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0:02
Starting off in Lavenda and Schultz. How do anthropologists define social complexity? This is another question that you've never had before, and perhaps anthropologists themselves haven't had it that much in the sense that we just thought it was easy. You just look around and you're like, "Hey, look at this society. They look pretty complex. They have PowerPoints and they can come to class. That's complex. And these other people are just hunting. That must be simple." So
0:32
at the time, in the olden days, this didn't seem like a big question, but as anthropology grew, it actually became a more important question or a more complex question than we thought it was. In part, this is because you never know where exactly to draw the boundaries around a society. If you draw the boundaries around, let's say, a certain segment of society that is making pots, you might say, "Well, that looks like a pretty simple society. They're just making pots." So
1:08
Lavenda and Schultz settle on this definition of complex: that you have large populations,
1:15
extensive division of labor, and occupational specialization (224). Again, it depends to a certain extent where you draw the boundaries around your society, especially when you're looking at it archaeologically. To a certain extent, extensive division of labor and occupational specialization are going to go together because if you have people who are specialized doing certain tasks, then the society is going to have to have its labor divided up.
1:45
It doesn't entirely solve the problem, in part because when you think about your individual life being a specialized person doing one task--let's say making pots--your
2:02
life might become simpler than if you have to do all the things that you would have to do in a hunting and gathering or what they call a foraging society. So like I said, in some ways this definition is difficult because life is not simple, and it might become in some senses simpler if you are in a specialized labor-divided society (225). The other thing is that the simpler your tools are,
2:40
in some ways the more complex your skills need to be to use them.
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So I like to use the example another anthropologist [Tim Ingold] uses of a lasso.
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A lasso is perhaps one of the simplest tools a person can possibly imagine. It's just a rope with a loop in it. However, if I handed you all lassos, how many of you could lasso a running horse?
3:16
None of you. Yeah, me either, even though I grew up in Montana. I can't do it. It would take a lifetime perhaps, and even then it's probably pretty hard to do. So it would require an immense bodily effort to do it. However, if I hand you a very complex tool, an iPhone, how many of you could make it work?
3:43
You'd all be able to make it work because, in fact, the skill of using an iPhone is pretty simple. In some ways, you could say the more complex your tools are--I
3:52
don't want to say it like this, but I just will--the stupider you can be, because, you know, the smartphone's doing it for me. All I have to do is push buttons with my fingers. I don't need complex skills in order to deal with this thing. This all adds up to something that several of you noted in your comments, which is extremely important. This little subheading that says, "Why is it incorrect to describe foraging (hunting/gathering) societies as simple?"
4:21
So we do want to figure out what a complex society is, but that doesn't mean we look back or look across at people who are hunting and gathering and say, "Aha! Life is simple. Life was simple back then. It was easy, simple back then." It's not a simple society; it's differently complex. So we still need to explain, or I would say one of the perhaps easier ways to think about this is to think about this from an archaeological perspective. And we're still doing
4:56
some archaeology here, so that's what we'll think about. How do you see the evidence for a complex society archaeologically? One of the things that you'll notice immediately is it's usually more fun to dig up a complex society than it is a hunting and gathering society. A lot of the things in hunting and gathering societies are cool, but they're transitory. They go away pretty fast, whereas some of the things in a complex society are super fun to dig up.
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So how would you know archaeologically speaking--I've put these three things here: population, agriculture (I usually need agriculture), and craft specialization or division of labor--how might you know that you're dealing with a large population archaeologically? What might you find?
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What's your evidence?
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Maybe this is why I drove everybody away with my persistent questions. What might be cool to find archaeologically if you're out there on a dig that would give you some of this stuff?
6:40
What is the evidence for a large population?
6:50
Big buildings, yay! Exactly. Finding buildings, foundations, those kinds of things, maybe even in an urban format (226). Sure, agriculture. So we think, you know, it's cool to find hunting and gathering stuff, but it's also cool to find evidence of irrigation canals, the tools of agriculture, that they've been modifying the landscape in a way, clearing fields, storage buildings. We saw that granary in the last class--the storage of agriculture.
