Archaeology

VIII

Archaeology of the Mind

Many scholars are currently seeking to develop a framework for analysing the cognitive aspects of early societies, especially of those that did not develop a system of writing and that therefore did not produce texts which might shed light on their thought processes. This branch of archaeology seeks to investigate how early societies described and measured their world, how they planned and laid out their monuments and towns, and which materials they prized highly and presumably considered to be symbols of wealth and power. In particular, it seeks to examine the material remains of religion, which may be expressed through art. As is known from modern studies of tribal peoples, religious activities are often of paramount importance to the life of a society; indeed, there is usually no clear dividing line between the sacred and the secular. It is fairly obvious from what we know of tribal art today that prehistoric art must have served many purposes, encompassing games, narratives, graffiti, messages, creation and other myths, and religion. Some of it is public, on open view in outdoor locations; some is intensely private, hidden away in recesses or deep caves (see Palaeolithic Art).

It can be argued that rock art is the earliest form of proto-writing, since at times it certainly appears to have been used to record and transmit information. For the cognitive archaeologist the picture becomes much clearer where real scripts are available. Their decipherment is a highly specialized skill. While it is easy to take for granted the fact that many ancient scripts can now be read, this is only as the result of some notable breakthroughs; Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform (the script used by ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia), and Linear B (used by the Minoan civilization) were all unreadable until their decipherment by Jean-François Champollion, German and British scholars, and Michael Ventris respectively. The decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs is still in its infancy, and the pictographic writing used by the Indus Valley Civilization remains the world’s most mysterious undeciphered script.

However, while ancient texts provide a great deal of valuable information about cognitive aspects of ancient societies, they are a complement to archaeology rather than a substitute for it.

An entire area of cognitive archaeology is taken up with archaeoastronomy, the study of ancient knowledge of celestial phenomena. The subject really comes into its own in later prehistory with the phenomenon of monuments aligned in such a way as to interact with significant astronomical events, such as the rising of the Sun at the solstice and equinox (see Ecliptic). From the prehistoric megalithic monuments of western Europe (such as Stonehenge and Callanish) to major buildings in the Central and South American civilizations (such as Tiahuanacu), such alignments demonstrate a profound knowledge of, and importance attached to, the movements of the heavens.

Some cognitive aspects of society can also be assessed from the existence of symbols of power, ranging from giant statues of rulers down to rich clothing or body decoration. Rare or precious materials are usually indicative of high status, as are fine objects that are beautifully made but could never have been used for their apparent purpose (friable axes, sheet-bronze shields, wafer-thin stone spear-points). Burials containing such prestige goods can plausibly be interpreted as those of rich and powerful people, and serve to underline social hierarchy. Remarkable examples include the tomb of Tutankhamen and the terracotta army of the emperor Shi Huangdi.

Religion is often presumed to have been used as another means of reinforcing social hierarchy. The importance of religion and the expense devoted to it, in terms of human labour and raw materials, may be identified in special buildings set apart for sacred functions, fixtures such as altars, and the paraphernalia of ritual, such as gongs, bells, and lamps. Water is often involved in rites, so pools or basins may be of significance; and the sacrifice of animals or humans could be practised. Cult images and symbols can be apparent, together with depictions of people in what looks (to our eyes) like an act of adoration, while votive offerings of food or objects (often broken or hidden) may be found. Important religious buildings or centres are also often associated with great wealth in terms of contents and decoration.

IX

Settlement and Society

Determining what kind of settlement an archaeological site represents is of primary importance, since type of settlement is indicative of type of society. In order to interpret the material, archaeologists have devised four broad social categories: bands, segmentary societies (or tribes), chiefdoms, and states.

Bands are small-scale societies of hunters, gatherers, and fishers, usually numbering fewer than 100 people. They often move around with the seasons, exploiting primarily or exclusively wild resources, so their sites tend to be seasonally occupied camps, together with smaller, more specialized activity areas such as kill or butchery sites, or worksites for making tools, often of stone. Depending on their surroundings, they live in cave entrances or rock shelters, or construct temporary shelters of organic materials such as wood, bone, or hides. The base camps are generally more substantial than the temporary or specialized sites. This kind of settlement is associated with the Palaeolithic period of the Old World (see Stone Age), and the Palaeo-Indian period of the New World (see Native Americans).

