<HTML>Hi Anthony,
I'm behind on my e-mails and postings. Please bear with me while I try and catch up and excuse me if I have to shorten some replies or leave something out. I will try to cover everything, however brief. I've only got about another hour or so online this morning to write.
Thanks for clearing it up that this is what you were taught over 20 years ago at university. I was suspecting you had been getting this info from old sources as I knew a number of years ago this was the dominant viewpoint. Since then new settlements have been unearthed and new data collected which has challenged the formerly traditional views.
>An elite class can begin with one shaman... one medicine man... one
>tough guy leader who saved people from an attacking tribe.
Before answering I'd like to state my bias openly, and it's for this reason my answers carry a different slant to Alex's. Alex is more familiar with the Indian cultures of North America than I am (after 12 000 BP); in turn my knowledge is drawn from the Bushmen hunter-gatherers of southern Africa, whose sites I have excavated at and whose rock art paintings I've both seen firsthand and been on expeditions to locate & record.
In times of trouble the Bushmen would nominate a leader and they would unite around him. After the conflict they were facing had eased, they would revert back to their former societial structure of equality. The majority of Bushmen used to be and are trance dancers; it isn't a profession that is exclusively reserved for a certain segment of their population.
In talks with Associate-Professor Andy Smith (the guy I've mentioned previously in connection with Fred Wendorf and the timing & cause of cattle domestication in North Africa), the Nuer nomads have a similar arrangement.
The pattern appears to be, at the risk of being simplistic, the more mobile a group is the more "egalitarian" it will be, the more settled it is the more chance there is of hierarchical differences emerging.
The examples Alex has cited I would be more inclined to call "chiefdoms" rather than grouping them together as "hunter-gatherers". It is to be remembered that chiefdoms can retain numerous characteristics of their formerly hunting and gathering lifestyle. Again there would be different structures of "chiefdoms". Alex may dispute me on this.
All of this also enters into another part of the overall depate, and that is when in the past, in the Near East, did our ancestors become functional interdependent upon each other. These two quotes from Robert Wenke's "Patterns in Prehistory" are valuable:
"To translate this sense of functional interdependence into archaeological terms, we must look for concentrations and distributions of artifacts indicating a certain level of activity specialization. In early agricultural villages, each house and each group of houses had approximately the samr contents in terms of numbers and types of ceramics, stone tools, figurines, and garbage. But in later, more complex societies we find concentrations of artifacts that clearly represent such things as pottery or stone-tool manufactring workshops, indicating that people specialised in these activities." (p. 349)
"What is important is that we know a major change in settlement patterning has occurred over time. Paleolithic hunters and gatherers and early agriculturalists lived in locations determined largely by the availibility of material resources. But later, in some areas of the ancient world, settlements began to be located with less regard for natural resources and more concern for trade routes, political frontiers, and administrative networks. Again, these changes occurred in settlements that were also building monumental structures, achieving denser population concentrations, and evolving some or all of the other elements of cultural complexity." (p. 351)
The present evidence indicates a scenario like this: during the Last Glacial Maximum hunter-gatherers in the Near East appear to have begun collecting wild cereals more intensively. Their population numbers were slowly increasing and their stone tool technology was extremely well refined. For reasons that are hotly debated today these hunter-gatherers began to become more settled (whether that was due to the expanding population, in which case we also need to know why the population was expanding, or whether it was due to various environmental pressures, or a combination of these and other factors), but they never stayed at one particular site permanently the whole year - which makes me reluctant to accept Alex's Indian model as appropriate for comparative purposes, although my own Bushmen model is far from adequate for applicibility. At these sites the activties seem to still be concentrated amongst family members, that the family was still the center-point and it was the family which provided for itself instead of being inter-dependent upon others for their essential survival. It is a likely possibility that domestication of plants and animals was an accidental by-product of people wanting to have a readily available resource to hand in times of draught - remember that the increased population numbers would have limited where they could migrate to.
To me it is with the advent of towns like Jericho that we see the first rise of proper elite hierachy in the archaeological record.
Mike.</HTML>
