Ancient Economies Miniseries - Prestige and the Ritual Economy of Chalcolithic Caanan

thank you all very much for coming out on what turned out to be a pretty rough start to the day hopefully it's gonna get sunnier nicer but I appreciate you all you know charging out into into such a sort of rotten start to the day and thank you very much for Kathy and Terry for arranging this and for inviting me I really appreciate it I'm going to talk today about something it's not really a kam lecture for those of you have heard me talk a little bit about the calculator you'll recognize some images for sure but I'm actually toying with an idea and so you all are perhaps not really the first guinea pigs but in the early starting of people that I'm throwing an ID out and it's it's an idea that I've been toying with and so this is sort of pushed me to put it out there and put a little bit more of the idea on paper and so if it's not an entirely solidified convincing argument that's because it's something I'm still working on and I hope you'll join me in thinking about these ideas and it's something that I do get excited about the economy of course is never something that's far from the news but of course now it's really a constant hot topic and will have an important impact on the upcoming midterm elections I would imagine I'm not in the comest and so you can imagine that I approach such a large complicated topic with a bit of trepidation what could a mere archaeologist field dirt archaeologists at that and one who specializes in prehistoric societies have to say on the topic well as it turns out not much particularly when it comes to modern economic woes or much less solutions still the workings of ancient eka eka knot economies was a key reason that I started down the rocky frequently congested path towards archaeology I became interested in the reasons behind the transition from relatively egalitarian societies to those with non Galit aryan social structures that is those that have leets anomalies the house in the house not have-nots the reasons that archaeologists anthropologists have offered for this fundamental change in human history are many but really they can be grouped into two large sets those that see it as economic and those that see it as political in the economic model archaeologists posit that suggests that an imbalance in population and resources was the root cause that more people pressing against diminishing resources resulted in the exchange from different areas in turn leading to those who gain from this trade from specialization to feed the trade and so on the political model centers on the actions of aspiring individuals who exploit situations for their own gain regardless of which of these models we wish to promote this is dependent upon economic intensification because a surplus must be produced in order to move beyond simple subsistence this is the topic I'd like to explore today that is how to archaeologists explain the reasons for economic intensification why was there this move away from egalitarian societies where things are relatively equal those explanations I just mentioned are largely economic revolving around imbalances and population resources or political these approaches downplay or even ignore what I consider to be one of the key sources of increased economic production individual and communal ritual participation and performance that often involve the entire population or much of the population in the great transformation Karl Polanyi pointed out two different meanings of economics one refers to economics is the logic of rational choice between the different ends of scarce means the second meaning refers to how humans make a living from their natural and social environment put another way the process of provisioning within specific context that provisioning encompasses both production and acquisition the second definition is one that's embedded in culture and society clearly major distinctions between economic and social or political experience or between rational and irrational behavior is not an accurate portrayal of how society works there are no Universal and invariant rules there are no natural laws of economics such as you might find in mathematical physics or or microbiology this is particularly true of small-scale societies and by small-scale societies I mean those ranging from several hundred to several thousand people in size and they're characterized by relatively unsent relized political systems small-scale societies such as the Neolithic societies across the Near East were by no means homogeneous nor was there an absence of social complexity but in the period that we will look at for our case study today we can see the beginnings of socio economic differentiation long-distance trade and prestige Goods and limited evidence anyway and suggest the emergence of some hierarchy some political leadership that's what we're trying to get at today is why did this emerge so first what do we mean by social complexity any human group is complex of course and true egalitarianism where everybody is really equal regardless of age or sex that's absent that doesn't exist and probably never did exist status distinctions of hierarchy are not limited to human groups even but found in a range of other animals as well certainly primates have hierarchies as well as other animals but by complexity I mean the process of qualitatively and quantitatively increasing interdependence and hierarchical organization of social groups and their economic political ritual and administrative structures key to this being possible is agriculture it is one of the keys to the rise of social complexity that is it's necessary but it's not sufficient agriculture does not Adam automatically lead to social complexity greater complexity requires energy in order to support specialist and elites and it supports increased economic activity there are however rare exceptions where greater social complexity arose among societies where subsistence is not based on agriculture but instead on rich marine resources of course I'm thinking for instance of some of the northwest groups traditional Northwest Native American groups along the northwest coast present-day Washington British Columbia Oregon the agricultural intensification freeze some people from full-time farming and from this specialist emerge things such as metal workers potters Tanner's would bake wood workers bakers etc depending on historical contingency different cultures now craft specialization is going to be a central topic to looking at this change in this economic intensification this case study that we'll look at today and the archaeological recognition of craft specialists is not always easy to recognize it's particularly when you're looking at small-scale societies when looking at complex States when looking at the state Mesopotamia or in Egypt where you see separate precincts for workshops and they're easy to identify why I shouldn't say easy but much more clear and the technology that's required for these workshops to operate requires investment resources in the indicators tend to be much clearer this is not always a simple matter however when we're looking at pre state societies without the benefits of texts or urban centers where you have these separated residential pre workshop precincts and so on well I apologize for the anthropology 101 short course this morning but I thought it useful to establish a few basic ideas about the related factors leading to increased social complexity subsistence economy subsistence economy here we have a nice tidy definition and this is something that you'll Stein will be talking about in much more depth next week I believe next next Saturday and so I won't elaborate on it too much but today I'd like to argue a different way of looking at the rise