7:26
We could think about craft specialization. Do we find tools and things that people are using concentrated in certain areas or these kinds of artifacts? How are they concentrated? So that is part of digging up or part of the things that are fun to find archaeologically and give you evidence that you're in a complex society. But there's something perhaps--and I think it's only this time that I read Lavenda and Schultz that it dawned on me--that
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the thing that makes a complex society complex or complicated is really that people have a different form of relating to each other, and that is that they are stratified, whether they live in a hierarchy. And there's a lot of evidence archaeologically for that as well,
8:17
which is very exciting to find, fun to find, like pyramids and various big things that give you a sense that somebody's wanting to build something big, a kind of a pyramid or a monument or something like that. That's showing that they have an idea that they are in charge of things and can mobilize people in order to do what they want.
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Similarly, with having being buried with stuff, with wealth, with what we call grave goods and tombs, sometimes elaborate tombs, sometimes at the bottom of a pyramid, it shows that there's a differentiation in society and people are stratified into social classes. Especially if you have children--like, you know, if a child dies and that child is buried with elaborate stuff, it shows you that even though the kid hasn't necessarily done anything,
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they still enjoy a social status just based on being part of perhaps an inherited social status.
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And so some of the archaeologists have called these things--we know the term artifacts--they call them "powerfacts," which is basically that they are things that give us testimony or that the elite, the top of society, would use to prove that they're the fittest to rule the society, to be able to tell people what to do (227). And so some of you in your questions asked, do you need or can a society thrive without being
10:03
stratified? Or will these other societies be able to catch up? Do we need stratification? Do we need a hierarchy in order to advance? Like we think if we can build a pyramid, then we're doing something cool, right? We think, "Yeah, that means I can do something." And what's, I think, interesting--and it's in that section on how we shouldn't describe hunter-gatherers as simple--there's a few things going on. Now, on the one hand,
10:38
most pyramids are not that difficult. I mean, some of them are amazingly amazing architecturally. Some of them are kind of building up earth over time. It's a pretty simple geometric shape, and that's why we see it in a whole bunch of different societies. But what they say is that, yes, a hunter and gatherer band or a foraging society probably is not
11:08
going to be able to build the pyramid. But in another sense, they would be like, "What is the point? Why are you building a pyramid?" That would be one of their things because, as we talked about, they're relatively egalitarian society. They wouldn't think that there was a point to building a pyramid. That would be the opposite of thriving. Thriving is being able to live and relate to the plants and animals in your environment, not building a stupid pyramid.
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So on the one hand, they wouldn't even want to. And on the other hand,
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in order to build the pyramid, you have to have a whole bunch of people who
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you can tell what to do, who you can make do it, who you can make do these jobs. And if you're in a non-stratified society like a hunter and gatherer society, you don't want people telling you what to do. I don't want people to tell you to come to class and do things and work. It's like, no, I'm going to do something else, something that's more valuable with my time. So this is all to say that in some ways, again, we can't consider that foraging or hunting
12:20
and gathering is a simple society. And we also don't want to get into a sense that just because you can build a pyramid makes you more developed or cooler, that your life will be better. A lot of people who built those pyramids--their lives were not better. They were unhappy that they were having to build those stupid pyramids.
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Lavenda and Schultz also mentioned here that it is during this time that we see in complex societies what we call the emergence of state government.
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And so there's been a lot of debate in social sciences and archaeology over what exactly a state is and how we know what one is, and if you can define one across time and space. Again, here I'd like to concentrate on the archaeological evidence.
13:19
So basically, we're going to define a state here as a complex society that also possesses a territory and is starting to think of itself as a people and a place, and there's a government that is over that people in place. Again, archaeologically, this gets fun because then you can find things like walls and boundaries and buildings along those walls. And it also gets archaeologically fun because, although we see weapons in various places, of course,
13:58
we start to see evidence that there are weapons around, you know, around the boundaries and around the borders, and there might be a standing army that is either defending or invading a territory.
14:18
We also expect to see--I mean, non-state societies can make some monumental architecture and some nice pyramids and stuff. You don't need a state necessarily to do that. But in a state society, you're probably going to see larger monuments. Lavenda and Schultz talk about having at least three tiers of society so that your society is going to be hierarchically organized in a way. We also start to see the emergence here of, again,
14:49
cool things archaeologically that you'll be dealing with--some sort of currency or a seal that you're marking off what belongs to certain people and especially what belongs to the government. And so you find evidence of coinage or seals and taxation.
