From Prehistoric Villages to Cities

Settlement Aggregation and Community Transformation

Jennifer Birch, Jennifer Birch

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135045104
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Ciencias sociales
• Categoria: Antropología física

Archaeologists have focused a great deal of attention on explaining the evolution of village societies and the transition to a 'Neolithic' way of life. Considerable interest has also concentrated on urbanism and the rise of the earliest cities. Between these two landmarks in human cultural development lies a critical stage in social and political evolution. Throughout world, at various points in time, people living in small, dispersed village communities have come together into larger and more complex social formations. These community aggregates were, essentially, middle-range; situated between the earliest villages and emergent chiefdoms and states. This volume explores the social processes involved in the creation and maintenance of aggregated communities and how they brought about revolutionary transformations that affected virtually every aspect of a society and its culture.

While there have been a number of studies that address coalescence from a regional perspective, less is understood about how aggregated communities functioned internally. The key premise explored in this volume is that large-scale, long-term cultural transformations were ultimately enacted in the context of daily practices, interactions, and what might be otherwise considered the mundane aspects of everyday life. How did these processes play out "on the ground" in diverse and historically contingent settings? What are the strategies and mechanisms that people adopt in order to facilitate living in larger social formations? What changes in social relations occur when people come together? This volume employs a broadly cross-cultural approach to interrogating these questions, employing case studies which span four continents and more than 10, 000 years of human history.

1 Between Villages and Cities

Settlement Aggregation in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Jennifer Birch

Archaeologists have focused a great deal of attention on explaining the origins of village societies and the transition to a Neolithic way of life. Considerable interest has also concentrated on urbanism and the rise of the earliest cities and states. Between these two revolutions in human cultural development lie a number of organizational forms that represent less well-known phases in human social evolution. In this volume we attempt to arrive at a more thorough understanding of one such intermediate social formation: aggregated settlements.

Throughout the world, at various points in time, people living in small, dispersed village communities came together into larger and more complex social formations. Some of the better-known cases of settlement aggregation come from prehistoric southwestern North America. In the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi areas after AD 1000 there was a shift in settlement whereby populations nucleated, resulting in the abandonment of large tracts of land. People who had been living in small villages with a hundred or so inhabitants came together into large, aggregated pueblos with populations of up to 1,000 or more (cf. Adler 1996; Cordell 1994; Hegmon et al. 1998; Hill et al. 2004; Rautman 2000, this volume). In Neolithic Eurasia the best known example of settlement aggregation may be the site of Çatal-höyük. Inhabited 9,000 years ago by as many as 8,000 people, Çatalhöyük is famous for its huge size, dense occupation, and art rife with religious symbolism (Düring, this volume; Hodder 2010a, 2010b). Many other examples of aggregation that resulted in the formation of large, densely populated settlements have also been identified archaeologically in prehistoric Africa, Europe, Mesoamerica, the Near East, and North America (e.g., Ethridge and Hudson 2002; Gerritsen 2004; Kowalewski 2006; Kuijt 2000; Parkinson 2002) and ethnographically documented in Amazonia and New Guinea (e.g., Gross 1979; Tuzin 2001), to name but a selection.

While these communities differ in size and historical context, what they have in common is that they are all essentially middle range—situated between prehistoric villages and emergent chiefdoms and states. The aim of this volume is to explore the social processes involved in the creation and maintenance of aggregated settlements and how they brought about transformations that affected virtually every aspect of a society and its culture. Our goal here is to draw out some of the similarities and differences in the cultural mechanisms people developed to deal with the challenges of living in larger, more complex social formations. A number of common themes emerge in the chapters contained herein, including the role of the built environment in mediating social relations, the construction of public spaces and structures, the importance and integrative potential of religion, ritual and mortuary behavior, changes in the social means of production and consumption, and oscillations in interregional interaction that accompanied the reconfiguration of geopolitical landscapes. Because many studies of aggregation have focused on settlement patterns at the regional scale, one of our aims is to explore how processes of coalescence played out at the community level, in the diverse and historically contingent settings of everyday life.

