I’ve not had much time to write – I’m sprucing up Hipcrime Vocab international headquarters in case I want to sell it and relocate. I’ll say more about that another time.
This article is particularly interesting given what we talked about last time concerning the Iroquois culture. It’s about a study of a Bronze Age farming settlement in Europe (modern-day Augsburg) and concludes, “Social Stratification Dates Back to Bronze Age Societies.” The societies studied by the researchers were:
. . .members of Central European farming communities that spanned from the late Neolithic period through the Bronze Age—or from around 2800 B.C. through 1300 B.C.
So I”m guessing this is the Corded Ware, Bell Beaker and Funnelbeaker cultures in particular (or similar cultures). Most likely they spoke an Indo-European language and may have been proto-Celtic.
. . . it has long been assumed that prior to the Athenian and Roman empires,—which arose nearly 2,500 and more than 2,000 years ago, respectively—human social structure was relatively straightforward: you had those who were in power and those who were not.
A study published Thursday in Science suggests it was not that simple. As far back as 4,000 years ago, at the beginning of the Bronze Age. . .human families of varying status levels had quite intimate relationships. Elites lived together with those of lower social classes and women who migrated in from outside communities. It appears early human societies operated in a complex, class-based system that propagated through generations.
Ancient Teeth Reveal Social Stratification Dates Back to Bronze Age Societies (Scientific American)
I’m not sure it was ever assumed to be that simple, but whatever. The interesting thing here is what it says about the creation of inequality. What we see here is a household structure, with various individuals ranked within it. People of different status lived cheek-to-jowl, and this is revealed by the burials:
Related individuals, the study’s authors found, were laid to rest with goods and belongings that appeared to be passed down through generations. The unrelated people in the household were buried with nothing, suggesting they were a lower class of “family members,” who were not given the ceremonial treatment.
“We don’t know if the low-status individuals in Augsburg were slaves, menial staff or something else,” comments Philipp Stockhammer of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, who was a co-author of the new study. “But we can see that in every household, individuals of very different status were living together.”
So, then, it’s quite likely that inequality first appeared within households, before it became institutionalized more broadly. Second, my guess is that certain lineages became ranked lineages, with some having a claim to a more ancient or revered ancestor, for instance. When you combine these two factors, you get a two-pronged stratification giving rise to inequality: one interfamilial—between different Houses, and one intrafamilial—between different individuals within the House. The highest-up individuals of the highest-up Houses were probably the most important decision-makers (chiefs or kings). However, without a permanent standing army or police, like the Iroquois, there was no way for potential leaders to impose their will on the rest of the tribe.
It’s quite possible that this was a sort of feudal-style order based around cattle ownership. In his Lectures on the History of Early Institutions, Henry Maine considered whether the feudal system as it developed in post-Roman Europe grew out of the land-tenure laws of the Celtic and Germanic tribal cultures that occupied the continent.
Under this system, the lands of a tribe (fine) were not owned outright by any single individual, although the chiefs (flaiths) may have possessed small portions of their own land. The chiefs did manage the land, however, giving them a considerable degree of control over the grazing herds. They loaned out portions of the herd to other tribe members, a practice called giving stock. The receivers of stock became vassals (céiles) of the chief, with certain obligations, including military duties. The amount of stock received from the chief determined one’s social status. Those who owed a little stock were Saer (free) tenants; those with more loans were Daer (base) tenants. The Daer tenants had the more onerous obligations. There were also freemen with no property, and an unfree servile class, with differing degrees of legal protection (Bothachs, Sen-Cleithes, and fuidhirs), with fuidhirs also subdivided into Saer and Daer. These folks had no clan affiliation, and were tantamount to slaves:
Every considerable tribe, and almost every smaller body of men contained in it, is under a Chief, whether he be one of the many tribal rulers whom the Irish records call Kings, or whether he be one of those heads of joint-families whom the Anglo-Irish lawyers at a later date called the Capita Cognationum. But he is not owner of the tribal land. His own land he may have…and over the general tribal land he has a general administrative authority…and, probably in that capacity, he has acquired great wealth in cattle…
It has somehow become of great importance to him to place out portions of his herds among the tribesmen…Thus the Chiefs appear in the Brehon law as perpetually ‘giving stock,’ and the tribesmen as receiving it…It is by taking stock that the free Irish tribesman becomes the Ceile or Kyle, the vassal or man of his Chief, owing him not only rent but service and homage…
The new position which the tribesman assumed through accepting stock from a Chief varied according to the quantity of stock he received. If he took much stock he sank to a much lower status than if he had taken little. On this difference in the quantity accepted there turns the difference between the two great classes of Irish tenantry, the Saer and Daer tenants…
The Saer-stock tenant, distinguished by the limited amount of stock which he received from the Chief, remained a freeman and retained his tribal rights in their integrity. The normal period of his tenancy was seven years, and at the end of it he became entitled to the cattle which had been in his possession. Meantime he had the advantage of employing them in tillage, and the Chief on his part received the ‘growth and increase and milk,’…besides this it entitled the Chief to receive homage and manual labour; manual labour is explained to mean the service of the vassal in reaping the Chief’s harvest and in assisting to build his castle or fort, and it is stated that, in lieu of manual labour, the vassal might be required to follow his Chief to the wars.
