11.1: Introduction to Social Archaeology

Answering basic social questions requires that we consider two dimensions of social interaction—how a site is integrated externally with other sites (Is it politically independent? A base camp? A city within a larger empire?) and its internal organization (Does the site reflect egalitarian social interactions or was it stratified?).

Political Organization

Political organization describes how social groups organize themselves to identify “us” versus “them” and to make group decisions, such as establishing rituals and rules, choosing when to migrate to another site or area, and determining how to deal with internal and external conflicts, including incursions by groups from nearby territories. Archaeologists have long used traditional classifications of societies’ political complexity such as tribes, villages, chiefdoms, and states to categorize sites in terms of how they were integrated into larger social organizations and to identify the largest group territorially with which they were associated using a system established by anthropologist Elman Service. These same categories are used to classify living societies that can be directly observed.

In reality, of course, societies often fall somewhere along a continuum of degrees of political organization and do not necessarily fit neatly into traditional categories. Archaeologists assess the complexity of a group’s political organization by analyzing its settlement patterns and written records and by observing and inferring the political structures by comparing them with structures observed in other cultures.

One of the categories used by archaeologists and cultural anthropologists is the band, which refers to mobile hunter-gatherer groups that typically number less than 100 individuals and are rarely integrated politically with others. These relatively small societies tend to forage for food over a large area and are nomadic, moving frequently with the seasons and availability of various food resources. Consequently, their sites are some of the most difficult to identify archaeologically because they leave few artifacts behind in widely distributed archaeological deposits. The number of individuals and families making up nomadic bands varies with the season, as family and gender groups separate for a time and then rejoin in seasonal movements known as seasonal rounds. Usually, leadership in a band is informal and impermanent, and many decisions are made by the community, though individuals who are admired can have greater influence. One example of a society organized as a band is the Paiute from the Great Basin of the western United States, who were studied extensively by archaeologist Julian Steward. In the pre-contact era (before colonists from Europe came to North America), the Paiute lived in family bands and moved frequently to access various seasonally available food resources, including grass seeds, pinyon nuts, ducks, geese, and jackrabbits. Archaeological evidence uncovered from their occupation sites consists primarily of projectile points and other lithic artifacts and a few other items, such as tule reed and feather duck decoys that were stored in caches in protected areas for future use. Bands typically leave behind little evidence of areas they occupy—occasionally, archaeologists find remains of temporary sites used for making projectiles and for butchering and preparing food.

A second political organization is the tribe, which consists of several small territorial populations that mostly act autonomously but sometimes interact with other groups linked to them by customs, kinship, and/or age for political or military purposes and sometimes send representatives to tribal gatherings. They usually join together in pursuit of a limited objective or gather informally in social customs. Tribes tend to be egalitarian and produce their own food by gardening (horticulture) and/or tending herd animals (pastoralism). They typically are more sedentary than bands, establishing relatively permanent settlements in which hundreds of individuals live. Tribal archaeological sites include villages containing numerous semi-permanent dwellings indicated by post holes, hearths, and/or food storage pits that reveal both longer-term occupations and the relatively coordinated labor of a greater number of individuals. Leadership in individual tribal groups typically consists of part-time leaders.

Chiefdoms represent a shift from the loosely organized political structure of tribes to more formal political structures involving multiple communities. The chief has greater authority and higher social standing (rank) than the rest of the communities’ members, and the role is permanent and can be hereditary and passed on to children. Chiefdoms typically are densely populated and use intensive agriculture, horticulture, and/or pastoralism. Chiefs typically do not have the power to compel others to obey them but are highly respected, often as religious authorities, and redistribute goods, direct public behavior, and perform other leadership tasks. Societies organized as chiefdoms often erect large-scale monuments made possible by the coordinated labor of a large number of people. One such monument is Stonehenge in England. These early, relatively hierarchical social organizations also led to differentiated burials in which individuals were buried with items valued by their cultures that pointed to differences in status.

State societies represent an even greater level of integration; they are autonomous political units that link and govern many communities in a territory. States are characterized by centralized governments that have the power to collect taxes, draft people for labor and to fight wars, and enact and enforce laws. States typically rely on intensive agriculture and pastoralism for subsistence and therefore need additional territory as they expand. Consequently, colonialism was a common way to obtain access to needed resources. States tend to incorporate multiple communities, often separated by great distances. In addition, state societies are stratified, assigning individuals to classes or castes, and frequently construct large public monuments such as palaces, temples, and public buildings.