THE PROBLEM WITH TYPES

Aggregated settlements do not fit neatly into commonly utilized taxonomies for describing societal or settlement types. The most common sociocultural typologies identify and differentiate between mobile hunting and gathering bands, farmers living in tribal or segmentary societies, chiefdoms, and states with urban centers and complex political and economic systems (e.g., Morgan 1877; Service 1962, 1975). Common classification schemes for types of settlements follow a similarly evolutionary structure, progressing from isolated hamlets or farmsteads to villages and towns, the latter two sometimes belonging to a settlement hierarchy that included regional centers or cities. On the one hand, these typologies are useful because they provide conceptual frameworks for cross-cultural comparison that help us organize our thoughts about different kinds of human societies (Renfrew and Bahn 2004: 181) and settlements (Flannery 1976). However, they also have the potential to mask diversity in the archaeological and ethnographic records and can lead to a disproportionate concern with issues of classification. Take, for example, arguments about whether Cahokia was a large chiefdom or an inchoate state (Anderson 1997: 260; O'Brien 1992; Peregrine 1992, 1996).

In many ways, the societies discussed in this volume fall outside these typological schemes and can only be placed in them with a degree of awkwardness. Some give the impression of being too large to be classified as villages but retain many aspects of social organization associated with seg-mentary village societies. Others developed a degree of social and economic complexity that implies a protourban classification, but lack evidence for hierarchical leadership and social stratification associated with early cities and states. In regions where large-scale processes of aggregation resulted in the concentration of population into fewer large sites, they may also have functioned as regional centers. Given this range of variability, it would seem that aggregated settlements represent processes of social evolution that demonstrate precisely why anthropologists should abandon sociocultural types or at least be critical of their explanatory utility (cf. Feinman and Neitzel 1984; Pauketat 2007; Yoffee 1993). Typologies work as tools for describing and classifying diverse phenomena, but they are far less successful in explaining how sociocultural and sociopolitical forms changed over time. To understand the significant degrees of similarity and variation in aggregated settlements we need to identify common patterns in how processes of aggregation were accomplished. Thus, to explain cultural change we need to identify the mechanisms through which cultural modification occurred and the conditions under which those processes developed. However, before we can identify these mechanisms, we need to more carefully consider exactly what we mean by aggregated settlement.

WHAT KINDS OF SITES ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

The societies and communities discussed here were not a product of internal population growth. Rather, most formed through processes of aggregation that, by and large, involved people abandoning a regional pattern of small, dispersed settlements in favor of aggregation into larger, more nucleated settlements. These communities were permanent and occupied year-round, which differentiates them from seasonal aggregations of mobile bands. While not a universal feature of hunter-gatherer societies, patterns of seasonal nucleation and dispersal served both economic and social needs, bringing people together to find mates, share information, and renew social ties. The importance of aggregations of macrobands extended beyond subsistence needs and included important social and ritual practices. The cave paintings of Altamira (Conkey 1980) and the monumental megalithic enclosures at Göbekli Tepe (Schmidt 2011), both sites of hunter-gatherer aggregations, attest to the cultural importance of and investment into such places. The fact that sites of seasonal nucleation have been identified around the world throughout human history speaks to the antiquity of aggregation as a mechanism for the transmission and reproduction of social practices and the creation and affirmation of cultural identities.

More permanent forms of large, coresidential settlements appear in the archaeological record relatively soon after the shift to sedentism, suggesting that aggregation remained a deeply rooted adaptive mechanism in human societies. This pattern has been referred to by different terms in the archaeological literature, including agglomeration (Hodder and Cessford 2004), aggregation (Kuijt 2000; Rautman 2000), convergence (Tuck 1971), fusion (Bandy 2004), nucleation (Gerritsen 2004), or coalescence (Ethridge and Hudson 2002; Kowalewski 2006). In each case, these changes in settlement brought about the reconfiguration of existing social relations to accommodate larger groups and manage tensions that might arise in the resulting societal formations, resulting in dramatic, and sometimes rapid, transformations in social organization and culture; changes that were every bit as profound as those that accompanied the transition to village life or the rise of cities and civilizations. By and large, rapid settlement aggregation did not favor the emergence of centralized, hierarchical political organization. Instead, corporate or collective decision-making structures developed (Kowalewski 2006: 117). As such, these social formations do not fit traditional understandings of complex societies. However, there is no doubt that the processes and relationships that they encompassed were complicated. In this way this volume represents part of the ongoing effort to broaden archaeology's focus beyond preoccupation with the development of vertically controlled and integrated societies to include more horizontal structures of organizational complexity (cf. Blanton et al. 1996; Crumley 1995; Johnson 1978; McIntosh 1999; Spielmann 1994) and how these sociopolitical configurations come into being.

