Exceptions that Prove the Rule, #3: Paleolithic Royalty?
by Jason GodeskyThe archaeological dig at Sungir in Russia has yielded evidence which would seem to belie the claim that rulers are a new and anomolous development for human societies. Specifically, two children–a male and a female–found decorated with thousands of ivory beads; as Richard Klein writes, “Experimentation suggests that the beads alone required thousands of hours to manufacture.” Yet these were children. They did not have such time in their short lives; neither did they have time to earn a reputation on their own merits. For such a lavish burial for two people so young, we are obviously looking at evidence of inherited power and prestige from the Upper Paleolithic, 26-22 thousand years ago.
Klein describes the site thus:
The Sungir grave was dug into permanently frozen subsoil (permafrost) more than 22 thousand years ago and contained the extended skeletons of two children, one arguably male and the other female, placed head-to-head. The putative male was covered with 4903 beads whose arrangement suggests they were fitted to closely fitting clothing. In addition, there were 250 perforated fox canines placed as if they had been attached to a belt at the waist….The putative female was covered and surrounded by 5374 beads or bead fragments that were also probably attached to clothing…..Experimentation suggests that the beads alone required thousands of hours to manufacture.
Archaeologically, the signs of royalty could not be clearer. A fairly slanted site called, “Man’s Conquest of Nature” offers the usual interpretation of Sungir:
These children must have had a special social status or role. Either they belonged to something very like a royal family or they must have been chosen to be buried (perhaps sacrificed) as part of an important communal rite - nothing else could justify the labour entailed in the grave clothes. Either way, we are now looking at a human society much more like those of historical time - a community including many individuals (perhaps thousands) who were not closely related to one another, yet felt they belonged to a common social unit with a hierarchical structure. The larger social unit must have made possible a much greater division of labour than had previously existed.
In The Mind in the Cave, David Lewis-Williams cites Sungir as evidence that humanity’s natural state is subject to a ruler. He cites this as one of the cognitive “advantages” we enjoyed over Neanderthals, leading to our success and their failure. But if the human condition is so amenable to rulership, why is the royal burial at Sungir so exceptional? Why have we not found more burials like it?
Lewis-Williams himself unwittingly offers us the reason why. Sungir was situated along the mammoth migratory routes. There was such a glut of mammoth meat once a year that these foragers could afford to remain stationary. They developed a complex society, including royalty. In other words, Sungir represents a prehistoric example identical to the Kwakiutl. As I wrote in that article:
We have generally discussed complexity in terms of agricultural societies, but high levels of complexity can also occur in foraging societies, as the Kwakiutl show. This illustrates that complexity is less a function of subsistence strategy specifically than food supply in general–or, more accurately, energy flow. The regular, high EROEI salmon runs gave the Kwakiutl a much larger source of energy than most foragers have access to….
The Kwakiutl’s energy source forced a level of sustainability upon them. They could sustain a very high level of complexity, but they could not use that to conquer the world. Competition was fierce, but necessarily contained within their limited means. This is a promising sign for the post-collapse world. No doubt, pockets like the Kwakiutl’s will exist then, as well, but like the Kwakiutl, the advantages that foragers are able to gain to increase their level of complexity are also pegged to a specific geography. They cannot conquer the world.
There are a small handful of other sites like Sungir, many of which are discussed in an article from British Archaeology titled, “When Burial Begins,” which suggests a slightly different take on the evidence:
A little later still are the spectacular burials of two adolescents and an adult male at Sunghir, Russia, which were all accompanied by several thousand mammoth ivory beads, several hundred fox teeth pendants and a panoply of ivory artefacts. At Arene Candide Cave in North-West Italy a young male - the Italians call him ‘The Prince’ - was buried in the mid-Gravettian period with typical splendour. In addition to the usual red ochre staining, yellow ochre was used to cover a bite that had been taken out of his neck - presumably the wound that killed him. He was buried with a cap of mammoth ivory beads; four enigmatically-shaped, holed and incised antlers known as ‘batons’, a flint blade sourced from over 100 km away, and several other valuable possessions.
These Gravettian burials are an odd bunch. With the exception of the ‘Red Lady’ of Paviland, all have pathological features and some of them may have been in considerable pain for much of their lives. For example, three individuals buried together in Barma Grande Cave in North-West Italy all had deformed spines caused by the degeneration of their vertebral discs, similar to two individuals from Dolni Vestonice. The Brno male had severe periostitis (bone disease) for many years, which may even have caused some neurological disorders.
