Long Term Analysis of Relationships between Social Complexity, Labor and Monumentality

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates the processes of social change in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies. Researchers wish to understand the processes that drive change in small-scale societies and how socially complex societies emerge over time. A central question is if these processes have a universal pattern, or if they vary from place to place and across different social types. Researchers have documented conditions under which persistent institutionalized social and economic inequalities develop among small-scale hunter-gatherer societies. These include the control of ritual practices, including monument building, as a way to create and sustain inter-generational transmission of wealth and rights to political power. Because controlling people to make things is a commonly recognized measure of political power, building massive earthen mounds often is used as a measure of social and political complexity. Complicated and energetically costly constructions are assumed to reflect greater social and political complexity, hierarchy, and economic integration. Scholars debate the historical processes that give rise to these inequalities; many researchers assert that social change and increasing inequality is an inevitable outcome of material accumulation and defense that enhances social prestige and reproductive success. Native American philosophy, however, interprets increasing complexity as the outcome of interactions among human and non-human agents in an infinitely complicated relational world. In this world, humans have moral responsibility to maintain order and balance realized through ritual actions such as monument building at charged places on the landscape. The project considers both a widely adopted archaeological assumption that hierarchical control leads to the development of large archaeological sites and compare it to a Native American approach which focuses not on hierarchy but rather community collaboration. The site is perhaps the largest hunter-gatherer site in the world with exceptionally large earthen mounds and ridges, and therefore is an ideal location to investigate if changing hunter-gatherer sociopolitical variation results from the accumulation of economic and labor control over hundreds of years as is claimed, or if building earthworks is a communal activity rapidly undertaken and given freely because Native people have a moral obligation to perform rituals at certain places that ensure balance, harmony, and order. To answer these questions, a multi-disciplinary team will use advanced quantitative and qualitative methods from archaeology, geology, and geotechnical engineering to investigate the history of site use, the pace and duration of earthwork construction, and earthwork building methods. Multi-method analyses allow assessment of whether hunter-gatherer complexity at the site an outgrowth of mutigenerational practices where unequal control of wealth was accumulated slowly encouraging the emergence of institutionalized political and economic complexity. This project provides educational opportunities and professional training to early career Native American scholars, U.S. and international students, school children and site visitors. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.