The sites discussed in this volume span more than 10,000 years of human history and are spread across four continents (Figure 1.1). I believe it would be counterproductive to attempt to find a common settlement type that defines them. It is, however, useful to review the terms that the authors use. Düring discusses “community organization” at Çatalhöyük, which has been described variously as a “large agglomerated village” (Hodder and Cessford 2004), a “town” (Hodder 2010a), and a “city” (Mellaart 1967); though Düring and his contemporaries reject such an urban classification. Duffy and colleagues discuss “nucleated village” settlements in Neolithic Europe, and

Figure 1.1 Locations of sites and regions discussed in this volume: (1) Çatalhöyük, Konya Plain, Anatolia (Düring); (2) Körös Region, Great Hungarian Plain, Hungary (Duffy et al.); (3) Azoria, Kavousi area, northeastern Crete (Haggis); (4) Taraco Peninsula, Lake Titicaca Basin (Beck); (5) Salinas Region, Southwestern United States (Rautman); (6) Southern Tucson Basin, Southwestern United States (Wallace and Lindeman); (7) South-central Ontario, Canada (Birch and Williamson); (8) Southern Appalachians, Southeastern United States (Rodning).

Haggis focuses on an “archaic city” in Eastern Crete. Beck's platform complexes were constructed by middle formative “villagers” in Bolivia. Rautman refers to the pueblo settlements in her study area in the U.S. Southwest as “village-communities.” It is worth noting that the term pueblo has its etymological roots in the Castilian word for “town.” Wallace and Lindeman, also writing about the Southwest, refer to “villages” and, more basically, “room blocks and platform mounds with attached rooms,” noting that while earlier researchers described settlements in the Lower Tucson Valley as “pueblos,” they would not in fact be called pueblos by today's definition. Moving to eastern North America, the Cherokee “towns” discussed by Rodning (also deriving their name from a European lexicon) are somewhat smaller than the aggregated ancestral Huron “villages” discussed by Birch and Williamson. In terms of how these social formations developed, some resulted from the aggregation of numerous small village-based communities whether physically (e.g., Birch; Düring; Haggis; Rautman; Wallace and Lindeman) or symbolically (e.g., Beck; Rodning), others were the result of the breakdown or reorganization of larger or more complex social formations or were living within range of such societies (e.g., Duffy et al.). Over time some went on to become urbanized (e.g., Haggis). Others allied into polities or confederacies (e.g., Birch; Rodning), and some eventually dissolved, returning to a more distributed settlement pattern (e.g., Duffy et al.; Wallace and Lindeman).

In each case, the inhabitants of these communities faced a common challenge: how to organize and sustain populations living together in larger groups than existed before. As such, we are not so much interested in why these settlements formed, but rather how they came to be and how they were maintained. Other questions include: Once people came together, what kept them together? How did they provide the necessities of life for these populations? What role did shared ideologies play in fostering a sense of community? What social, political, economic, or formal mechanisms did people develop to maintain community cohesion? Was sustained settlement nucleation a desired outcome, or was it a short-lived response to particular historical or environmental conditions? In what ways were they different compared to what came before? It is the relationships between households, suprahousehold units, and communitywide organizational structures that are the subject of our interest. Because mechanisms for both integrating and ordering populations develop primarily in the context of day-to-day interaction and decision making, the local community is the most appropriate scale of analysis for exploring changes in social production and reproduction in the context of settlement aggregation.

AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF COMMUNITIES

This study places the community at the center of historical processes of sociocultural change. The term community is frequently used in archaeological discourse yet remains somewhat amorphous in definition. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a multitude of sociological and ethnographic studies have attempted to define the community as a geographic area, a group of people living in a particular place, an area of common life, and, in political discourse, a powerful organizing ideal (Cohen 1985; Etzioni 1995; Hoggett 1997; Suttles 1972). While the concept of com...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Archaeology
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Between Villages and Cities: Settlement Aggregation in Cross-Cultural Perspective
• 2 The Anatomy of a Prehistoric Community: Reconsidering Çatalhöyük
• 3 Coming Together, Falling Apart: A Multiscalar Approach to Prehistoric Aggregation and Interaction on the Great Hungarian Plain
• 4 Social Organization and Aggregated Settlement Structure in an Archaic Greek City on Crete (ca. 600 BC)
• 5 Appropriating Community: Platforms and Power on the Formative Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia
• 6 Social Integration and the Built Environment of Aggregated Communities in the North American Puebloan Southwest
• 7 Competition and Cooperation: Late Classic Period Aggregation in the Southern Tucson Basin
• 8 Organizational Complexity in Ancestral Wendat Communities
• 9 Community Aggregation through Public Architecture: Cherokee Townhouses
• 10 The Work of Making Community
• Contributors
• Index