15:08
And then states almost always need some form of record-keeping, which in many cases is
15:18
writing. But we'll talk about an interesting state that arose that has a very different form of record-keeping. So these are the kinds of things that we start to think something else is happening in addition to being a complex society--that we're having government control over people and a kind of centralized system defending a territory over a certain space.
15:49
One of the key questions for archaeologists, especially when we think about that people in hunting and gathering societies--that was the sustainable system in which people were able to spread out all over the world--why did people develop complex societies or state societies? And the first point I would like to make here, because in the old days we thought it was simply whenever there was agriculture, you'd end up in a state
16:18
or you'd end up in a complex society, and it is not inevitable just because people start growing food or having animals that they are going to develop other forms of social complexity. There are plenty of societies that have different forms of agriculture and different forms of farming that don't really necessarily develop state or government societies. And so over the years, there's been various hypotheses that are called
16:49
prime mover hypotheses, sort of like we saw with agriculture, where they're looking for one thing that is going to explain the rise of the state, the rise of complex societies.
17:05
You liked one of them. What was one of these prime movers?
17:15
Yeah, but what's responsible for how society is, at least according to this hypothesis? Why do they get complicated like they do, and why do they have state governments?
17:32
Irrigation. Yes, this was an idea that was put forth by Wittfogel back in 1957. I think it's a cool idea that's called the hydraulic hypothesis (229). It's the idea that
17:47
state societies are going to arise because you need somebody in control of the irrigation system. And so if you have an irrigation system, you're also going to have--and he was especially looking at societies in the East, in Asia. Unfortunately, this didn't work out because there were societies, other societies were found that managed complex irrigation systems without necessarily having
18:15
a centralized control, whereas there were other societies that developed centralized controls that didn't really have much in the way of irrigation. So that was a great idea but didn't quite pan out. Another great idea that is probably not panning out so much that Lavenda and Schultz don't even mention it, but we used to talk about it, is that states arise in areas of long-distance trade, and there would be people who would capture the trade in those areas.
18:46
Again, unfortunately, we found out that there are some areas where they have long-distance trade and no states, and other areas where they don't necessarily have other kinds of trade and states arise anyway. So that didn't really work out.
19:03
There was a very cool idea called environmental circumscription, or also known as the population, war, and circumscription hypothesis (230). This is more of a multivariate or multi-causal idea that as your population grew, if you were then fighting with other groups and there were in a certain environmentally circumscribed area, that you would need a state in order to do this. And you know, I mean, it certainly helps to explain the rise of some states, but when we get to the end,
19:36
we get to sort of the final analysis from Lavenda and Schultz. At least their opinion is that "anthropologists cannot offer a single, sweeping explanation of cultural evolution" (231). So we have tried. We've tried different kinds of ideas about why societies might have become complex, just like we've tried to figure out why agriculture arose. And our opinion, or Lavenda and Schultz's opinion of anthropologists and archaeologists,
20:12
is that although these various hypotheses have been tested, we can't say that there was one thing that in all areas of the world explained the rise of complex societies or of state societies. So we tried, but it doesn't work out that way. The very end of this chapter, Lavenda and Schultz go into kind of a long and deep history of a very fascinating area of the world--the Andes in South America, which encompasses what are now the
20:48
countries of Colombia, Ecuador, but especially perhaps for the Inca in Peru and Bolivia,
21:00
and to a certain extent also in Chile. It's a super interesting area of the world,
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and I had the good fortune when I was an undergraduate in college--I went my junior year abroad, I spent in Quito, Ecuador, and it was completely fascinating at the time. And it was probably the reason I eventually wandered into anthropology. I was a history major at the time.
21:32
One of the things that's really interesting about this area of the world is how the sort of varied texture of Indigenous societies and how they persist into the modern world. But it's also a super interesting area in terms of how much of the climate has to do with altitude. And so even if you are--it's an area of the world which is very close to--Ecuador is, of course, right on the equator. But as you go up and down the Andes mountains, you have these different
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microclimate zones that you can trade back and forth, all the way from being able to grow sugar
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in the coastal lowlands up to being able to grow corn and potatoes in the highlands, and even having some snow-covered peaks up there even though it's an equatorial landscape.
