Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind
[Part 3 of 3] Constructing the Community, settlement, group-oriented and individualising societies, social differentiation, the functions of monuments, segmentation, and the rise of ethnicity..
In his book Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind, published in 2007 …
Colin Renfrew wrote:
Chapter Seven
Constructing the Community
[3rd and final part]
Settlement and Community: Group-Oriented and Individualising Societies
Perhaps the most important new social or institutional fact that emerges from the reality of living together in a village like those of the early neolithic of western Asia is the community of the inhabitants. From the association of living together, and from the daily interactions of the village street, come shared understandings and relationships.
The mobile hunter-gatherer band was no doubt also very rich in interpersonal relationships. But in at least two senses such bands were different. In the first place the social group is usually much smaller in mobile societies – usually not more than twenty or thirty people living together for most of the year. Certainly such societies do often have seasonal get-togethers in which further relationships are forged and maintained, and at which several hundred people may assemble. But this is not the same as the permanent association of village dwellers in an established settlement that may range in scale from a couple of dozen to several hundred individuals.
Moreover the associations between people in mobile societies can be transitory. If group members disagree, they can disaffiliate. They can leave the band and, if appropriate, take up membership of another group. This is more difficult in an agricultural society with a permanent village settlement and with rights of access to cultivable land. Of course at marriage, the groom (or sometimes the bride) will move out, depending on the prevailing residence patterning – on whether the community is matrilocal or patrilocal, to use anthropological terminology, but that is simply a feature of the marriage system prevailing.
Living in a village could mean more than simply residing in adjacent houses: it involved participation in a wider sense. As we have seen, in western Asia some of the earliest villages, even before the development of agriculture, had public spaces that may have been shrines, and where communal rituals may have been practised. Villages had shared burial rites and individuals were buried following the prevailing conventions. In some cases they practised communal burial. Not surprisingly, there is a tendency within a village for people to do things the same way. For instance in pottery-making or in weaving, the same practices or conventions are often followed, so that a coherent style may develop that is reflected in form and in decoration. In most villages people of the same gender and age-grade dress the same way, and use similar forms of personal adornment.
Villages and livestock had on some occasions to be defended from predators, human as well as animal. So in some cases defensive walls were built to defend the community. Inevitably too, members of the community learnt the same language, even if some of them spoke in addition the languages of their parents, in cases where one or both parents originated outside the village.
These features, which tend to relate and bring together community members, often also serve to differentiate them from the members of other communities, who have their own conventions, their own ways of doing things. There is inevitably some sense of ‘us’ (inhabitants of our village) and ‘them’ (members of other communities). We have here the roots of ethnicity, of that sense of belonging to a … permanent group of related people that differs in well-defined ways from other such groups.
In early food-producing societies, and indeed in more complex societies too, it is possible also to make a rather basic distinction. Most early societies appear to assign very little personal importance to prominent individuals. There is no evidence for what the anthropologist calls salient ranking. On the contrary, so far as personal equipment and adornments go, they might at first sight be described by the anthropologist as ‘egalitarian’ societies, with the kit and personal possessions of one person much like those of another. The settlement pattern is often little more than a series of simple dispersed farmsteads, each resembling the next, without any overarching social articulation. The houses within a village are similar to each other; none is pre-eminent. But in some cases such societies are nonetheless capable of significant collective action. Such collective action can result in impressive collective works. …
In practice group action is often most evident in the form of collective work. The anthropologist Edmund Leach indicated that, in traditional Burma, there were irrigation projects that required collective endeavour on a considerable scale, far exceeding the resources of the single farmstead or even of the single village. Yet they were not the product of any centralised organisation with permanent leadership. Similarly, perhaps, in the prehistoric record of north-western Europe, there are, as we saw earlier, substantial stone structures, frequently termed ‘megalithic’, whose construction required considerable group endeavour. Their very early date, and hence their exceptional originality, was of course made clear in the course of the radiocarbon revolution. The chambered cairns of north-western Europe – dating to the neolithic period, back to 3500 BCE (centuries before the pyramids of Egypt) – at the more modest end of the scale, must have required a labour input of some 10,000 work hours. The larger henge monuments of southern Britain may have needed as many as 1 million work hours. And it has been calculated that the biggest monuments of the time, such as Silbury Hill and Stonehenge, would have needed tens of millions of work hours when the transportation of raw materials as well as the construction work is taken into account.
Yet these societies in general do not give us much trace of the individuals involved. These were certainly not state societies. They are not accompanied by rich burials, nor by any kind of finery. Prestige goods, such as polished stone axes of attractive materials, are not in general found associated with burials. Whether or not it is appropriate to designate societies whose achievements imply considerable managerial resources, as ‘chiefdoms’, is a matter for discussion. Certainly one does not see any evidence in the archaeological record associated with these monuments for the presence of the chief in person. But the group achievement is evident. For that reason the term ‘group-oriented’ is appropriate for such societies. …
… But, with a few exceptions, they betray little sign of prominent individuals of high status. That there was a management capacity no one can doubt. But it was not centred upon the person of an individual who was accorded prominent high status, celebrated by conspicuous symbolic artefacts. In the absence of evidence of a centralised controlling power, the construction of such impressive features has sometimes seemed enigmatic.