in social complexity and economic intensification for this lecture our case study will be the calculus ik period in the southern Levant modern what is now modern-day Jordan Israel in the Palestinian territories will focus our analytical lens on evidence that I will argue is indicative of what I'll call a ritual economy or a ritual mode of production that is the production of objects that are critical for ritual performance and the lower definition you see here or virtual economy is what you get when you try to look it up in anthropologists and you end up with the definition that you're not quite sure what they're trying to say so simply put it's just the the production the economic production necessary to for ritual performance for ceremonial rites to be able to produce the necessary extra food as well as artifacts to go with those ritual performances this often occurs in a ritual cycle and this is why Roy Rapoport called it the mode of the ritual mode of production this argument is made in juxtaposition to those arguments which suggest that the increase in economic intensification and social complexity during this period were the results of efforts to deal with population and resourcing balances or the political aspirations of individuals these these were these ideas were what drove me as a graduate student what drew me into archaeology I was very much convinced by them and I have now been sort of moving away from them as I've looked more and more at the data from my dissertation and since then so instead I argue that primary motivation for subsistence intensification and craft specialization in small-scale societies such as the calculative of the southern Levant was to supply the needs of ritual practices for ceremonies so to structure this we'll look at some of the basic facts of the period under studying and after that we'll turn to a brief summary of the data that's been used to support this idea there were nonagon Terry and elite placed basically chiefdoms in the calculus and from that we'll turn to evidence for the ritual practices during the period and the equipment involved with these well the calculate expands about a thousand years and we don't really have an internal chronology for that period unfortunately something we're still working on but there's about a thousand year period there where we cannot separate it down into smaller increments at least we can't all agree on it some people have their ideas but we don't need to go there today in the southern LaVon this period continues the Neolithic tradition of agricultural communities already well-established across the Near East of course the domestication of plants and animals that took place during the Neolithic in the near East established the foundations for the ability at least for surplus production to actually produce more than people needed simply to get by to survive but despite that ability it was some millennia that passed before truly ranked hierarchical societies emerged probably not until the early Bronze some would argue during the calculative period so the calculative period in southern LaVon which came right after the Neolithic is thought by some to have had these hierarchical societies certainly there are diverse elaborate mortuary practices which for those of you who have heard me lecture before I've elaborated on at some length and that the mortuary practices in the period are fascinating and we'll touch upon them very briefly today there are also prestige items and evocative imagery to complement the social populations social phenomena such as population growth settlement hierarchies that is where you have larger settlements and smaller ones around them and even the limited craft specialization yet the typical trappings of chiefdoms of hierarchical societies things like monumental architecture elaborate mortuary displays elite controlled craft production in large storage areas that are limited to only access for some of the population these things are absent in the calculating so it's not a clear example where we have chiefdoms elites versus everybody else there's still some argument about this what we can't agree upon is that during the calculating most people were sedentary a grow past that is they had sheep that goat in the northern areas they had pigs they had cows they lived in large and small villages pigs again in some of the better watered areas there was still some hunting in the very far south reaches where you couldn't actually practice agriculture so down in the Sinai Southern they go modern southern Jordan there was still some hunting going on but for the most part people were practicing agriculture and had sheep goat cattle and pigs in the more well water there is the intensification of production during this period is clear details about the practices such as things like all of production are still being worked out we're still arguing over some of these details but there's a dramatic increase in status Goods and the increase in craft production is also clear for instance the basalt holes the basalt holes something I studied for my dissertation it could be a whole nother lecture that you should count yourself lucky that you're not having to listen to right now are a wonderful example where people invested a lot of energy in making a calculative the Sol's such as that that thing which I don't know a lot of museums don't like to use scales for some reason so that is about half a meter tall so almost up to my knee made out of solid basalt folder using stone tools somehow there were copper tools the copper tool would last about one minute against this heart the salt so they did this with stone tools all the intricate detail is difficult to estimate how long it would have taken somebody to make one of these and I still hope that I will have the opportunity to push a graduate student into trying to make one of these or two of these with the graduate student I always thought I was going to do it but I haven't gotten around to that yet we all need to actually make some tools and you know following the ancient tradition and then try to make one of these so I would estimate though that something as elaborate is that we'd probably take a couple of weeks to make unless that's all you're doing all the time simpler this all whole such as these are still quite beautiful despite my rather pathetic picture of them it's run I recognize these are again this one is nearly as tall as this one nearly a half metre tall so these are being made out of the salt the salt is from the Golan and the Galilee so the where these were found in the Negev the the salt is not local somebody traveled a couple days away to get the basalt and that's actually all we know about the production of these and that's a problem when you want to talk about economics of course if you're not talking about production you have a problem on your hands and I'll be the first to admit it so it's clear that people are investing a lot of energy getting the resources spending a lot of time manufacturing these basalt bowls and then taking them back because we don't think they're being made on the villages we've got no evidence of the tools or the detritus from their manufacture so this suggests that there's a great investment in making these and yet you can already tell they're not very standardized this one is much more elaborate than most that we find and others the more simple forms still are not really a basic size they some flare out more than others some are squatter they're not very standardized and this is what led me actually from studying these in my dissertation to the store to sort of start looking at where are they showing up and why aren't they more standardized if this is craft specialization why aren't they sort of be more efficient about how these are manufactured but really the the