22:29
What I most want you to get out of this part of Lavenda and Schultz is how our archaeological research in this area is so rich, and there needs to be more of it, in fact, that it sort of challenges ideas--again poses a challenge to us about our traditional ideas about how states formed. And one of the most interesting things about the Andes in terms of state formation is that it looks like some of the complex societies, especially on the coast of what is now Peru, got
23:10
most of their calories and stuff from the ocean. And so we have--we've talked about this a little bit in northwestern--the northwest of the Americas where most of their calories came from salmon, and so you had sedentary complex societies that were based on salmon. And similarly here, we see complex societies emerging probably--although this is not--there seems to have been some agriculture there--but probably before or not dependent upon agriculture.
23:46
"If the first complex societies on the Peruvian coast were based on a steady supply of food from the sea, rather than agriculture, the notion that village agriculture must precede the rise of social complexity is dealt a blow" (236). And then, as I mentioned, most of the time we've seen the necessity that a state needs to have a written language. The Inca were managing a huge empire with basically--they had a system called
24:08
quipu, which is a knotted cord system, and some people called it a kind of three-dimensional writing system because you would make these knots in these strings, and then people could kind of read them with their hands. And so it's something again that we in some ways can't understand because a lot of the archaeological evidence was destroyed and burned by the Spaniards, who were not interested in having another state competing with them at the time.
24:40
So a lot of really interesting and fascinating stuff from this section. Again, my main point for us to think about is how it again shows us how complicated state formation can be. So in order to--over the years, I've been working on a diagram of how I feel that all this social complexity can be represented. And so this is my attempt at showing how we have these hunting and gathering societies, some of which become agricultural, some of which go to being horticultural,
25:25
some of which then be hunters and gatherers, some of whom are pastoralists. Basically, you have a whole bunch of diversity of society, not necessarily going in an order, and that these societies kind of--but not always--correspond to certain forms of social organizations. So we talked about how bands, small bands united by kinship, are basically forms of--are the typical organization of hunting and gathering societies, and how there are other organizations
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that are larger--tribes, chiefdoms--and that some of these might become states over time. But it doesn't necessarily mean they'll stay states because states come and go as well. And then I want to bring in--Lavenda and Schultz mentioned--transegalitarian
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societies.
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There they are. Transegalitarian societies on page 228 of Lavenda and Schultz, which are--again,
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they're societies that are seemingly poised between equality and hierarchy. "Transegalitarian societies have flourished in various times and places up to the present day, and they do not appear necessarily to be on the way to becoming anything else in particular" (228). So there are these kind of societies that don't really fit our definitions, and people
27:09
live in them and maybe even thrive in them for a while, but they don't seem to be evolving or going in any particular direction. And then I would say that over time, sometimes some larger society can come in and create a bigger empire that swallows up some of these places. And then, oh, another empire has swallowed up these people for a while, but ah, then that empire went away. So then another empire comes over here,
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and then that empire falls, and then finally this empire falls and leaves us with our people again.
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So for me, I think the primary message of archaeology is how diverse humans can organize themselves, both in terms of their food-getting and subsistence and what they're doing, but also socially and politically. And so I think for me, that's the main message that I get from the archaeology up until about 500 years ago. But at the end, or right before the Andes, I should say--they talk about how archaeologists
28:24
have in general embraced this diversity, but some of them are starting to talk about what they call "the cumulative effects of the emergence and spread of domestication, sedentism, social hierarchies, and states" (232). And so even though these things can be very diverse over time, what happens is when you have these planted animal
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complexes--packages, you might say--with a large, growing, sedentary,
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a hierarchy that is then organized into a state, it opens up a whole new realm of possibilities that people are able to inflict their will onto the natural world or the environment.
29:15
And so, as some of you noted here, it's an interesting question because we talked about niche construction and how humans are great at sort of transforming their environment, and that was happening with hunters and gatherers. But with agriculture, state societies, we get these other opportunities to modify the environment. And so some people say that what we call the Anthropocene--the time when human elements become the most important part of the world--actually begins with
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agriculture 12,000 years ago and the emergence of these sort of state governments and empires up to around 4,000 years ago. And that set in motion the kinds of societies that we see today. I've left this as a question mark. I know there are some people who defend that, and we'll talk about other societies as--some of these ancient societies as having a huge environmental impact,
30:23
of not being sustainable, of ruining their environment in a way that echoes what we think about today. For me, I actually don't believe this, but I will tell you why in the next section.
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