Flannery and Marcus go for the Big Picture

I’ve just finished reading the new book by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (2012, Harvard University Press, hardcover). The book covers an immense amount of archaeological and ethnographic territory in tracing human social evolution from the Paleolithic to the early empires, emphasizing the nature of inequality in different kinds of societies. This is truly “big history.” The topic is timely and big, the time depth is enormous, the cases reviewed are numerous, and even the endnotes are big (47 pages, out of a total of 631). I learned quite a bit, and I recommend the book to anyone who reads this blog (well, perhaps not the postmodernists, who just aren’t going to like the book, but they probably don’t like the blog, either).

With an epigraph of the famous quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (“Man is born free, and yet we see him everywhere in chains”), who could dislike this book? Well, Randall McGuire for one. His book review, in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (23-1, 146-147), praises the eudition and diversity of the case studies, but he really doesn’t like this book at all. It “suffers from the same flaws as all universalizing, unilinear theories of cultural evolution” (p.147). The authors, in McGuire’s view, don’t recognize or acknowledge the superior work of Eric Wolf or Johannes Fabian, who identified those flaws (Hmmm, I didn’t think Fabian wrote about cultural evolution). Flannery and Marcus are said to “spatialize time,” depicting ethnographic societies as “frozen in time” (in fact these societies are so cold and frozen that they bounce around like billiard balls, a metaphor from Eric Wolf repeated by McGuire without attribution).

I was a bit puzzled with McGuire’s review. First of all, the book didn’t seem at all universalizing or unilinear to me. Second, I thought I had heard those criticisms before. After some checking, I found the critique of The Evolution of Human Societies, by Alan Johnson and Timothy Earle (1987, Stanford Univ. Pr), contained in McGuire’s book, A Marxist Archaeology (1992, Academic Press, pp.151-152). Here’s what he didn’t like about Johnson and Earle in 1992: Their model is universal and unilinear, and it conflates time and space (i.e., it spatializes time). So now, twenty years later, McGuire has dusted off his old criticisms of cultural evolution to throw at Flannery and Marcus.

McGuire would probably respond that the criticisms are the same because the problems with cultural evolution are the same. But to me, these critiques (in 1992 and 2012) apply more appropriately to work by Elman Service and others in the 1960s and 1970s and not to either Flannery and Marcus, or Johnson and Earle. I don’t want to get into a big debate about cultural evolution here, but the following passages from The Creation of Inequality are not consistent with McGuire’s charge of universal/unilinear ideas:

·         “One of the interesting facts of hereditary rank was that it could be created even by hunters and gatherers such as the Nootka. Neither slavery nor aristocracy, in other words, had to wait until agriculture had arisen.” (p.554)

·         “For all these reasons we should probably view clans or descent groups as one of several alternative social networking strategies rather than as an inevitable second stage of foraging society.” (p.550)

In fact, much of the book is devoted to exploring alternative arrangements of social organization, inequality, economic processes, and political dynamics. To me, Flannery and Marcus did an excellent job of producing a useful contemporary approach to cultural evolution that avoids the kinds of criticisms that were popular in the 1980s and 1990s. There are no layer-cake models here, there are no simple typological sequences (e.g., bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states; or egalitarian, ranked, stratified), and the authors do not assert (or assume) that social variation is somehow explained by assigning a group to an evolutionary category. I just re-read McGuire’s review, and realized that he is really obsessed with the issue of “unilinear” evolutionary models; the term “unilinear” is used three times in the review, and the term “unilineal” appears six times. I can’t tell whether is this is a subtle deliberate distinction, or just an error of writing and editing.

I am not claiming that the The Creation of Inequality is without flaws. I was disappointed by the authors’ refusal to weigh in on a number of current debates, and it seemed to me that their treatment of inequality was somewhat reduced in the final chapters (on states and empires) compared to earlier chapters. Inequality seemed to be swamped by issues of social and political dynamics in the chapters on states. But then the lack of systematic attention to inequality is one of the major failings of the archaeological study of complex societies, so Flannery and Marcus had less research to draw on. I also have a few minor quibbles on topics I specialize in, but these do not detract from the value of this important book.

If you are a postmodernist, you almost certainly won’t like any account of cultural evolution, and you just aren’t going to like this book. But for those of you with a more empirical and scientific bent: Read this book. You will learn a lot. And then let the passages where you disagree with the authors serve as starting points for more research and writing. Inequality is a tremendously important topic with a rather poor record of archaeological scholarship (due, in large part, to the influence of postmodernism, but don't get me started.....). Let's hope this book signals a new commitment to archaeological research on inequality. 

*** ADDED 20 MARCH 2013: Here is a link to Peter Turchin's review of the book. This is a preprint; the review just came out in the Times Literary Supplement. (Click here for the TLS version).  He evidently tried to post a comment, but Blogger was being cranky and rejected his comment.

Jonathan Marks tells archaeologists to "put down those beers"

Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks writes some of the more insightful and entertaining works in anthropology today. Check out his website for his publications. (By the way, are YOUR publications posted online???).  I particularly like his book reviews; they are concise and pithy, often containing some real zingers that put people and ideas in their place.