way to really talk more about craft production is the sophisticated copper smelting during the calculating this clearly attest to skilled craft production and this is something we'll return to ivory working as well has some element of craft specialization although there aren't that many ivory objects they're clearly very nicely done and some I would argue are very evocative of pre-dynastic Egyptian forms I would suggest that that one looks very much like a badarian type I'm not sure that all my ancient illogical colleagues would agree with me on that it's a tough thing to sort out it would really help we had the head but we don't others are probably not probably not Egyptian inspired but locally manufactured ivory pieces coming from the Nile hippo ivory from some distance these are just a few examples of social valuables the conspicuous consumption of today's title such items represent objects outside of the subsistence economy how do these objects relate to the economies of village life 6000 years ago first I think we should bear in mind that these valuables are not simply tokens of prestige the demand for these types of objects inspires and motivates the intensity and the scale of crafts productions small-scale societies just as an annual right such as Halloween inspires the intensity of costume and candy production on an annual basis so economic intensification was linked to increases in the elaboration and frequency of communal and individual ceremonial activity of course there is an important difference and many of these calculating ceremonies probably would have been viewed as an obligation I'm not so sure that any of us would really consider Halloween an obligation at least not not now the impact of ritual practice on economic production has long been recognized in the anthropological literature so I'm certainly not the first by any means to suggest that ritual practices and ceremonies would draw and actually push economic production one of my own anthropology professors the University of Virginia when I was an undergraduate threat Damon has documented how much we're requirements in masam region which is in the South Pacific motivated an enormous amount of time effort and resources for communal mortuary rights and even bronislaw malinowski in his early work among the tro brands noted the large economic impact of communal ceremonies within a ritual cycle people would start manufacturing canoes and large stone tools axes that you couldn't actually use they were too lard they were too thin for this ritual cycle in ramping up the production for ceremonies similar observations as I've already mentioned led Roy Rappaport to coined this term ritual mode of production in which he suggests that the ritual cycle defines and gives meaning to social and political and ecological relations conspicuous consumption events such as the potlatch or the Kula ring would you see an example of here differ from our own conspicuous consumption in at least one fundamental way and I think this is important to keep in mind for for us for modern industrial societies amassing wealth and status items that's the conspicuous part what you have right what you drive what you're wearing but Kula or potlatch or even the mocha events if any of these ring familiar these are events to amass wealth and give it away so conspicuous consumption of those is the very public giving away of all of it as opposed to keeping it these and other ethnographic studies allow us to look the social valuables of the Calculus ik from a different perspective the general economic intensification evident during this period and the related craft specialization is not produced for ordinary everyday consumption instead craft specialization in long distance trade provide valued objects that are distinguished from other material items anthropologist of course have long noted that economic institutions are not separate from the cultural realm and particularly among them the often traditional folk societies in which they work yet archeologists as opposed anthropologists archaeologists still tend to dichotomize material culture of the set of past societies into two categories subsistence and wealth wealth is associated with elites and subsistence is what people in small-scale societies had to settle for so let us look at some of these socially valued goods operating within what I consider the ritual economy of the calculizard first I'll turn to the most obvious example of craft specialization metallurgy the calculating period of course is named after the recognition that copper smelting begins during this time calcio is copper lithic is stone and it's a technological sophistication that's unparalleled in there in neighboring areas such as Egypt at this time the Egyptians were not producing sophisticated metals like this at this time they did not have the technology available even though very soon after the calculus they really sort of shot forward in terms of social complexity well over what was going on in Palestine and the environs just just the general area of course so set in a remote cliff to the west of the Dead Sea the knot Nahal mesh mark cave is truly spectacular and I've mentioned this in lectures before it's it's extraordinary because there are not other hoards like this in the region it's it contained the famous treasure of exotic and labor-intensive crafted artifacts of copper and I've as well as some pottery and a few other items you can see it here in the crevice where it was found with the the mat the reed mat that was put together that this whole bundle was put together in this crevice when it was found originally in fact there was some doubt as to how it could possibly be calculate the copper was too beautiful too sophisticated it was beyond anything that was known locally as beyond anything that the Egyptians were doing at the same time so how could it be that these these these agriculturalists was a few pieces of nice pottery and a few pieces of ivory how was it that they had this there was some doubt recently this mat was read ated and it's only about I guess it was published about six years ago or something like that so they did you know very high precision mass spectroscopy type of radiocarbon dating so reading the several different pieces of this mat and put it solidly in the calculus in fact pushed the date earlier so really into the calculus think not no chance that it's early bronze this is very interesting it's very strange that it's up in this crevice so there are over 400 copper artifacts primarily maize heads and sectors the remarkable hoard provides insights not only to the sophisticated copper techniques but also the elaborate iconography of the hoard these range from birds ibex horns to I should mention the ibex horns are really a common theme in the calculative context very often in mortuary context and some of the birds even seem to be inspired by I would argue Egyptian motifs again that's something that's very difficult to demonstrate one way a bird is a bird perhaps but some of these do look like a particularly this one looks very similar to some of the Egyptian motifs to my eye other motifs are difficult to interpret they appear to possibly be vegetal motifs others combine the animal horns with tools or handled vessels and so you can see how we have elaborate iconography combining the IBEX horns with like a blade and axe over here we have things that also might be axes but maybe a vegetal motif on the top something that is maybe like a mace head or again possibly fetch at all these maybe even mimicking basketry but again and copper again these these nice strap handles this stuff is extraordinary in that it is the lost wax casting method of metal the syrupy ado so this is not something that was common and we're not even sure where all of the copper is coming