls are aligned with to celestial patterns ○ Extraordinary investment suggests a matter of fundamental importance, such as world renewal rituals ○ It was thought that the Ohio Hopewell were maize farmers living in sedentary villages ■ It was believed that the earthworks and elaborate mortuary rituals of Hopewell requires a food surplus and agricultural economy yet there is no evidence to support this view ○ No evidence to support chiefdom societies ■ The magnitude of Hopewell construction and the abundance of exotic artifacts is difficult to explain in the absence of a hierarchical social structure, well developed agriculture, craft specialization and redistribution ○ Are mobile foragers, that gathered wild foods, hunted, fished and collected or cultivated some weedy plants as they moved between upland rock shelters, floodplain camps and large earthwork complexes over the course of the year ○ Show us that complex interactions can occur without the strong centralized authority found in chiefdoms and states Gobekli Tepe, Anatolia ○ 9300 - 7300 BP ○ Period regionally referred to in SW Asia as the Pre-pottery Neolithic A (10 000 BP to 8 800 BP) ■ Cultivation of wild crops (proto-domestic) ■ Hunting of wild game ■ Settlement in large villages (round houses) ■ Construction of communal architecture ■ Development of elaborate community ritual ○ No adjacent water source at all ■ Very critical to the interpretation of the site ○ Series of ritual round roofs ■ Temples or complex houses? ■ Upright pillars made of limestone ○ Eight monumental round-oval buildings have been excavated ○ These buildings are generally found in the lower-lying hollows and the earliest buildings are erected at the site of (9600-8700 BCE) ○ In use for many decades, perhaps even for centuries ○ Interpreted as anthropomorphic in character - top is the head, the pillar being the torse - umm….idk man, not convincing ○ Many of these stones and T-pillars feature carved and engraved depictions of local species of wild animals, birds, and insects ○ Two competing interpretations

■

○

○

○

It is a ritual shrine - the symbols and spaces relate to commemoration of the dead, associated with feasting rituals and the T-pillars are gods, with animal attendants ● Birth of the gods, new religious thinking of this time ■ It is a domestic site and the rituals are incorporated into daily life of the inhabitants Significance ■ Aggrandizers in complex hunter gatherers capable of organizing labour to construct monumental architecture ■ Community ritual an integral part of the process leading to plant and animal domestication ■ Agriculture is not the basis of ritual and social complexity The process of domestication is a conceptual shift that allowed humans to imagine anthropomorphic gods that existed in a universe beyond the physical world This provides complex hunter gatherers with the conceptual understanding that they can control the natural world...