Any large addition to the stock deposited with the Saer-stock tenant, or an unusual quantity accepted in the first instance by the tribesman, created the relation between vassal and chief called Daer-stock tenancy. The Daer-stock tenant had unquestionably parted with some portion of his freedom, and his duties are invariably referred to as very onerous. The stock given to him by the Chief consisted of two portions, of which one was proportionate to the rank of the recipient, the other to the rent in kind to which the tenant became liable…Beside the rent in kind and the feudal services, the Chief who had given stock was entitled to come, with a company of a certain number, and feast at the Dear-stock tenant’s house, at particular periods, for a fixed number of days…
…the relation out of which Daer-stock tenancy and its peculiar obligations arose was not perpetual. After food-rent and service had been rendered for seven years, if the Chief died, the tenant became entitled to the stock; while, on the other hand, if the tenant died, his heirs were partly, though not wholly, relieved from their obligation. At the same time it is very probable that Daer-stock tenancy, which must have begun in the necessities of the tenant, was often from the same cause rendered practically permanent…
…the effect of the ancient Irish relation was to produce, not merely a contractual liability, but a status. The tenant had his social and tribal position distinctly altered by accepting stock. Further, the acceptance of stock was not always voluntary. A tribesman, in one stage of Irish custom at all events, was bound to receive stock from his own ‘King,’ or, in other words, from the Chief of his tribe in its largest extension; and everywhere the Brehon laws seem to me to speak of the acceptance of stock as a hard necessity.
Once again we see that status is dependent upon credit/debt relationships. Over time, these relationships become solidified. The chief who distributes cattle to the tribe is also the chief who distributes booty in raids, and cattle rustling is a frequent theme in early Irish literature. We don’t know if the social structure of these ancient central European farming communities was close to that of tribal Ireland, but it may have been.
Another clue to the social structure comes from another finding:
By radio dating the teeth samples and comparing them with regional geographical radioactivity profiles, Stockhammer and his collaborators also determined where each person grew up. Traces of radioactive elements called isotopes are all around us, including in our food and water. From childhood, these elements are incorporated into our bones and can be used to determine where someone was raised. The results show that in nearly all of the households studied, there were females who hailed from elsewhere.
Whereas the remains suggest that farmsteads were passed through many generations of males—up to five in some cases—females only persisted in a community for one generation. This observation means a system of patrilocality was followed: men stayed in their place of upbringing, while women moved in with their husband’s family. Patrilocal cultures had previously existed, including far back in the Paleolithic, but the findings support the idea that the practice became more common as the organization of societies developed.
Stockhammer points out that social structure has long been a major topic in archeology and that countless studies have explored the communal interactions of ancient societies. Yet he feels the new study illuminates the transition of societal organization as we moved, from the late Stone Age to the Bronze Age, toward individual families living with those of a subservient class and women from other communities. “We added a new aspect to the current state of the art: the integration of genetic, isotopic and archaeological data, which helped us understand the complexity of past social structures,” Stockhammer says. Though he is resolute that his findings cannot directly be correlated with other ancient societies, he does draw a comparison with classical Greece’s oikos family structure and Rome’s familia, in which slaves and those of lower status were part of the family.
Indeed, Greece and Roman cultures initially developed out of such farming communities. The oikos and the familia were extended households that formed the smallest constituent part of these societies. They were united by kinship under the authority of the patriarch, as Maine argued in Ancient Law:
It would be a very simple explanation of the origin of society if we could … suppose that communities began to exist wherever a family held together instead of separating at the death of its patriarchal chieftain.