from some of it is probably not coming from local sources in the present-day Jordan or Israel it's probably coming from somewhere in the north it has not been pinpointed and there is not agreement on where that copper is coming from because there are higher trace elements of arsenic and antimony in that copper that do not match the sources in the south or anything on in other areas in the far south so this sophisticated technology is probably also drawing in metal ores from other areas and this hints at trade in exchange over a fairly great distance the mesh Marquart also included some ivories the ivories these are hippo ivory and this one I believe is hippo ivory but I'm not sure that's actually been confirmed by a baby the only ivory expert that it ever seems to work in the area there a few have been identified as elephant and so I don't know if there really is in the elephant but most is hippo ivory and if I was probably coming from the novel so what's this doing here archaeologists have proposed different reasons that this incomparable deposit was left in a remote cliff face and I should point out that you saw where it was in that cliff face they had to rappel down the Israeli military and archeologists sort of built rope ladders and rappel down the cliff face to even get in that crevice so it was not even though there was some pottery that wasn't particularly glamorous and so some people suggest that they were maybe living in this cave this seems pretty hard to believe that anybody was living up there most archaeologists would agree on the cultic or the ritual nature of the deposit the the motifs the fact that it's all hoarded together and placed in this crevice so most archaeologists would agree on that however they've proposed different reasons about why it was in that crevice hidden away like that and we don't really have time to go into all these different theories but one of them is is overlooked and that is that there were human burials up there and at least one of them seems to be directly associated with that hoard so although it seems like an awfully elaborate burial a funerary context it nevertheless there are human burials there and so that may be the reason so this is this is a point that's been ignored that there were the skeletons found in the cave where the hoard was found so whether or not this should be interpreted as a burial assemblage there's little a little doubt that ultimately it was associated with ritual practices of some sort well now I'd like to turn to we were just looking at the court which is right down here here you have the Dead Sea what we were just looking at was no home Miche Marv I think so-called cave of the treasure and now we're going to jump over here and look at the site that he lives jallat doesn't look like much there's no impressive monument to architecture there's really not a lot to point out here you can see the traces of a mud brick building maybe a stone platform some nice large cars and a whole lot of pits boy did we hate the pits mud brick wasn't much fun either but the pits were horrible because there were so many of them they're cutting across each other and you can't really tell which one came first or what belongs in what pit so a few pits archaeologists love them and find all sorts of goodies and pits you find preserved animal remains preserved botanical remains you find goodies you know nice artifacts that are hidden away but when you have too many pits and they cut over each other you start to not have much of a comprehensive architectural plan that causes some problems for us and the site is now published and you can see the consciousness of the need for wearing clothes when you're excavated protecting yourself from the Sun lots of moderately sized site as well it's nothing extraordinarily large doesn't monumental architecture and it's located the interface between the northern Negev and that coastal plain that humid coastal plain the architecture and the stratigraphy is I said is rather disturbed the plan is less than coherent but the assemblage from you lot is remarkably rich a lot of it comes from the pits the gila lady in the Gila Ram are the most famous most well known symbols locally every archaeologist is known of them for quite some time and of course the culotte lady is inspired quite a number of articles she's just the kind of thing archaeologists like to wax philosophical about and of course there's a lot of imagery there to talk about the vessel that she has on her head is what's called a churn and the churn is actually missing the neck so there should be a little bit more the neck right up at the top and it's a miniature of a vessel that we know well and was probably used for making butter and yogurt so there you have a vessel that was probably pretty crucial to agricultural societies sitting the top of the head of the Gilad lady clearly a lady although somewhat barrel shaped I would disagree with most of archaeologists who have asserted that she's a simple fertility because she's my anthropological colleagues don't necessarily agree that she's pregnant and it's a tough one to know one way or the other of course she could be barrel-shaped because this is how you build an a vessel she's hollowing the inside and so there's a certain amount of barrel shading this probably helps the structural integrity of making this Hollow we don't know exactly what it is she has under her arm she does have a very nice little stool some have argued that it's like a birthing stool which we know from much much later Hittite iconography so it doesn't mean that that's what this is it could just be a stand that you put a cult ritual object upon if you have parallels actually in copper for very similar shaped objects and well if you really want to wax philosophical you could probably make an argument that these are sort of the furrows of the field and her tears are drunk you know going in and watering the fields for fertility not sure I would really go that far but you can tell somebody and I have already argued about this and here you have the RAM with also typical vessels in its back so this is what the site of qalaat is particularly well known for these are those are extraordinary objects they're not known from other sites but the the the assemblage from jallat is quite rich in other ways and so it includes a large number of stone mace heads and I had the good luck of getting to study those as a graduate student there's an extraordinary large number of them for sight on any calculates like you might be lucky enough to find one or two we had about 40 stone makes heads at the site and a few of them I would argue are very similar to pre-dynastic shapes this is a more typical calculate that sort of pure form or pear-shaped these are not very typical actually not known from pretty much any other sites there these are also not made of local materials nor are these pallets this is granite and this is scoria this court is volcanic probably coming from somewhere in the Galilee or the Golan up where the volcanoes were and granite is either coming from Sinai or somewhere in southern Negev southern Jordan again not local to the site and then the obsidian which we use neutron activation analysis we found six pieces of obsidian of course we took photographs with the nice ones is the best pieces and these six pieces were traced to three different sources in Anatolia so well over a thousand kilometers away nothings are very small unknowns could sort of be the function of down the line trade you could have you could very easily envision some nomadic pastoralists ort of trading it from amongst different people on it sort of finally making its way down it doesn't necessarily mean the people in this village made their way to different volcanic sources in modern-day Turkey but nevertheless it is a very