The young boy from Lagar Velho may have looked odd. His hyperarctic body proportions - short limbs - have been seen by some as indicating that he is a Neanderthal-modern human hybrid, but it may be that he simply looked a bit odd to his compatriots. The pathological disorders found among almost all individuals buried in the Gravettian are surely too common to be coincidental. It may well be that the disabled nature of these men - for with one or two exceptions they are all male - marked them out as somehow special. Perhaps they were all shamans or medicine men.
Tim Taylor has suggested that they may all have been murdered. If something goes wrong for the community, the shaman is called upon to fix it. If he cannot, he is killed. A similar rationale may survive thousands of years to explain Iron Age bog bodies. It is an attractive idea. What is clear, however, is that burial was never the norm for ‘ordinary’ people. We have to assume that most people were disposed of - as perhaps they had been for hundreds of millennia - in ways that were reverent and ritualistic but which are now archaeologically invisible.
The case of the Gravettian burials suggests a different possibility: that the ornate nature of the burial had a supernatural significance, and that the willingness of the community to donate the kind of necessary time and materials required for such elaborate burial was less a matter of royal deference, than negotiation with the spirit world.
There are examples of complex foragers both past and present, known from both ethnography and archaeology. They all share certain characteristics. All share the common traits of a complex society, but all rely on a localized source for their energy. In each case, that source is abundant, but it cannot be moved. This anchors the society, and enforces a degree of sustainability–at the very least, they cannot expand. These examples highlight an important point, namely, how foraging stops the rise of hierarchy. Even in those cases where foraging has allowed a certain amount of complexity, it has done so only by anchoring it, and denying it the opportunity to conquer the world. Even at their most voracious, foragers are, at worst, a danger only to themselves.
Hey –
Isn’t it even — at least potentially — more telling than that? I’m thinking that a society like this MUST find a way to balance thier interaction with thier ecology, or they won’t be around long enough to reach a more complex state.
So its not ONLY that they are geographically limited, but the ’sustainability’ comes into play much more quickly with stationary-limited-abundance.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 10 March 2006 @ 9:13 PM
Sure. If you can take your energy source with you, then sustainability is something you can put off; instead, you just expand. But if that’s not an option, you need to live within your means.
The other part is, regardless of that, complexity will always rise to the level of energy available in that region. Complexity is a function of energy, and there’s not much you can do to change that.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 March 2006 @ 10:07 PM
So does this mean that given the opportunity people will always gravitate toward complexity and hierarchy?
Are we never able to resist temptation? Will the fall continue to repeat itself for ever and ever amen?
Comment by Aaron — 11 March 2006 @ 2:50 AM
Hey –
Yeah, I think what I was (trying to ) get at is that the Salmon runs, and that one particular point on the mammoth migration route are not unique… so it almost MUST be the case that there were other societies, all over the place, that also had these issues… but even a single season of ‘over-harvesting’may well have spelled the end for thier aspirations of greatness
So here’s an interesting question. IF we could identify some of those places, and IF there was sufficeint data to figure out a timeline… do you think we would find a sine wave of increasing complexity and die off, or do you think it is possible — given the short timeline — that some of these other possible exceptions ‘learned thier lesson’ and created customes to stabalize thier populations at less-than-optimal (relative to food) levels?
Hey Aaron — Its not that people gravitate to hierarchy and complexity… but ANY animal will generally end up at population levels in balance with thier food supply. If that supply is large enough to enable communities that exceed Dunbar’s Number, then heirarchy naturally develops as a necessary adaption to DEAL WITH more people. From there, its all a question of whether the environment contains a positive feedback loop (agriculture) or a negative feedback loop (foraging).
Janene
Comment by Janene — 11 March 2006 @ 9:34 AM
This evidence confirms my hypothesis that physical disability was one of the major motives for early settlement.
If the food supply for nomads in an area is high enough to raise population density to a certain point, then settlement at places favored for trade meets or festivals becomes viable. Those who settle down to trade and to store goods for trade are not necessarily disabled themselves, maybe they have a disabled member of their family or socially dedicated foraging band. These early settlers did not need to have any agricultural skills to start, so they are different from what we think of as settlers later in history, and they tend to be overlooked.