In most of the Greek states and in Rome there long remained the vestiges of an ascending series of groups out of which the State was at first constituted. The Family, House, and Tribe of the Romans may be taken as the type of them, and they are so described to us that we can scarcely help conceiving them as a system of concentric circles which have gradually expanded from the same point.
The elementary group is the Family, connected by common subjection to the highest male ascendant. The aggregation of Families forms the Gens or House. The aggregation of Houses makes the Tribe. The aggregation of Tribes constitutes the Commonwealth. Are we at liberty to follow these indications, and to lay down that the commonwealth is a collection of persons united by common descent from the progenitor of an original family?
Of this we may at least be certain, that all ancient societies regarded themselves as having proceeded from one original stock, and even laboured under an incapacity for comprehending any reason except this for their holding together in political union. The history of political ideas begins, in fact, with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions; nor is there any of those subversions of feeling, which we term emphatically revolutions, so startling and so complete as the change which is accomplished when some other principle—such as that, for instance, of local contiguity—establishes itself for the first time as the basis of common political action.
What’s most interesting to me is the patrilocal method of residence. The Iroquois, as you recall, were matrilocal—tracing descent from the mother’s side and living with her clan. This latest study gives a boost to Engels’s theory that when matrilineal and matrilocal cultures were “overthrown” in favor of patriarchy, private property became inherited, giving rise to private property and inequality. Go back and read what he said about this in the previous post.
It’s worth noting that pastoral (cattle) cultures are—without any exception that I’m aware of—male dominated and patriarchal. Is the introduction of cattle the path to inequality? Contrast this with the matrilocal and (semi-) matriarchal culture of the Iroquois with their clan mothers. They had no large domesticated animals (which didn’t exist in North America), and practiced hoe-based farming, which was done mainly by women. It seems that this meant that women had higher status in that culture, with a subsequently flatter social hierarchy and less inequality of property.
As for when it was overthrown, Marija Gimbutas famously argued for years that “Old Europe” was matrilineal and matriarchal, and practiced “goddess worship” based on the large quantity of female figurines that she found. She then claimed that the Kurgan peoples swept in from the east and replaced the Old European culture with one that was much more warlike, patriarchal, and worshiped masculine gods. The farming peoples in this study would have been their descendants. They were also likely the ancestors of the various Indo-European cultures. While she may have overstated the importance of goddess-worship (on very little evidence), in many other respects Gimbutas may have been largely correct about the transition (she is backed up by recent DNA evidence). To what extent were these “low-status” individuals the earliest farmers and hunter-gatherers of Old Europe?
. . .Stockhammer believes marrying outside one’s community encouraged the cultural exchange of information, which ultimately led to the formation of new civilizations. Increasing social interactions with other communities allowed for a more efficient transfer of skills and goods to a wider population. “I am sure the fact that a large number of adult women from outside the society entered the society had an important effect—that new knowledge and technologies came with them,” he says.
Anthropologists and scientists from other fields refer to a concept called ratcheting, in which cultural information is not just shared and learned but also modified and improved. If ancient humans mingled with outside communities, countless kernels of know-how would have been borrowed and altered for both good and bad (more effective tools; more lethal weapons and warfare).
Individuals marrying outside of their community may have also made sense from the standpoint of genetic fitness and allowed local societies to thrive. Doing so would have prevented the genetic abnormalities that come from inbreeding and perhaps, in the long term, improved collective community survival.
Interestingly, our closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, are also female exogamous. That is, the females leave the community in which they were born, whereas the males stick around. Could this be a clue to human social relations? As a side note, even today, it feels like more women leave the places of their birth to seek out mates, while those who stay put are more often men. If I may be so bold, I suspect this is why women are so much more into travel than men are on average (there are exceptions; I’m one of them), and do so much more of it. In my failing Rust Belt city, for example, every woman not pregnant by twenty-one moves away to somewhere better, and only comes back to raise her kids (aside from the occasional boomerang).
Only humans can from these types of affinal relationships, and it does allow for much larger social agglomerations and transfer of information. Robin Dunbar talks about this in his book Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior. Chimps may be female exogamous, but there is no ongoing relationship between families, and hence no uniting of disparate chimp bands. Subsequently, there is no cultural or knowledge transfer between chimp bands; they are largely hermetically sealed. H. sapiens’ ability to overcome this limitation may have played a role in us coming to dominate the planet, and may have very deep roots, indeed.