I just read his outstanding book review essay on seven books on cultural evolution by evolutionary psychologists and others:

Marks, Jonathan
    2012    Recent Advances in Culturomics. Evolutionary Anthropology 21:38-42.

If you have read some of these works applying biological models to cultural evolution, you will recognize the aptness of Marks' comments (such as the fact that decades ago anthropology solved many of the supposed problems they bring up).

Anyway, to the remarks on archaeologists and beers. Marks ends his essay arguing for the importance of distinguishing good science from bad science (a major theme in his publications), and the need to link anthropology to broader intellectual currents. Such linkages:

"will probably also require some archaeologists to put down those beers and get involved in building the intellectual bridges that will link the natural and social studies of human evolution." (Marks 2012:42).

I am all in favor of building these bridges (check out my past posts indexed with "Archaeology and other disciplines"), but do we really have to "put down those beers"  do do this? I write this from the Texas hill country, where I have very much enjoyed the ales from the "Real Ale" brewery in Blanco, TX.

Cultural evolution, postmodern archaeology, and mechanisms

I am posting from funky Pacific port city of Guaymas, Sinaloa, Mexico, en route home from a summer of lab work in Toluca, Mexico.

I've just read an interesting debate between Robert Carneiro (dyed-in-the-wool cultural evolutionist) and Timothy Pauketat (postmodern archaeologist) about the concept of chiefdom. Its published in a journal that is hard to find (and this issue is not yet online). Carneiro has a lengthy review essay on Pauketat's book, Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions, followed by a reply from Pauketat and a final piece by Carneiro:

Carneiro, Robert L.
2010    Pauketat's Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions: A Challenge to Social Evolution. Social Evolution and History 9(1):135-165.


Pauketat, Timothy R.
2010    Carneiro's Long Tirade. Social Evolution and History 9(1):166-171.

Carneiro, Robert L.
2010    Critique of Pauketat's Volume. Social Evolution and History 9(1):172-176.

Much of the content of the debate is predictable if you know something of the work of Carneiro and Pauketat. The journal is soliciting papers to continue the debate/discussion on chiefdoms. I find Carneiro's account frustrating. I largely sympathize with this scientific approach and his critique of Pauketat. But by ignoring the empirical and theoretical work of the past few decades, Carneiro leaves himself open to easy critique by Pauketat.



What I want to comment on here is the concept of social mechanisms, something that I have started to read and write about. Much of Carneiro's frustration with Pauketat's approach is his lack of attention to social mechanisms. Carneiro tries to find social mechanisms in Pauketat's book, but is largely unsuccessful. But this is a key difference between scientific anthropology and postmodern anthropology. What are social mechanisms? The following text is adapted from a paper I just wrote on urban theory in archaeology (Smith, Michael E., "Empirical Urban Theory for Archaeologists". Paper under review for publication.).

A social mechanisms is: “an intermediary level of analysis in-between pure description and story-telling, on the one hand, and universal social laws, on the other” (Hedström and Swedberg 1996:281). The study of social mechanisms is one part of a broader approach called “analytical sociology” (Hedström 2005; Hedström and Udéhn 2009). Social mechanisms are lower-order social processes that have a causal component: “The basic idea of a mechanism-based explanation is quite simple: At its core, it implies that proper explanations should detail the cogs and wheels of the causal process through which the outcome to be explained was brought about” (Hedström and Ylikoski 2010). In the words of Hedstrom and Swedberg (1998:24), research on social mechanisms represents “the essence of middle-range sociology and expresses the idea that sociology should not prematurely take on broad-sweeping and vague topics or try to establish universal social laws (which are unlikely to exist in any case). It should instead aim at explanations specifically tailored to a limited range of phenomena.” See also Gerring (2007) and Faletti and Lynch (2009).

I'm too hot and tired to elaborate on how the concept of mechansisms is used (or not used) by Carneiro and Pauketat. But after reading the sociology and political science literature on mechanisms in the past few months, I was struck by their importance in Carneiro's view of science and anthropology, and by how much his discussion paralleled the critiques of postmodern sociology by some of the analytical sociologists cited above


Falleti, Tulia G. and Julia F. Lynch
2009    Context and Causal Mechanisms in Political Analysis. Comparative Political Studies 42(9):1143-1166.

Gerring, John
2007    Review Article: The Mechanistic Worldview: Thinking Inside the Box. British Journal of Political Science 38:161-179.

Hedström, Peter
2005    Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Hedström, Peter and Richard Swedberg
1996    Social Mechanisms. Acta Sociologica 39:281-308.

1998    Social Mechanisms: An Introductory Essay. In Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, edited by Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg, pp. 1-31. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Hedström, Peter and Lars Udéhn
2009    Analytical Sociology and Theories of the Middle Range. In The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology, edited by Peter Hedström and Peter Bearman, pp. 25-49. Oxford University Press, New York.

Hedström, Peter and Petri Ylikoski
2010    Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences. Annual Review of Sociology 36:49-67.

It seems to me that attention to social mechanisms by archaeologists would greatly clarify the nature of the changes and dynamics of past societies. If this sounds at all interesting, check out some of the above sources. On the other hand, if this sounds ridiculous, outdated, and "scientistic", then you are probably a postmodernist and most likely  you disagree with much of the way I think about human societies and the role of archaeology in studying past societies.