State societies typically leave behind abundant archaeological evidence, including terraced fields, highways, record-keeping devices (e.g., the Incan complex system of knotted string known as khipu), monumental buildings and cities (e.g., Machu Picchu and Cuzco in South America), and mummified human remains. These elements of infrastructure and monumental works are characteristic of state societies because they are possible only when rulers can conscript thousands of human laborers and compel taxes.

Grave goods in state-level societies vary substantially because of social stratification in those cultures. A well-known, one-of-a-kind example of the grandiosity of grave goods often included in burials of state leaders is the burial of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, which included 6,000 life-size warriors molded from terra cotta and a depiction of the world in miniature, complete with stars above and rivers made of liquid mercury.

Social Stratification

Within a society there is an internal organization that typically is based on whether the advantages of the society are equally available to everyone or are available only to higher status individuals. There are three basic categories of advantages:

• economic resources: things that are considered valuable in a culture, such as land, tools, money, goods, and wealth.
• power: the ability to make others do things they do not want to do, such as slave labor.
• prestige: particular honor or respect.

When some groups have greater access to these societal advantages because of their identities rather than having to earn them, the society is considered to have social stratification: unequal access to resources, power, and/or prestige. Evidence of social stratification first appears in the archaeological record at the same time as the development of agriculture. At the ancient Egyptian site of Gebel el Silsila, for example, the remains of four young children (between four and nine years old) showed evidence of mummification and were buried, likely in a wooden coffin, with multiple valued items as grave goods, including amulets, a bronze bracelet, and pottery. Since the children would not have earned the status associated with those items (achieved status) in their short lives, they likely inherited their status through kinship, which is called ascribed status.

The degree to which different social groups possess access to society’s advantages is used to characterize the degree of social stratification in a society. In egalitarian societies, individuals are not grouped by access to economic resources, power, or prestige. They can individually achieve status in their lifetimes, but their status is not passed down to other members of their families. Everyone in an egalitarian society is born with an equal opportunity to attain society’s advantages, and prestige is granted to anyone who earns it through exceptional skills or efforts. Most egalitarian societies were comprised of foragers, horticulturalists, and pastoralists. They relied heavily on sharing to attain needed items, which ensured equal access to economic resources and functionally separated actual wealth from recognition of skill. In these societies, there is no dominant leader, and the group uses social levelling devices to maintain equality. These devices consist of behavior such as ridiculing, teasing, and shunning of would-be leaders that reduce their status in the group and prevent them from becoming more powerful than others.

Rank societies, which are typically agricultural and sometimes pastoral, assign individuals to social groups that have unequal access to prestige (but not to wealth or power). Coastal fishing societies in northwestern North America were rank societies. The abundance of salmon and their success in harvesting and preserving the fish allowed them to stockpile food resources that were subsequently given away in ceremonies known as potlatches that served to reinforce the host’s social status as high ranking. Rank societies were often ruled by chiefs since no one had the ability to force people to work but could influence others to work by working hard themselves.

In class societies, social groups have unequal access to economic resources, power, and prestige. Some have greater opportunities in life simply because of the social group into which they are born. Class societies are also called fully stratified societies. They can be open class societies, in which individuals can move into a different class, or closed class societies (caste societies), in which individuals can never change their class status. Because many past class societies have assigned classes based on specialized professions and crafts, archaeologists can infer the presence of a class society from dedicated sections of cities by occupation.

Methods of Analyzing Social Stratification

Archaeologists use a variety of techniques to identify the social dynamics of the societies they study. Settlement analysis identifies patterns in how different groups of people use particular locations using surveys, remote sensing, and other techniques and then compares those patterns to patterns of settlement at other sites. Traded and other non-local items are useful when identifying multiple sites occupied by a single group at different times. For example, site surveys, some excavation, and ethnoarchaeology methods can be used to better understand how a hunter-gatherer group used a regional location in its seasonal rounds. All of these lines of evidence can be used by an archaeologist to determine if any and what type of social stratification was practiced by a particular group whose remains are being studied archaeologically.