Tribes comprise up to a few thousand people, who tend to be settled farmers, though some are pastoralists with a mobile economy. Their life is based primarily on domesticated plants or animals, or both. They occupy settled agricultural homesteads or villages, which collectively form a settlement pattern of fairly evenly spaced sites of similar size, so that no one settlement appears to dominate. This kind of system is associated with the first farmers of both the Old and New World (see Origins of Farming).

It is in chiefdoms, which normally consist of between 5,000 and 20,000 people, that the first real signs of differences in social status become apparent. The ranking system depends on how closely related individuals are to the chief, but there is no true class structure. The chief is the pivot of the whole system, employing craft specialists, and redistributing to his retainers and subjects the offerings of crafts and foodstuffs that he periodically receives from them. The burials of chiefs and their relatives tend to contain very rich grave goods.

Chiefdoms generally have a centre of power, with temples, chiefly residences, and craft specialists. This permanent ceremonial centre, designed for ritual, acts as a focus for the population, but it is not a city with a bureaucracy: those are features that are associated with the fourth and last stage.

The distinction between chiefdoms and early states is not always clear-cut. In developed states, the ruler (a king or queen, sometimes deified) has authority to establish laws and enforce them with an army. Society is stratified into different classes, with farm-workers and poor urban dwellers forming the lower stratum, craft specialists occupying an intermediate position, and priests and relatives of royalty forming the ruling class. Because taxes are levied, a bureaucracy is required. The complex redistribution of tribute and revenue to government, army, and craft specialists is one of the distinguishing features of states.

An urban settlement pattern, with a large population centre of more than 5,000 inhabitants and with large public buildings and temples, is indicative of a state. A settlement hierarchy, with the capital at the heart of a network of subsidiary centres and small villages, can also often be discerned.

Archaeologists normally obtain information about settlement patterns from a thorough study of what has already been found in an area over many years. However, in regions where a thorough picture is required, surveys are carried out by having a territory walked systematically by a team in order to record all archaeological traces that are visible on the surface of the ground. The concentrations of material, and their type, give some indication of the kind of sites involved, their size, timespan, and number, and, in some cases, of the hierarchy of settlements. They may be given provisional labels such as “regional centre”, “local centre”, “village”, “hamlet”, “homestead”, “base camp”, or “specialized activity area”.

In a cave or rock shelter once occupied by mobile bands, the occupation deposits may be deep, having built up over centuries or even many millennia, so that excavation needs to focus primarily on the superimposed layers, and how their contents change through time. By contrast, open-air sites left by hunter-gatherers tend to be far less substantial, with little depth of stratigraphy, so that the horizontal aspect is the focus of archaeological attention, tracing the distribution of fireplaces, other features, and artefact clusters. In rare cases where a single, short phase of occupation can be distinguished at a site, it is even possible to gain some insights into precisely what activities were carried out, often in discrete areas, by observing the location of artefacts, toolmaking debris, animal bones, and so forth.

In settlements occupied by segmentary societies, survey and excavation are the basic approaches to locating sites and determining their layout and extent. In a village, some structures are usually excavated completely, with others being sampled to gain some idea of the range of different structures that may be similar dwellings or more specialized buildings. Within the dwellings, it may be possible to recognize areas used for cooking, sleeping, or eating, and perhaps different areas used by males and by females.

The analysis of grave goods or the degree of elaboration in tombs can reveal much about incipient differentiation in social status in segmentary societies, although it is not always easy to distinguish achieved status from inherited status. However, if children are buried with great wealth, it is reasonable to suppose that they inherited that wealth rather than acquired it. Another major source of information for these societies is their public monuments, many of which must have required the mobilization of large numbers of people drawn from a large area. This scale of endeavour, and the very existence of major ritual centres, seems to mark the transition from the simple, egalitarian societies of the first farmers to the more hierarchical chiefdoms that followed.

