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When wealth and poverty began
Did haves
and have-nots split up in the Stone Age?
July 26, 2005
Special to World Science
Trying to get rich, many historians and archaeologists believe, is a game as old
as civilization itself.
Not so, a growing number of
researchers say: it actually dates to the Stone Age, when, recent findings show, a
sharing lifestyle started giving way to class divisions.
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Prehistoric cave paintings such as
this image of a horse from Lascaux, France, may in part be seen as
reflections of the earliest hierarchical cultures, some
researchers say.
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This contradicts a popular view that these
distinctions between rich and poor, mighty and weak, arose only thousands of years
later, roughly alongside agriculture or civilization.
The findings could reshape a debate that has embroiled philosophers and others
for centuries: why social inequality exists at all.
That subject, always
emotional, has a new urgency today, as public health studies suggest inequality
fuels evils ranging from violence to disease.
The idea that civilization led to inequality dates at least back
to the writings of the philosopher Rousseau, in the 1700s.
But in truth, understanding inequality may require a new look at Stone
Age relics, argues Brian Hayden of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British
Columbia. Such relics include the widely celebrated cave paintings, and evidence of secret rituals that may have unfolded in the depths of those
caves, he says.
Hayden is among several archaeologists who maintain that social inequalities became entrenched
among some groups in the Old Stone Age, a period from about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Archaeologists traditionally consider it an era unsullied by hierarchies, during
which sharing was the
normal way to allocate resources.
As University of Southern California archaeologist Christopher Boehm
wrote in his 1999 book Hierarchy in the Forest:
“Before 12,000 years ago, people were basically egalitarian. They lived in what might be called societies of
equals... Everyone participated in group decisions, and outside the family there were no dominators.”
Marked inequalities originated around 5,000 years
ago, he wrote.
Hayden disagrees. New findings reveal an Old Stone Age life “far removed from the simple hunter-gatherer
model” that portrays its people as egalitarians, he said at an archaeologists’ conference in Lyon, France, last March.
He labels some of them as “complex hunter-gatherers,” who have some elaborate social divisions,
as some traditional Northwestern American tribes do. The simple
hunter-gatherer model, by contrast, draws on studies of African tribes.
Shaman
games
In the Stone Age, Hayden argues, some of the first glimmers of entrenched
inequality may have come when people met in deep, lavishly painted caves to conduct secret rituals.
In so doing, he argues, they portrayed themselves as people with exclusive access to powerful supernatural
forces. This gave them an excuse to demand privileged roles in their group.
One indirect reflection of social inequality around the same time may be the widely
admired cave paintings
such as those at Lascaux, France, Hayden argues.
This artwork—often attributed to a leap in human
intelligence—simply shows that the same forces that produced class divisions produced other
social institutions, Hayden says. These included specialized groups of workers,
such as artists.
The question of when inequality arose is fraught with pitfalls, such as how to
define inequality. By some definitions, it has always existed; every social animal has pecking orders.
But many researchers believe humans brought inequality to new levels.
With us it became “more institutionalized,” and “more elaborate,” said Gary Feinman of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and editor of the 1995 book
Foundations of Social Inequality.
Why did this occur? Was it a power grab by con artists, like Hayden’s secretly meeting
“bigmen”? Or a smart strategy by groups to coordinate
decisions? Most theories tend to adopt one
or both explanations in some form.
Figuring out when it happened is a step toward determining why, researchers believe.
According to Hayden’s analysis, the “when” question has a fairly simple answer: as soon as it was possible.
Almost as soon as there was more food and goods available than what people
strictly needed, someone claimed some of that surplus for himself rather than
sharing. Almost as soon as social institutions of any kind arose, such as specialized craft and trade groups, class divisions became one of them.
Archaeologists have several methods to tell how unequal a given prehistoric culture may have been. One is to check for buried “prestige objects,” such as exotic ornaments that only a privileged few could have afforded.
Such evidence is discernible at a 15,500-year-old site in southwest France called Saint-Germain-la-Rivière,
write Marian Vanhaeren and Francesco d’Errico in a paper published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology’s June issue.
A burial there yielded 71 canine teeth of young, male red deer, an animal rare or absent in the region at the time,
the researchers wrote. The items, probably necklace parts, were carefully perforated in a standardized way, they
added.