The recognition of the capacity of ‘group-oriented’ societies to produce such impressive collective works is essential if a clear account is to be given of prehistory.
Very similar observations can be made about the early and impressive constructions of coastal Peru, some of which were the product of societies still living largely off the produce of the sea, and not yet practising the cultivation of maize. … Yet these seem to have been egalitarian societies without any indication of rich and prominent individuals.
The end product of such group activity was often a feature of little obvious practical value: a monument, or sometimes a monumental complex. A monument is a construction, the product of a process of material engagement whose significance may be described as social and conceptual, and whose construction and use instigates and perpetuates memory.
The Constructive Role of Monuments
In many agricultural societies, the settlement pattern is one of dispersed farmsteads rather than of permanent villages. That is very clear during the neolithic period in western and north-western Europe. For, whereas in south-eastern Europe, in Greece and the Balkans, permanent village settlements often resulted in the formation of tell mounds like those of western Asia, in temperate lands with their higher rainfall, mud-built buildings are not such a good option. Further north and west, village communities of this kind are seldom found during the neolithic period.
It is clear that the settlement pattern was sometimes a dispersed one of single homesteads or small groups of houses, which frequently went out of use after a few years. In such cases, the construction of stone monuments, often burial monuments, sometimes seems to have provided an element of permanence that the domestic settlement itself, in the absence of villages or of permanent homesteads, could no longer offer.
Stone monuments do indeed play a conspicuous role among the group-oriented prehistoric societies of north-western Europe. These were neolithic societies, contemporary with or following the first spread of farming from Anatolia to north-western Europe. But in north-western Europe, finds of villages of well-constructed houses resembling those of south-eastern Europe are very rare. In fact, in some areas, traces of housing are so scarce that it may be questioned whether these should be regarded as sedentary societies at all. Some of the remarks made earlier about the new ways of life open to early sedentary and agricultural societies may not apply. Yet they do display a new sense of community. Their mode of burial did involve the investment of much effort in the construction of permanent burial facilities. These vary in scale from the earthen long barrows of southern England and the stone chambered cairns of Scotland to the very much larger henge monuments, some of which, like Stonehenge and Avebury, contain circles of standing stones.
These monuments were often viewed by earlier generations of archaeologists as the result of the migration of peoples or the diffusion of ideas from more civilised lands, following the old idea of ‘ex Oriente lux’. Now, on the contrary, they are viewed as local products, and their construction can be considered in social terms such as we have been discussing. One view of the long barrows and chambered cairns is that they served as ‘territorial markers of segmentary societies’. The apparent regularity in their spatial distribution suggests that each was associated with the habitual territory of a resident population (not necessarily a sedentary one).
The notion of ‘segmentary society’ implies little more than that these were small, autonomous social units of comparable size to their neighbours. Often the larger monuments have been seen in similar terms, reflecting the growth of larger social units in the later neolithic period, while the chambered cairns date back to the earlier neolithic period.
Such a view might nonetheless be criticised as somewhat ‘reflective’, in the sense that it interprets the monuments as reflecting or materialising the existing social structure. Segmentary societies, it would be argued, often need a ritual and ceremonial focus, and this need was met by these local centres. In the same way, larger and group-oriented societies need a focus, and the great henges would have served as ceremonial centres and perhaps also as pilgrimage centres for their parent communities. Thus they too would reflect aspects of the social order. Now, however, the material engagement approach outlined in the last chapter would suggest a more active role for material culture and for these monuments. Culture need not be seen as something that merely reflects the social reality; it is rather part of the process by which that reality is constituted. The development of social institutions can be viewed as part of the process of the increasing engagement of humans with the material world, in this case in architectural terms. It is in the course of this engagement that new institutional facts are called into being, and new social institutions initiated.
This approach can certainly be applied to neolithic Britain. In the case of the chambered cairns and long barrows, rather than reflecting a pre-existing social order, they helped to call that order into being. At the time of its first inception the long barrow or the cairn will have been conceived as a project, and one that would need some 10,000 work hours. In order to bring this about, the rather small group of occupants of the territory in question would need to invest a great deal of their time. They might need also to invoke the aid of neighbours in adjoining territories, who were encouraged no doubt by the prospect of feasting and local celebration. One can imagine that when the monument was completed it might itself have become the locus for further, annual celebrations and feast days. It served henceforth both as a burying place and as a social focus for the territory. The suggestion here is that it was as a result of these ongoing social activities, along with other activities of a ritual or religious nature, that the cairn or barrow came to be the centre of what soon emerged, as a direct result of these activities, as a living community. It is reasonable to suggest that this community would not have come into being had it not been for the ongoing activities centred upon the cairn.