long way now typically my lectures I've always said that these are unique to the catalytic period with the exception of one piece we know from another site however this year we found two more pieces of sitting at our site Marg rava up in the north so I'm very excited about being able to trace those two pieces we just discovered this summer and find out if they're from the same source as these or somewhere else and I've even got a colleague who's volunteered to do the testing for free so it doesn't get much better than that and got a permit to take them out of the country so all these asides aside what else did we find a key lie we found hundreds of ceramic and basalt fenestrated stands we call them fenestrated for the obvious reason of course they have windows and they've been traditionally called incense burners there's not really a good reason to interpret them that that way functionally I mean it's a nice name for them and since burners makes a lot more sense than calling them fenestrated pedestals stands but we don't really know if they were bringing in the incense and a lot of them as you can see are not burned they are not very practical in many ways and so they might be nice for perhaps burning an incense or keeping an oil hot but we don't have a lot of evidence for at site of qalaat we've got evidence for about hundreds of them again this one is the salt so it's coming from several days away that this basalt and we have more of these at the site of qalaat than any other site in the southern LaVon so we have hundreds of those the mollusk shells sample is much larger than for most other sites it includes species such as a safari a Rubens it's species from the Nile another species called Tran cada which is from the Red Sea as well as others from the Mediterranean so the site is bringing in shell from different water sources it's bringing in basalt from distant northern or Eastern sources and then we have the violin shaped figurines the lovely violent shake figurines now if you study the AG in a bit you immediately look at them go wait a minute but those look a lot like you know these are later however these are a good thousand years later than those ones you know from the Cycladic islands and so probably not not related because these are some of the earliest that we know of in the southern Livan again at this site we have I forgotten now on what is the number 76 76 of these things from the site of qalaat that number 76 of them is more than have been found at all other sites from Lebanon to Sinai put together so it's 76 doesn't sound like an extraordinary number but in contrast to any other site it's it's a lot and this again again you can see that they're made of some exotic materials granite I think this is the one that's made of chloride shifts and one of my colleagues my senior colleagues sort of a mentor was taken to task for drawing a parallel to the female form with these and so he was very happy when we later discovered one that he thought helped make his case this is a unique example of a violent shape figurine and that one sorry not the one on the left this one is from a different site up north again female form seems fair enough and what the reason I bring it up in this context is that it seems to have contours that resemble the ossuary the burial box is for secondary burial in the Caliph elliptic so you can see how you've got the shoulder and neck very similar and the cebre similar to the ossuary shoulder in that can you do the breasts of these also areas so there does seem to be this connection between a clearly ritual artifact and perhaps these ossuary boxes for burial for secondary burial but back to you lot there are no ossuary is at that site there are however a lot of burials and this one is probably the large it's one of the better preserved burials at the site it's a collective burial and so their burials all over the site an estimated number of about 90 individuals at the site so burials were primary they were placed in shallow pits primarily there were scattered bones and some you know of ones that have been disturbed or removed this collective burial is in a shallow mud brick lined pit you can just make out the traces of some of the mud break here still wasn't pretty well made pit or silo or even just a burial structure so it might have been initially been intended as a silo but as a secondary use it clearly contained complete skeletons of nine individuals three adults three adolescents and three children below when we excavated it very carefully this layer of individuals we found a layer of animal bones at the bottom of it a very thick layer of animal bones I don't mean just a few animal bones here and there which we find cross the site a thick layer of sheep goat at the bottom of it and then below the animal bone of the of the pit was a nice stone paving kind of suggest maybe some sort of Associated feasting or something difficult to know that this event have with the animal artifacts at the bottom with the animal dominance of at the bottom of the pit it's tough to know that it was all one event but just one meter away we found this a mud plaster pit you can just make it out with a complete basalt fenestrated stamp which you've already seen a picture of actually and burn ghazal horns there was something like 12 12 burned gazelle horns actually but you can only make out a few in this particular picture gazelle horn course gazelles are something that's hunted what were these people who were raising sheep and goat and maybe a few pigs and cows doing with gazelle horn corn we don't really know we don't have any evidence that they were hunting maybe they were using something that we no longer have traces so for hunting well maybe they went out and collecting these maybe they were trading with other groups further to the south we really don't know whatever reason though it's pretty evocative that they were collecting these these foreign cores the interior cores of the gazelle and putting them together in this pit right next 1 meter away from that burial structure that had the 9 individuals in it and again brings us back to that repeating that redundant motif of forms that are often in association with the fenestrated stands now relative to the area excavated the burial density aqui alot is much higher than any other site in other words the mortuary rites were a central function of the site and yet despite the exotic nature of the artifact assemblage population Aquila really suffered pretty poor health so it doesn't really seem like it was some sort of elite precinct we don't really have any evidence for say priests or anybody really doing well so there's very nice objects things that are being made from materials that are non-local and very evocative artifacts but it's not these don't but at least according to the diet the people who are living there who were buried there don't really suggest an elite group of people well the one thing that I can never resist showing is of course the dog was also buried at this site it is only good not only in his own pit but I mean literally this is not just a dead animal but one that was clearly placed in a burial pit like some of the other individuals and had his own mortuary artifact which actually is clear more clearly associated with his dog than most of the other human burials at the site he had his own mortuary that's all most of the other humans didn't that most of humans did not Carolyn Gregson our archaeologist and who's been an archaeologist for a very long time said that the dog is very old she suggested that because the animal had an unhealed fractured leg it was well cared for for months or even years before it died and because it's articulate he was clearly placed there not sort of just dumped and then scattered somewhere he was placed in this pit we don't really