The foundation of all of this may have been religion, specifically, the tutelary religion of the hearth, as Fustel de Coulanges eloquently describes in The Ancient City:
A family was composed of a father, a mother, children, and slaves. This group, small as it was, required discipline. To whom, then, belonged the chief authority? To the father? No. There is in every house something that is above the father himself. It is the domestic religion; it is that god whom the Greeks called the hearth master—εστια δεστοινα —whom the Romans called Lar familiaris. This divinity of the interior, or what amounts to the same thing, the belief that is in the human soul, is the least doubtful authority. This is what fixed rank in the family.
The father ranks first in presence of the sacred fire. He lights it, and supports it; he is its priest. In all religious acts his functions are the highest; he slays the victim, his mouth pronounces the formula of prayer which is to draw upon him and his the protection of the gods. The family and the worship are perpetuated through him; he represents, himself alone, the whole series of ancestors, and from hm are to proceed the entire series of descendants. Upon hm rests the domestic worship–he can almost say, like the Hindu, “I am the god.” When death shall come, he will be a divine being whom his descendants will invoke.
Consistent with the findings of the researchers about unrelated females moving in to male-centric houses, Fustel de Coulanges also found that Roman hearth religion had women leaving the house of their birth and becoming a part of their husband’s family:
This religion did not place woman in so high a rank. The wife takes part in the religious acts, indeed, but she is not the mistress of the hearth. She does not derive her religion from her birth. She is initiated into it at her marriage. She has learned from her husband the prayer that she pronounces. She does not represent the ancestors, since she is not descended from them. She herself will not become an ancestor, placed in the tomb, she will not receive special worship. In death, as in life, she counts only as a part of her husband.
Greek law, Roman law, and Hindu Law, all derived from this old religion, agree on considering the wife as always a minor. She could never have a hearth of her own; she was never the chief of a worship. At Rome she received the title of mater familial; but she lost this if her husband died. Never having a sacred fire which belonged to her, she had nothing of what gave authority in the house. She never commanded; she was never even free, or mistress of herself. She was always near the hearth of another, repeating the prayer of another, for all the acts of religious life she needed a superior, and for all the acts of civil life a guardian. pp. 68-69
And getting back to the initial theme of passing property down via inheritance seen in the burials of these communities, that too seems to have been intimately connected to the religious worship of the hearth according to Coulanges:
There are three things which, from the most ancient times, we find founded and solidly established in Greek and Italian societies: the domestic religion; the family; and the right of property — three things which had in the beginning a manifest relation, and which appear to have been inseparable. The idea of private property existed in the religion itself. Every family had its hearth and its ancestors. These gods could be adored only by this family and protected it alone. They were its property.
Now, between these gods and the soil, men of the early ages saw a mysterious relation. Let us first take the hearth. This altar is the symbol of a sedentary life; its name indicates this. It must be placed upon the ground; once established, it cannot be moved…The god is installed there not for a day, not for the life of one man merely, but for as long a time as this family shall endure, and there remains any one to support its fire by sacrifices, This the sacred fire takes possession of the soil, and marked it its own. It is the god’s property.
And the family, which through duty and religion remains grouped around its altar, is as much fixed to the soil as the altar itself. The idea of domicile follows naturally. The family is attached to the altar, the later is attached to the soil; an intimate relation, therefore, is established between the soil and the family. There must be his permanent home, which he will not dream of quitting, unless an unforeseen necessity constrains him to it. Like the hearth, it will always occupy this spot. This spot belongs to it, is its property, the property not simply of a man, but of a family, whose different members must, one after another, be born and die here. p. 48
Is this the origin of private property? In ancient Rome, when land (and slaves) were transferred between owners, such a transfer was accompanied by a “solemn ceremony” called mancipatio (the origin of the word emancipation). Over time, these became replaced by cash transfers and real estate markets, and inequality ran amok, eventually leading to Rome’s downfall.
How closely did these ancient European farming cultures resemble that of the ancient Greeks and Romans? After all, they were both based around farming and cattle-rustling. We can only speculate, as culture does not calcify unlike the elements in bones and teeth. The researchers’ invoking of Greek and Roman culture is telling, however. It certainly seems like they may have been quite similar. Hopefully, new methods like those used in the article will give us even more data to work with, as they hope:
University of Michigan archeologist Alicia Ventresca Miller, who was not involved in the paper, shares Stockhammer’s enthusiasm and feels this new work reveals a lot about early human inheritance of goods and property. “As far as I can tell, there are no other studies that have such large sample sizes and multiple analyses to come to these conclusions, especially for prehistoric groups,” she says. “Their finding that wealth was inherited, rather than achieved, has real impacts for research on inequality and will likely change our understanding of ancient Europe. The results give us insight into the complexity of ancient lifeways.”