This line of reasoning helps us to see how a particular form of engagement with the material world – the construction and varied use of a communal burial cairn – could help promote the emergence of a coherent new social unit. The same point applies with even greater weight, on a larger scale, where the henge monuments are concerned. Their construction certainly implies some pooling together of labour from a number of the smaller, earlier territories. But once the henge was built, it could serve as a focal point for those territories. This too is an example of the active role of material culture. It reflects a new kind of engagement, where a larger group of people would use this constructed monument for ritual, social and perhaps for religious purposes. The end product was the emergence of a coherent larger community where none was before.
In considering the emergence of group-oriented societies in this way, centring upon the construction of a regional or territorial monument, it is worth asking further about what precisely was so attractive about a circle of stones that it should act as the centre for important rituals (as we are suggesting), and eventually become the central focus for an emergent new social unit.
The answer is clear, even if it remains a little mysterious. It resides in the affective power of any major monumental construction, in its capacity to impress us with its material presence, as well as to enhance a sense of place. The landscape in which we live is a constructed environment, rich with the memories of earlier people and events. Even without man-made constructions, the accretion of these spatially specific memories makes the landscape as much a social as a physical reality. The insertion into this landscape of the memories associated with a great monument reinforces that process. It might be an exaggeration to suggest that the emergence into nationhood of the state now called Zimbabwe was a product of the earlier construction of the monument known as Great Zimbabwe. Yet at the same time, the achievements of the indigenous ancestors of the area did play a role in the subsequent and more recent self-recognition, the renewed ethnicity, of the population concerned.
There is, in the construction of even the simplest of monuments, as the recent that work of the sculptor Richard Long has shown, something that attracts and engages our emotions. This too is a form of engagement with the natural and material world. It is an action that is more symbolic than practical. But the underlying symbolic relationship remains a little obscure. Again one may think of what we may call constitutive or immanent symbolism, for it is not initially clear just what the constructed feature actually symbolises. It just is. And, by its arresting presence, it serves as a marker for the actions of its makers and for what those makers wished to remember. That, after all, is precisely what a monument is. Later it can take on a more explicit meaning, serving to represent and indeed to ‘symbolise’ the community whose very emergence it has facilitated.
The Rise of Ethnicity
The monument, like the village itself, can thus bring a new kind of social reality to the community that inhabits the locality or the local territory in which the monument is located. The very process of constructing the village or the monument in a sense calls that community into being. And the continued use of the monument, for ritual or other social purposes, like that of the village, maintains the reality of the social group that constitutes the community.
Moreover, as the neolithic record of Britain exemplifies, there can be hierarchies of monuments. In Orkney there are the local chambered cairns, representing around ten thousand work hours and serving a local community. Then there are the great central monuments, the stone circles—the Ring of Brodgar, the Stones of Stenness—that represent an order of magnitude more of work, something like a hundred thousand work hours. They will have served the entire mainland of Orkney. Their construction and the rituals practiced there will have given a sense of community to the entire island population.
The same can be said for the monuments of south Britain built at the same time. The long barrows of the Early Neolithic that are so frequent in the Wessex area (representing about ten thousand work hours), and the causewayed camps (about a hundred thousand work hours), each serving a group of long-barrow territories, were superseded as monumental edifices by the henge monuments of the later neolithic. These were regional monuments, each representing about a million work hours. They are interpreted as ritual centers, a conspicuous part of a sacred landscape. The process culminated in the construction of Stonehenge, representing something like thirty million work hours.
We do not have much evidence, other than the monuments themselves, for the social structure of south Britain at this time. But it is possible that strong group affiliations were associated with the henge monuments, and that these affiliations were associated too with the sort of tribal loyalties that we would today term “ethnic”. Of course, early in the last century Gustaf Kossinna used archaeological evidence to speak of “peoples” in what we now regard as a misleading way. But the approach here is a different one.
We are not speaking of supposedly preexisting peoples or ethnic groups, defined forever by their alleged genetic identity. Instead we can perhaps see here the very emergence of ethnicities where previously there were only more localized affiliations. Ethnicities were formed through living together, and from the experiences and collective endeavors to which the monuments continue today to bear testimony.
… It remains to be considered how far the discussion is valid when other trajectories of development are considered. The discussion of property earlier in this chapter may not be directly applicable in quite the same way to other trajectories, where other concepts and institutional facts may have been formulated to regulate the ownership and inheritance of goods. Certainly livestock bring a particular kind of wealth, but the herds of sheep and goat seen in prehistoric Europe and Western Asia were not a feature of the Americas or of eastern Asia. …
[That is the end of CHAPTER 7, and the END of this 3-part exhibit.]
The Source has been:
Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2007
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