have parallels for this in the southern Obama we don't have any other animal burials this early certainly not with their own mortuary artifact now we do have some parallels in Egypt at sites like Maudie and Wadi Degla and Heliopolis and those are animal burials that are sometimes equipped with offerings most of them dogs but they're a little bit later they're not quite as early as this as far as I can make out from the literature so the dogs funerary vessel with that double handled cylindrical vessel down there is also quite unusual and it's locally manufactured so we can't say that it comes from Egypt and yet the unusual nature of the vessel is bit suspicious well that's that's the site of qalaat just recently some colleagues published a rather interesting paper and this is the site else off this is in Jordan Valley now it's actually just south of the Sea of Galilee I'm not going to talk about it for very long I just wanted to mention it and I mention it because they published a paper just last year arguing that the that feasting took place at this site now the large scale accumulation of food for feasting is well known in the anthropological literature whether it's yams huge amounts of yams for bridewealth payments or into trade within the Kula ring it's well known phenomena to to sort of ramp up production of food and not because you need to feed people so much as display of being able to spread the wealth around this is typically associated with ritual events and of course we could make parallels in their own lives as well this often involves 2gg planning for over a year or more and so food production is intensified for the feast now feasting of course may produce the need for other types of cereal ceremonial equipment whether it's special garments or ornamentation or material goods for display so here we see the site of teloth which my colleagues published again it's just just south of the dead of the Sea of Galilee very hot area and all the architecture is primarily mud brick and they argue it's a site of feasting so here you can see a plan just part of this site you see our standard rectilinear or calculus ik building and then you see some very intriguing circular structures not typical of calculus excites this site that suggests it's a the rectilinear architecture and the courtyards have associated with them to the cars and as well as the hearth a series of silence and so in that courtyard area and from their report I believe that these are also silos as well but that that is not that is not so their point is their argument is is that you have silos being built that are a place to put a lot more food than what they met the needs of the people as far as they can estimate now this is a difficult thing to be certain of you know how much could be stored in these silos but it's clear that not very many people would live in a courtyard rectilinear complex like this and so the suggestion is that these were built for feasting events and that these mini hearts were being used for roasting animals basically the Calculus thick barbecue events and they found a lot of pig bone in these in these roasting ovens pigs were very popular at the site it's a very wet area down in the Jordan Valley and pigs seem to have any barbecue it seems to have been what people were drawn to at the site this is the final point I'd like to mention today and it's something that it's it's an intriguing aspect of the calculus you really cannot get away from the the aspect of secondary burial in period a major cow clipping innovation is the introduction of extramural mortuary grounds so in the neolithic very often people were just simply buried under the floor somewhere probably in a house that they were no longer using or going to abandon and the capitalistic you start to get what I think we can fairly call separate separate grounds cemeteries and those cemeteries are sometimes in caves and sometimes they're just extra you know extra village areas with circles along with this practice with secondary information what is secondary information secondary process is where the body is put somewhere for a period of time and then people return to collect the bones maybe not all of them there's the sort of the largest pieces it varies culturally for reburial so it's actually a long ritual cycle it's actually a long process this comes back again in the second Second Temple period but this is the first time that we really see this as a very standard procedures during the calculon people are starting to practice secondary mortuary practices these are very often in caves and they're typically associated with Austin Aries here you see an ossuary and this is a karstic cave so that's why it looks like molten melted ice cream it's now solidified all over everything so here you have a ceramic box this is the top of the box but it's flipped upside down and here you see the nose maybe a headdress some breasts and that would have sat on top these are little handles that weren't really for picking it up as much as they were probably for closing the lid for holding the lid on top and then this is this horrible environment where my colleagues had to work chipping all this stuff off of this very soft human remains and artifacts and ossuary is very tough environment to work it was found with tracker though they had no choice it had to be Salvage archaeology project this is just a very simple map showing where the ossuaries our auto areas are found in caves marked by the red stars and where a few of us words are found very rarely in non cave sites just to give you a sense of where these found of course you can already recognize that the concentration is in tel-aviv and the larger suburban area where a lot of development takes place and where a lot of these caves were discovered with tractors and back hoes and so on when they break open the side of a mountain they're building a suburb complex and that's when these are discovered so it's actually quite rare that the archaeologists have a trivalent of finding it first before of bulldozer does unfortunately the picking cave the one we just looked at is up in the north not far from our excavations Marg raba many of these are known from the coastal plain as we saw on central Hill Country although this is really touted as the primary mode of calculate burial there's a diverse array of information so people are not only buried being varied this way they're still also being buried singly or multiple burials as we saw a key lot rather than secondary burial burial Goods though are usually associated with secondary burials most of the burial goods are with secondary burials and they become much more frequent and elaborate than in periods like the Neolithic in the earlier periods but this is this quantity and quality of goods really varies widely so you have no Hamish mark that's a very good this is extraordinary for more than 400 copper artifacts in other burials we have nothing you saw the burial of nine individuals there was really nothing associated with those individuals the Pokeno series though give us an insight to just how elaborate some of these secondary mortuary containers really were we knew about this before picking was discovered and in the 90s but nothing quite as elaborate as this silence so you can see how this one call the screen has got a very clearly delineated face so the ossuary we saw earlier just had a simple nose maybe kind of a headdress and that was typical of most Oscars this picking gave us an insight sort of gave us motifs and even applique features that we've never seen before so the screen has got very clear eyes very clear mouth is this was not not something we seen before even more remarkable was this one that has some sort of strange headgear on it I mean we've really are not ears if you can see the side view you can