Cameron M. Smith - Anthropology For Dummies

Explaining how cultures changed through time is one of the most contentious issues in the field of anthropology. Many models have been proposed to account for cultural change, including

Cultural ecology: These approaches consider the most important changes in human culture to be traced back to ecological issues, such as food and water supply. These factors are certainly important, but some argue that cultural ecology misses the importance of factors such as religion and even the individual human, inappropriately turning people into “automatons” that simply react to environmental change.

Postmodernism: Postmodern approaches place a high value on the ability of such factors as gender, ideology, religion, myth, and the individual to change culture over time.

Economic change models: These approaches focus on the organization of labor and the negotiation of social inequalities (haves and have-nots) in society. They have been interesting and useful for some archaeological investigations, but don’t work for periods when ancient labor wasn’t organized as it is in the industrial world, and labor divisions and social inequalities weren’t very prominent (as in the many millions of years of foraging societies).

Combining the terms cultural and evolution is enough to make some anthropologists see red. That’s because for a long time (from the late 1800s through the 1950s), anthropology labored under a mistaken concept of how culture changed through time, crudely grafting Darwinian evolution to the concept of culture. When this mistaken view was overturned in the mid-20th century, many anthropologists also threw out an evolutionary approach to culture, a move that has many archaeologists — me included — a little steamed.

The mistaken idea was that all human societies were on a Darwinian track toward Civilization and that those that didn’t make it were — however unfortunately — simply being selected against or weeded out by the pitiless forces of nature. This idea roughly categorized foraging peoples (like Australian Aborigines, most Native Americans, and polar hunting folk) into the category of Savagery, followed by small-scale farmers (like the chiefdoms of Hawaii or New Guinea) in the category of Barbarism, which could only evolve into — and rightly should evolve into, according to the idea — Civilization. That Civilization was typified by the Victorian white male of London was a nuance that few Victorians noticed. This misconception of how culture changed (that all cultures were on the same track) was clearly and carefully used to justify colonial efforts worldwide that were considered beneficial; after all, Civilization was being brought to the Savages.

For many reasons, this theory revealed itself to be a flawed understanding: Human societies, it turns out, don’t have an automatic drive toward becoming white Victorian males. But this flaw isn’t enough to entirely ditch the concept that culture changes through time by an evolutionary process.

Archaeologists, deeply concerned with the change in cultures through time, have most carefully examined cultural change, and they are most convinced that it does change by an evolutionary process. Culture doesn’t ride on the genes — it’s taught by language. Every society has its own way of surviving, but the principles of evolution apply to culture in some important ways. I don’t dwell on them in this book, but if you’re interested, you may want to start with some more advanced readings in archaeology, such as textbooks that cover archaeological theory.

Archaeologists have proposed dozens of other lenses through which to envision and understand cultural change through time, and they’re fascinating (even the really whacky ones!). But none, in my view, has entirely explained everything, and in my experience, most archaeologists agree with me. Culture is complex, people are complex, and all kinds of events have happened in the past to shape cultural change. I say this in a few other places in this book: Single-factor models never seem to pan out.

Archaeology deals with change through time as reflected by the artifacts used by ancient humans, so its limit goes back to over three million years ago, the age of the earliest (known) artifacts. Archaeologists commonly mutter “We don’t do dinosaurs!” when people ask whether they’re excavating a dinosaur because the dinosaurs — studied by paleontologists — became extinct around 65 million years ago.

Like all the fields of anthropology, archaeology even has its own subfields; I describe two of the most important ones — dealing with the prehistoric and historic periods of human evolution — in the following sections.

The earliest writing systems go back to about 6,000 years ago, and the entire period between that time and the time of the first stone tools (the first artifacts), around three million years ago, is called prehistory .

Prehistoric archaeology studies this period with many of the same concerns as historic-period archaeologists. However, some aspects of prehistoric archaeology are unique:

A concern with ecology and adaptation: Whereas most peoples written about in the historic period were agriculturalists, people of the prehistoric period were mostly foragers (formerly known as hunters and gatherers) who moved across landscapes to hunt and gather their food; figuring out what they ate and how they got their hands on it (that is, adapted to their selective environments) is a central focus of prehistory.

A focus on stone, bone, and antler artifacts: Before the historic farming societies, artifacts made from these materials were the most likely to have survived decay over the millennia. Wood was also important, but it decays quickly and not much survives beyond a few thousand years.

A concern with egalitarian social organization: Unlike the farming societies, which ranked members according to how much they did or didn’t have, prehistoric societies were essentially socially equal. A significant question is how ancient cultures maintained this egalitarian mode of social organization.

Keep in mind that just because some societies took up writing around 6,000 years ago, not all did; many remained foragers living outside the boundaries of growing civilizations, like that of the Aztecs or the Maya. These people included the Native Americans, people who lived in the Americas for well over 10,000 years before the arrival of European explorers. Those explorers wrote down what they observed of the Native Americans, so documents do exist that describe people on the margins of history. But of course the Native Americans had their own histories, told as oral traditions, so they weren’t people without history. Today, a lot of their past is told through archaeology.

Historic archaeology takes advantage of the fact that about 6,000 years ago, some human groups invented language and began to write down things that can tell about the past. In a way, because I’m primarily a prehistoric archaeologist (normally working on cultures that did not have writing systems), I envy historic archaeologists; they have a lot more information to go on when they start their research. On the other hand, when I start looking into the billions of pages of historic records about the ancient world, I realize that the historic record presents as many problems as it does solutions!

Historic archaeology proceeds with many of the same concerns and methods as prehistoric archaeology, but it often addresses two issues of particular importance.