Another approach to studying the change from segmentary societies to more complex systems is through examining craft specialization. In segmentary societies, craft production was organized primarily at household level, and village sites may be found to contain pottery kilns, or slag from metalworking. However, it is in the more centralized societies of chiefdoms and states that one can see whole quarters of towns and cities devoted almost entirely to such specialized crafts as stoneworking, potting, leather-working, textiles, brewing, metalworking and glass-working.

Naturally, the task of assessing settlement and society is far easier for those periods and cultures where documents or even maps exist. For example, thousands of inscribed tablets and other documents relating to civilizations of the Near East, Egypt, China, the Aegean, and the Classical world detail relationships between different sites and regions, as well as aspects of their economy, laws, royal edicts, and public announcements. From the Sumerian society of Mesopotamia, for example, hundreds of tablets from temples list fields, the crops harvested in them, craftspeople, and dealings in goods such as grain and livestock.

Where written texts are missing (as in most chiefdoms) or inadequate (as in most states), the hierarchy of sites can only be deduced by archaeological means. For example, a capital city or principal centre can be identified from its size, and from signs of central organization such as an archive, a mint, a palace and major religious buildings, or fortifications. It can sometimes be difficult to establish the precise function of large and (presumably) public buildings; temples, for example, can have a social as well as a religious function. Other aspects of cities-such as the areas for specialist artisans, or the differences between rich and poor housing-are easier to identify. Indeed, one of the fundamental distinguishing features of centralized societies is the disparity between rich and poor, not simply in terms of basic wealth but also in terms of access to resources, facilities, and status: in other words, in social ranking.

X

New Directions

For many years, most archaeologists were content to answer the simpler questions of “what?”, “when?”, “where?”, and “how?”. These questions are still the primary concern of Classical and historical archaeology. However, in the past few decades, theoretical archaeology, which addresses questions of why changes in society occurred, has come into its own, particularly in Britain, Scandinavia, and North America.

In America, one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers was the anthropologist Julian Steward, who brought to explanations of culture change his understanding of how living cultures work. He focused not only on how cultures interact with each other, but also on how the environment could cause cultural change. The British prehistorian Graham Clark, from the 1930s onward, also developed an ecological approach that departed from the traditional artefact-dominated archaeology of his contemporaries; his emphasis on how human populations adapted to their environments led him to collaborate with specialists in many disciplines who could identify plant and animal remains and reconstruct past environment and subsistence in great detail. This pioneering work laid the foundations for an entire branch of modern archaeology.

By the 1960s, this kind of scientific archaeology was well established. With the availability of absolute dating methods, the aim of research turned away from chronology to focus instead on much more challenging questions. Many younger researchers began to deride the simplistic explanations (such as migrations, invasions, diffusion, or vaguely defined influences) that had traditionally been put forward to explain social or cultural change. The so-called “New Archaeology” of the 1960s demanded that every argument be based on a framework of logic, and on sound, testable assumptions. Emphasis was placed firmly on rational explanation rather than description. Cultures were analysed as systems and subsystems, and great attention was devoted to relations with the environment, with subsistence and the economy, and to interactions between different social units in order to help explain developments through time, and from there help establish general principles that, through examination of the archaeology record, could be applied to human history and prehistory.

The New Archaeology was in its turn, dismissed as functionalist, denigrated for its reliance on ecological explanations and for being over-concerned with the utilitarian aspects of human life. One successor to the New Archaeology is Post-Processual, or Interpretive, Archaeology, which incorporates influences from literary studies and from various areas of history and philosophy. It rejects the generalizations that seemed to be a goal of the New Archaeology, and instead lays emphasis on the uniqueness and diversity of each society and culture. In addition, it asserts that the objectivity that was another goal of the New Archaeology is unattainable, and stresses that there is no single or correct way to interpret the past or to undertake research.

XI

Conclusion

Archaeology is the only discipline that can investigate the fundamental events in the human past: when, where, and how humankind arose; the origins of agriculture and the domestication of animals; the development of writing, religion, art, and technology; the evolution of complex societies, the earliest cities, and the process of urbanization. Although the picture of these phenomena that it has pieced together inevitably remains incomplete, with much work still to be done, it is in these fields that some of archaeology’s greatest achievements lie, and it has transformed human knowledge in little over a century.