kind of see how these things protrude out it almost looks like they're wearing one of those old aviator you know hats and even even has a snout that looks very uncommon like more like a baboon or dog's snout and even has arms and fingers something we'd never seen before on any of these burial containers so something quite quite different this this varial of paquimé cave had over 400 individuals estimated in it and hundreds of these Oscar eyes it's not yet published luckily Israel's of small archaeological community and so we all talk and when I was there working on my dissertation they had all this stuff spread out in their halls it was so much of it they couldn't just keep it in a room they couldn't nobody could keep it hidden if they wanted to so in trying to put it together it was everywhere all over the antiquities department so you just walk in and you see these amazing heads and pieces of containers being reconstructed by people fascinating stuff the site also included steo type beads some very elaborate basalt holes like the examples you've already seen one ivory figurine and some metal objects so the pit is picking assemblage really clearly extended the Kalka with ik reach even further to the north much much further than anything we've known before and of course as I mentioned the ossuary has included motifs that we've never seen before these model three-dimensional heads and arms and mouths in other lectures I have discussed the varied and often rich burial practices during the calculus so rather than risk terrible redundancy I only wanted to emphasize the elaborate nature of these funerary practices and at the beginning of the oh I'm sorry I forgot that I had given more than 15 assemblage yet another ossuary and one of the things that has this thing stands about that high and has sort of like the finist rated stand bowls on it some of them had skulls in it as far as they could tell most cases I couldn't tell because things were broken and smashed and covered up but a few of these actually still had human skulls and them so clearly part of the ritual equipment for the burials at picky yes moon this is the creepy twins finally knock on this is the only burial cave to date that has actually been worked at with archaeologist and spelunkers and his volunteers who found of course not the archaeologists who found the cave site and work together to actually investigate the cave site without benefit of a bulldozer or backhoe or anything and so in this site it's an elaborate deep cave you can see here there's a ream aid there map you can see where the different ossuary ZAR where the human remains are so even though it's a deep karstic cave it nevertheless was rather disturbed things have been sort of knocked around things are not clear you can't say oh this individual was found in this ossuary or this ossuary with female characteristics had a female in it we've never had the benefit of that kind of resolution in the archaeological record in any of these caves but at least in this one it wasn't actually ripped open by a bulldozer and luckily one of the things that was discovered were these gold and electrum rings found in one of the crevasses what they call the passage clearly with you know nearby some of the ossuary and burials but not in one of them not right next to it this is remarkable and I know that some of my colleagues are still a little suspicious what's this gold doing it in calculus it could have never been any gold found before no and these are not bracelets they're too small again it's a museum photograph and so there's no there's no scale on it but they're quite small so they're too small for anybody's wrist and you can see that there's sort of a hammer they're pretty because they're gold but they're not really finally finished in the sense that it's an object of decoration the suspicion or at least the the the archaeologists who discovered them have suggested that they were ingots some some way of actually putting them to move them in and from Egyptian tomb context that date I forget now 2,000 years later something like that like not even close not even in the ballpark of the calculate we do have very similar objects that are being demonstrated on long sticks being brought by Nubians to the cave in Egypt so we do know about these but the the time period the chronology doesn't work at all we also gold very difficult to trace so the copper we can at least start working on trace elemental analysis and posit this or you know eliminate that source this source possible eliminate that source gold no chance it's not so simple and so we don't know where the gold is coming from the two closest possibilities Azerbaijan and Nubia modern-day Sudan both pretty far away given me the likelihood that there's some Egyptian cotton connections with with shale steel tight beads that we discovered in Palestine also we're probably coming from Egypt given that connection the more likely connections seems to the more likely source seems to be Nubia but as far as pinpointing it scientifically we haven't been able to and it doesn't seem like we'll be able to any anytime soon so at the beginning of the lecture I suggested that the rich copper hoard found at the homie Shamar was funerary nature and then there was the pilgrimage site of July that also seemed to have human burials as a key function of the site now whether those sites are fully accepted as mortuary they're probably related to ritual practices other mortuary sites are undisputed of course such as Nahal Cana and pequin I mean these are ritual mortuary rituals sites there are many other examples of course but the central point here is that during the calculus if we have ample examples of ritual sites and yet these include objects that are really not standardized and the even the architecture the sites themselves they're not standardized to the point that we could call them something like temples we really avoid using that term because temples are something that are codified in standardized you can start looking at them understanding what function does what we don't have that in the calculus thing right not yet and probably never will it doesn't really seem to have that formalization much of this ritual though clearly seems related to the proper disposal of the people's loved ones secondary burial rites meant the preparation for reburial allowed time for creation of ritually charged objects to go with that deposition much of it the reburial which we would know that you're going to do perhaps on some sort of kalindra cool plant or some sort of agricultural clinical time timeframe so in the calculator glance Cape cemeteries sanctuaries the caches in the caves were all intertwined to form the Nexus of ritual practice that address these central human concerns of death and the regeneration of life a ritual economy such as that of calculus ik can motivate individuals skilled craftspeople to create these socially valued goods rather than emphasize the political aspirations of a few over the necessity of many ritual acts such as feasting an exchange of social valuables builds prestige but it also provides the opportunity for individual ritual participation so I would argue that the perspective of a ritual economy encourages us to consider how values and beliefs motivate economic choices rather than the reverse so ritual as the basic social act can actually drive economic production and so with that I'd like to leave it there and give you all a chance to ask any questions or challenge this this idea whatever you like so thank you very much I give us something else to look at Wow you know you really got to the heart of a problem the the not all mesh Mart for the the copper horrid found in the crevice was of course found it does seem like it was one deposit all together at the same time in that mat but