Krishna Veeramah, a population geneticist in the department of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University, who was also not involved in the study, thinks the new multidisciplinary research approach may serve as a model for future work, especially as characterizing ancient DNA becomes more affordable and widespread.
On a related note, it seems that these pre-state cultures were hardly static. Over at Peter Turchin’s blog, he writes:
As the readers of this blog know, a big chunk of my research focuses on why complex societies go through cycles of alternating internally peaceful, or integrative, phases and turbulent, or disintegrative periods. In all past state-level societies, for which we have decent data, we find such “secular cycles” (see more in our book Secular Cycles).
What was a surprise for me was to find that pre-state societies also go through similar cycles. Non-state centralized societies (chiefdoms) cycle back and forth between simple (one level of hierarchy below the chief) and complex (two or more hierarchical levels) chiefdoms. But now evidence accumulates that even non-centralized, non-hierarchical societies cycle. The work by archaeologists, such as Stephen Shennan, showed that various regions within Europe went through three or four population cycles before the rise of centralized societies (see, for example, his recent book The First Farmers of Europe).
These cycles were quite drastic in amplitude. For example, last month at a workshop in Cologne, I learned from archaeologists working in North Rhine that population declines there could result in regional abandonment. Several hypotheses have been advanced, including the effects of climate fluctuations, or soil exhaustion. But there is no scientific consensus—this is a big puzzle.
The authors of the paper hypothesize that as power became too centralized, the various families and social groups comprising the culture simply dispersed rather than become subservient to permanent despotic power. Turchin thinks it was warfare, specifically protection of surpluses from nomadic outsiders:
First, why did the different groups move together in the first place? From almost any point of view, except one [defense], this was a really poor decision. Such crowding together resulted in serious problems with sanitation and disease. Additionally, farmers had to waste a lot of time traveling to their fields, because such huge settlement required a lot of land to support it. The only reason for such population concentration that makes sense to me is collective defense…
The second question is that at the end of the mega-settlement period, the population didn’t simply disperse out; there was a very substantial population collapse. Again, what was the reason for this? In historical periods the usual answer is pervasive endemic warfare. Not only war kills people, its effect on demography is even more due to the creation of a “landscape of fear,” which doesn’t permit farmers to cultivate fields, so that the local population gradually starves, has fewer babies, and is further diminished by out-migration…
However, the former hypothesis is consistent with James C. Scott’s ideas that people in early farming cultures were often looking for a way to get out from the bitter toil and backbreaking work of farming by abandoning it and becoming “barbarians.” This, he says, happened whenever authority became too coercive for too long. Those stockade walls were to keep the farmers in, not the barbarians out. Slate Star Codex recently reviewed Scott’s book:
Scott thinks of these collapses not as disasters or mysteries but as the expected order of things. It is a minor miracle that some guy in a palace can get everyone to stay on his fields and work for him and pay him taxes, and no surprise when this situation stops holding. These collapses rarely involved great loss of life. They could just be a simple transition from “a bunch of farming towns pay taxes to the state center” to “a bunch of farming towns are no longer paying taxes to the state center”. The great world cultures of the time – Egypt, Sumeria, China, whereever – kept chugging along whether or not there was a king in the middle collecting taxes from them. Scott warns against the bias of archaeologists who – deprived of the great monuments and libraries of cuneiform tablets that only a powerful king could produce – curse the resulting interregnum as a dark age or disaster. Probably most people were better off during these times.
The book ends with a chapter on “barbarians”. Scott reminds us that until about 1600, the majority of human population lived outside state control; histories that focus on states and forget barbarians are forgetting about most humans alive. In keeping with his thesis, Scott reviews some ancient sources that talk about barbarians in the context of people who did not farm or eat grain. Also in keeping with his thesis, he warns against thinking of barbarians as somehow worse or more primitive. Many barbarians were former state citizens who had escaped state control to a freer and happier lifestyle. Barbarian tribes could control vast trading empires, form complex confederations, and enter in various symbiotic relationships with the states around them. Scott wants us to think of these not as primitive people vs. advanced people, but as two different interacting lifestyles, of which the barbarian one was superior for most people up until a few centuries ago.
Book Review: Against The Grain (Slate Star Codex)
Speaking of reviews, I’ve finished reading Civilized to Death, and I suppose I should write a review. It’s no secret that I’m very partial to it’s thesis, but highlighting some especially relevant parts might be enlightening.