Another approach used by archaeologists to analyze the social organization of a group is burial analysis, which examines human remains and analyzes the rank and status indicated by the grave goods that accompany them. They analyze the skeletons to reveal the age and sex of the individuals when they died, their causes of death (e.g., disease, dietary deficiencies), and whether the remains were buried individually or communally. Sex and age differences contribute to determining potential differences in wealth and status. If, for example, only some older adults were buried with status goods, archaeologists interpret those burials as reflecting achieved status, a marker of an egalitarian society. Status goods sometimes found buried with children and babies point to ascribed status, indicating a stratified society.

Monuments and public works are particularly useful when analyzing the type of stratification present in a society. The size, spacing, and construction requirements associated with public works such as roads, irrigation systems, earthen works, monuments, and large-scale buildings tell us a great deal about the social structure of the society that produced them. The larger and more involved the project, the more hours of labor required to construct it. Thus, large-scale projects require a greater level of social and political organization. The Great Wall of China, for example, represents multiple generations of labor organized during a series of dynasties spanning 2,000 years. The oldest sections cover more than 13,000 miles, representing the labor of at least 400,000 people, many of whom died from the harsh conditions experienced during construction.

Naturally, a society’s historical records provide important information about the social structure at the time. The ancient Egyptians and the Chinese during some of the earliest dynasties kept detailed records of family lineages and individual families’ ties with past leaders. Other cultures have recorded business transactions, taxations, literature, and laws. Of course, many cultures did not keep written records, and many of the records that were kept were lost to time or poorly preserved. Inscriptions in clay and on stone buildings and stelae (inscribed upright stone markers) can potentially survive, but records made using papyrus and other perishable organic materials are only rarely preserved.

Other Types of Social Analysis

Ethnicity—one’s membership in a particular cultural group defined by language, religion, and other cultural traits—can be challenging to identify in the archaeological record. One indicator archaeologists use is distinctive styles of pottery and other materials. For example, excavations in one section of the Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan have uncovered distinctive pottery styles and burial practices associated with the Zapotecs in Oaxaca. Archaeologists believe that this site reflects a community of Oaxacan Zapotec immigrants living in Teotihuacan. Much of the information discovered so far about ethnicity has come from written records. But even when documents remain, it is difficult to infer much about people’s ethnicities and potential differences in their social status unless there is some kind of obvious separation as there is in Teotihuacan.

Gender analysis is used by anthropologists and archaeologists to understand the social and cultural roles and relationships assigned to each biological sex (male, female, and sometimes other sexes). We can often infer more about gender roles than about ethnicity from documents and representations of daily life and rituals for some ancient cultures, but much of that information is not preserved.

Consider the ethnic groups and gender identities present in our culture today. What aspects of those identities could be preserved for future archaeologists to discover and what types of sites would those archaeologists study? What kinds of evidence of ethnic and gender identities likely would not be preserved?

Despite the challenges associated with interpreting the archaeological record to understand ethnic groups and gender roles of past cultures, the potential discoveries are worth the effort and benefit from new technologies. A Viking burial that was first excavated in the 1870s was recently re-analyzed, and archaeologists discovered that a highly ranked warrior uncovered during those early excavations was not a man, as had always been assumed, but was a woman. None of the items in the burial were typically associated with women in Viking culture. Some have speculated that this grave points to a transgender warrior, but researchers have cautioned against trying to interpret the site through such a narrow lens. Archaeologists recognize that gender roles within a culture are unique and that we cannot apply terminologies and categories from Western cultures to ancient civilizations.

Terms You Should Know

• achieved status
• ascribed status
• band
• burial analysis
• cache
• caste society
• chief
• chiefdom
• class
• closed class society
• economic resources
• egalitarian
• Elman Service
• ethnicity
• gender
• grave goods
• horticulture
• Julian Steward
• khipu
• nomadic
• open class society
• pastoralism
• potlatch
• power
• prestige
• rank
• seasonal round
• settlement analysis
• social levelling device
• social stratification
• state
• tribe

Study Questions

1. What characteristics distinguish a tribe from a chiefdom?
2. Compare and contrast egalitarian, rank, and class stratified societies. In what ways are they similar? What is most significant among their differences?
3. How do achieved status and ascribed status differ? In which forms of social stratification are achieved status and ascribed status most significant?
4. Why do you think ethnicity and gender can be complex to identify and study archaeologically?
5. What are two ways in which monuments are significant to social archaeology?