This strongly suggests social inequality, the
authors asserted, adding: “Our results push back by some 9,000 years the first documented occurrence of this phenomenon.”
Hayden says the authors are actually not the
first to present such findings, but rather are adding to a growing pile of
evidence chipping away at the image of the egalitarian cave man.
Such findings “certainly can be considered provocative, a challenge to the idea that Paleolithic [Old Stone-Age] societies were unequivocally egalitarian,” Feinman wrote in an
email.
But he also opined that while Vanhaeren and d’Errico have made
a case for wealth disparities, they haven't proven “a more hardened and inherited social
stratification” existed, a more extreme form of inequality common in many civilizations.
Hayden, by contrast, argues that inherited inequalities probably did exist in
the Stone Age in some places.
As for how the phenomenon began, he proposes it
had its roots in clever power-grabbing schemes by a few people. Secret societies
are an “extremely common” version of such a scheme, which also appears in a
number of modern
complex hunter-gatherers, he argues.
Bulls and cats
Hayden interprets as secret ritual sanctuaries the elaborately painted, deep recesses of some Stone Age caves. An example is the so-called Hall of Bulls
at the Lascaux caves—not far from Saint-Germain-la-Rivière, and dating to the
same time period.
Such sanctuaries often boast paintings of “power animals” such as bulls and felines, Hayden argues, creatures that
still tend to figure prominently in secret-society rituals and iconography.
Rituals, he adds, are but one of many strategies by which people may have weaseled, threatened or cajoled their way to the top. Throwing feasts was a widespread way to buy one’s way there, he argues.
The common thread, he said, is that these people, whom he calls “aggrandizers,” exploited the growing material benefits society was reaping through technology.
Consistent with this, the same sites that provide the first evidence of
inequalities tend to provide evidence of the earliest storage pits, he notes.
Hayden’s account of
inequality’s origins is rather gloomy, but is informed, he says, by
personal observations.
After studying Mayan
highlanders in Mexico in 1990, Hayden noted in a paper presented at a Society of American Archaeology conference
a decade later: “I was completely astonished that the local elites provided essentially no help to other members of the community in times of crisis, but instead actually devised means of profiting from the misfortunes of
others.”
Other researchers have put a more positive spin on the emergence of inequality, noting that it has benefits, such as fostering better organization among larger groups.
“If you go out to dinner with two or three people, figuring out who’s going to take the check, or how you’re going to handle it, rarely is much of a problem,” Feinman said. “But if you go out with 10
or 12 people... somebody usually has to become the ‘operator’ or the ‘banker.’”
Vanhaeren and d’Errico wrote that social inequality may have been a strategy
to increase populations. In line with this, there is evidence for greatly increased populations around the same
place and time where the first evidence of inequality appears, they said.
Hayden explains that by arguing that the same increased food resources that allowed for greater populations also
permitted inequality.
Boehm, for his part,
continues to defend a view of Stone Age people as egalitarian—at least
partially.
Hayden, he says, has
failed to consider that people can be unequal economically,
but not politically. Some California tribes “make a big deal, symbolically, of who has better material goods, but
they’ll still kill a man who tries to dominate the group,” Boehm wrote
in an email.
Stone Age people may have been similar, he added.
The debate over inequality’s roots may continue for years to come. Even Rousseau’s ideas may stay alive, if, for example, the findings—rather than refuting
a link between inequality and civilization—simply reveal that some aspects of civilization appeared earlier than is traditionally thought.
The debate takes a newly modern urgency with evidence from the public health field that the social divide is a cause of crime, stress, and even disease.
Poorer people tend to get heart disease more and die
earlier, write researchers with Semmelweis University of Medicine, Hungary, in
the August 2005 issue of The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Also, “More unequal societies tend to be more violent,” wrote Richard Wilkinson of the University of Nottingham Medical School in Nottingham, U.K., in the December 2004 issue of the
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
In keeping with such points, Hayden argues, some of the first evidence for organized violence appears alongside that of entrenched inequality.
Scalpings and decapitations seem to have taken place at some early feasts, he notes. “In the most extreme cases,” he said in his talk, “we may even be dealing with chiefdoms where slavery existed and humans were occasionally sacrificed.”
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