A New Social Science of Prehistory
Written by Michael Heller
In upcoming posts I will be looking at the decisions all prehistoric societies had to make, their processes of decision making, and the character and functions of their leaders. Beforehand, though, I should remind readers of the framework I identified in previous posts, and be more specific about directions it will now take. In particular, I emphasise the newness of my conceptual approach. In the prehistoric contexts my intention is to dispense with dichotomies of egalitarian and non-egalitarian societies, and of hierarchical and non-hierarchical societies. I dispense also with typologies of chiefs and chiefdoms which intrude into forms of governance which properly belong under headings of rulership with cores or centres. These and related concepts are in my view misleading in their own contexts, and simply set up problems for the analysis of all future societies. Specific reasons for faulting these almost universally accepted approaches will be identified in the analysis of decision making and leadership.
Over the past 150 years the social sciences have failed to build a clear and simple set of categorical concepts for identifying and explaining the fundamental universalistic differences among the ‘prehistoric’ (before administration, rulership, writing, and science) and the ‘primitive’ (contemporary iterations of the prehistoric) societies. My evolutionary framework of individualistic, communalistic, and coordinative societies is intended to remedy this shortcoming. The objective now is to put it to the test with an overview of the joint evolution of three types of group society as they survived the ravages of time, responded to the opportunities and pressures which they must have encountered, and reshaped themselves along identifiable trajectories which, at a given moment, can be said to be primarily individualistic, or communalistic, or coordinative.
This was not an evolution by ‘stages’. There was a back and forth in the forms and magnitudes of sociated governance. Human groups slid from person-over-person individualism, group-over-person communalism, and small or large person-over-group coordination. To and fro. In practice this means all prehistoric societies were a little of each, simultaneously. However, the observer from the vantage of long run history has the advantage of being able to see the factor that distinguishes one from the other. That factor is ‘governance’ — the mechanism and process of making the decisions about, and for, society. To govern is to make a choice about safety, shelter, and subsistence, and the social order conditions of bordering, bonding, and binding. The decision can range from the very trivial (e.g. what to do about the husband who is abandoned by his wife) to matters of life and death for individuals or societies. It is largely for this reason that we are compelled to define a society by its governance. And, happily, the essentials of governance are relatively easy to define and differentiate.
Our knowledge of these processes is partially post hoc in that we already know the main trends of evolutionary pressure — group size dynamics, material innovations, knowledge acquisition, the sheer weight of interactional experience. These emerged in the (inevitably) organisational nature of agriculture, and pushed toward optimising centralised and hierarchical administrative governance. In any study of a ‘known to have existed society’ it helps to know what came afterwards. Then we may speculate about the reasons why choices were made to move in new ‘known future’ directions.
However, there is no choice but to rely on speculative proxies, that is, examples of societies which survived or were regenerated in fact or fiction, as recorded much later in history. From these proxies we can extract ‘universals’ — the features of governance that, in the past as in the future, were probably the equivalent or actual ‘constants’ corresponding to such factors as the dynamics of group size, types of environmental or material constraint, the cognitive constraints, and the motivational impulses.
Whether they were mobile, stationary, or seasonal, and whether or not they stored some foodstuffs and engaged in some animal husbandry, all humans existing before the agricultural revolution lived in societies that were materially determined by the activities relating to hunting and gathering. The empirical proxies inevitably have epistemological shortcomings arising from different degrees and types of ‘spoliation’ of ‘pristine’ pre-agricultural and pre-rulership conditions. What we have as evidence ranges from practices recorded in the nineteenth century, the anthropological studies of the mid-twentieth century, and contemporary studies done in a wholly transformed world. I also consider the Homeric society as evidence of ‘starting over’ after collapse.
I will be relying heavily on excellent books written by acclaimed scholars in recent years that attempt to summarise and bring order to large fields of social science for their own purposes of freshly conceptualising the essential prehistoric transitions — drawing inter alia on archeology, biology, the sciences of the mind, and good ‘proxies’ which accumulated in nineteenth and twentieth century fieldwork studies. While I may disagree with their interpretations of the evidence, I do trust their evidence.
Therefore the evidence I use to support my new conceptualisation of prehistoric and primitive societies is taken from a top layer of primary authors who already expertly synthesised the vast secondary literature (though I also quote or cite my favourites among the secondary sources). The ‘primary’ authors open on my desktop (as I write) include Christopher Boehm, Timothy Earle, Kent Flannery, Robert Kelly, Richard Lee, Charles Maisels, Michael Mann, and Ian Morris. I also pay close attention to scholars who have more recently undertaken meta reviews and modelling exercises based on many existing field studies in order to elucidate the basic components of governance, such as ‘leadership’ and ‘decision’ making (e.g. Zachary H. Garfield and his coauthors).
My selections within this range are determined by what they reveal about the only sociational factors that we may confidently conclude were universal across time and place: the mechanisms and individuals for leadership and decision making in governance.
On logical-theoretical grounds I assume that decision making rested initially on individualised characteristics — those who speak and those who listen in assembly contexts being then ‘sorted’ according to strength, intelligence, personality, sex and age. Thereafter this small-scale framework was adapted to two primary and emergent parallel or alternating imperatives in more or less larger scale group settings for —
inclusion and sharing of influence in ‘all people’ assemblies with irregular, informal individualised leadership, or,
more formalised and regularised restriction of decision making to ‘ranked people’ within leadership assemblies.
In fluid voice-exit-loyalty sociational settings external to family or household I also assume absence of individual or organisational ‘power’ to routinely compel obedience, and absence of individual or organisational ‘authority’ to routinely enforce decisions.
I further assume structures of decision making that somehow but certainly supersede animalistic and biological differentiations of individualised governance, and precede ‘the organisation’. Then, group-society variables of decisions and leadership indicate only two mechanisms for prehistoric decisions — communalism or coordination. As I hope to show, this pair of utilitarian and often intertwined mechanisms invalidate the earlier dichotomies and concepts, such as egalitarianism, chieftainship, or hierarchy.
Coming up
Decision, leadership, and assembly processes: analysed with my previously discussed perspectives for the π system code, the 4 ‘Rs’ (rationality, rules, reckoning, rightness) the three ‘Bs’ (border, bond, bind) , and the three ‘Ss’ (safety, subsistence, shelter).
The organic illustration is:
Natura Morta (V. 907), by Giorgio Morandi, 1954