Once a person has a fixed location, storing goods becomes possible in quantities far in excess of what a nomadic band would carry or drag from camp to camp. Trade provides a way to accumulate artifacts and a motive for doing so, to have savings for seasonal variations in trade.
The settled lifestyle with caches and hoards of possessions (not yet property, which is a result of agriculture) may lead to a worldview where burial with grave goods is preferred to cremation or other quick forms of return to the energy flow of life on Earth. So then some early settlers, not necessarily all of them, appear to have chosen that new funeral option. It may have been considered especially appropriate when the body was of the member of the band whose disability had motivated the band to settle. By using up stored goods in funerals and burials, early bands may have been giving themselves the option to return to nomadism when their reason for settling was past. If that is the case, then it perfectly explains why all of those early skeletons found with grave goods have defects.
It’s making me teary eyed just thinking about it.
Comment by Sonny Moonie — 13 March 2006 @ 6:38 AM
Well, once settled, few communities start moving again unless ecology demands it. Settling means investing a lot of energy into stationary resources, and those “sunk costs” make moving away a very unappealing option, even after the initial motivation to settle is long gone.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 March 2006 @ 10:17 AM
What economists call “sunk costs” are named that to point out that they are a rationalization of emotional attachments, not a part of rational economic calculation. When a band or family has kept camp at one place a few years straight, to take care of a disabled member, they may have spent thousands of hours building shelters and trying to practice horticulture there. That work is a “sunk cost.” If it’s a good trading spot, they may have achieved a “high standard of living” in terms of possessions such as ivory, hides, and flints. However, if their horticulture isn’t very well developed, they will probably be able to improve their diet and health quickly by switching back to temporary camping when their reason for staying is obsolete. That is a rational economic calculation.
Some people have difficulty giving up on sunk costs of the past and taking an option known to be better in terms of the present and future. The fact that these burials and others in many cultures included grave goods shows that the people who performed them were able to give up on sunk costs, at least at an appropriate time when grieving. They gave up on the possessions of the deceased group member, which they may have put some labor into helping to accumulate. Maybe it was with the motive of letting him or her rest.
Imputing royalty (or ritual murder, as in the British Archaeology article) to a person whose remains are found, just because they are very ancient remains and have some possessions with them, is stretching a little evidence into a vision of the past that seems grand in a conventional history sort of way. Such a biased means cannot be expected to serve good ends, especially if you prefer nomadism to conventional history’s value of civilization. If a skeleton like the Sunghir children with beads had been found and dated to 1000, 2000, or 3000 years ago, with the same artifacts, it would not have been believed to be historically important in the same way and the grave goods would have been attributed to the unimportant trade of some unimportant, illiterate tribe. I don’t think it’s unimportant, I think it’s revelatory, anthropologically and emotionally.
I don’t know if Sunghir was a busy village for a while with a wealthy chief or Big Man, or it was just a camp that was used a lot of times. The Russian webpage says it was a seasonal camp, because there were only surface dwellings, not dug in ones. I don’t buy that argument, because digging in just makes the floor colder , and Sunghir settlers may not have needed a cellar right there.
Comment by Sonny Moonie — 14 March 2006 @ 10:54 PM
Yeah. Seems many folks here are evaluating their own, current “sunk costs” in education, skill sets, diet, relationships, beliefs, investments, etc…
Their sunk costs in civilization itself…
Comment by JCamasto — 14 March 2006 @ 11:39 PM
The rest of your argument would follow … except people aren’t rational. Aren’t now, never have been, and I’d bet very good money that they won’t start being rational any time soon.
If it takes thousands of man-hours to make the beads for a boy’s funeral … that’s certainly a pretty strong suggestion that this is a less-than-egalitarian setup. The archaeological interpretation of grave goods is an imperfect science, but one that’s been analyzed to hundreds, if not thousands, of volumes. After reading just a few of them, I’m inclined to agree with the usual reading that excessive grave goods are usually a pretty good barometer of status.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 15 March 2006 @ 10:17 AM
Of course, it’s also possible that these remains don’t denote any royalty in the sense we know…it could be that they were religious figures of some kind. In modern-day Nepal, a girl is chosen to be representative of the goddess on Earth, and is bedecked with beautiful clothing and jewelry representing the wealth of the communities. Perhaps these “royal children” were holy children, and several communities contributed to their burial finery for religious reasons.
Comment by Ulerian — 1 July 2006 @ 12:39 AM