when they dated the mat there turned out to be something of a problem but I really don't know what the answer is and that is that despite using very high precision think they were dated at the Oxford labs one of the world's best mass spectroscopy labs they came out with different dates and the dates okay well that's that's normal with radiocarbon dating you don't expect to come up with exactly the same data their probability statements anyway but these dates vary by like hundreds of years so that part of the mat seems to be earlier than that part of the mat and so how to interpret that I don't really know possibly it's because different pieces of mat had been sitting around for a while and were woven together and put together as one and it's not in such great condition that you can sort of spread it all out and say yes this parts the as far as I understand it it would be too difficult to it would be too detrimental to the map sort of stretch it out and try to say this part was earlier in that part you know these different pieces were put together so I don't know what the answer to that is it does seem like it was one event but the mat itself seems like it may have been the results of several different events are several different manufacturing processes which is a little the law right this certainly seems possible in fact it seems like one of the only explanations that I can come up with the the problem is with the mat really survives so well I mean certainly in a dry cave thousands of years it preserved but that's because nobody touched it for those many thousands of years and because it was in an environment where there is very little as almost an anaerobic environment that's part of what helped preserve it of course if you had people touching it and moving it around and attaching things to it and taking parts off I would have thought that eventually it would have all just sort of disintegrated but you know I don't know that we can talk about over generations but what we can say is that those different copper items are not all made the same there's no standardization yes there's an idea of what a mace head looks like and all mace Ed's many hundreds of them look pretty similar but they're not exactly the same and they're clearly making a different mold for each one and so it's it's not sort of a efficiency production line kind of idea somebody one of the theories that was posited about these was that they were that there was a deposit of artifacts that were no longer useful that they had passed there's there's sort of their sacred time and so of course what do you do with a sacred object well you don't exactly just chuck it in the bin you put it in some sort of deposit where sacred objects go but the problem with that is that the most of these are in pretty good Nick they're really in pretty good shape and so it doesn't really seem like they would have expired in their in their utility they're still beautiful I mean as you saw they still shine up wonderfully 6000 years laters so that doesn't really seem like they were broken or would be would have been disposed of for that reason and here the excavators of the G lot site would argue that there were that there was a priestly class or there were some priests and there is one site called M Getty which will hopefully take a short hike up to during the trip in two weeks and an Getty is one that we would all agree I think all the archaeologists work in calculating and even other periods would agree that that does seem like a sanctuary site of pilgrimage site not nothing but there's no residence there really at the same time that the difference in burial seems to suggest difference the difference that we can't really associate with hierarchies so that's still problematic and part of the reason is when you find these wonderful cave burials with all the marvelous ossuary and great artifacts you can't really say which artifact went with who or there went with several people so you have secondary burials there very often grouped anyway so already you've lost that it's just not nice and tidy like those pre-dynastic Egyptian or Egyptian burials where you have individual lots of pots palettes other good stuff in one single articulated variable you have secondary burial it sort of messes up your evidence and it's put together with some objects then the cave collapses and things get broken or people return and bury some more things and sort of push those things out of the way because they don't know those people they know it's a generation later they don't have approved that isn't so they're going to focus on their burial so we really are not convinced that we are there yet and so I could still see being able to posit that some of these burials and secondary burials were being done sort of on a group basis a corporate group a lineage of that you would do it maybe even on an annual basis or something and include some nice artifacts but maybe not for one individual maybe for individuals who you collected up as a group for an on a secondary burial right say when the harvest is done we can have the time to take care of this kind of problem so right right exactly that kind of yeah that's exactly the kind of ethnographic analogy from Madagascar though that makes me think of this yeah so it's clearly when you look at the copper objects okay this stuff is pretty impressive and the sophisticated technology is beyond what anybody's doing in in other areas at the same time most cases they're not really associated clearly with an individual in the single burial so it's problematic for asserting that there's a hierarchy there yes the secondary burials generally include the skulls and long bones but they don't seem to be too picky about trying to collect every single bone yeah right and the the problem of course is that when you find an articulated burial or earth light at the site of qalaat where you find disturbed burials it's difficult to know well was that just simply disturbed because somebody came along later and they didn't know somebody was buried there or is that because they came back and collected certain pieces and when you find an articulated burial is that because that person was different were they they like weren't as important they don't rank a secondary burial or is it because in the archaeological record whatever for whatever reason nobody came back they would have been had the secondary burial but it just never happened for that person it's very difficult to know these things it's it's very tough to tease it out so it's it's difficult to know whether or not ultimately most people except for infants would have gotten a secondary burial or whether or not there's really a distinction that some people get a secondary burial and some people don't for whatever reason you know so that's also a problem with trying to understand hierarchy and status within the period yeah that's a very good question there are you know that the pottery is primarily been made locally but we do have some evidence for just recently a French woman by the name of Valentin rule published an article suggesting that there are some pots coming from a site in the Jordan Valley and then found in the Negev so there may be some specialization developing honor may be something of a minor scale but not everybody's making exclusively their own local pottery such as for pottery specifically you mean or just truth yeah I mean again for some of the Flint tools which which is what I've studied for years there there are most of the tools locally produced just but not all there are those that seem to be coming even from some distance so they're these things called fluent tabular scrapers and they're very they're they're large fan scrapers that might be the size of my hand or even slightly larger very flat no thicker than my hand or even less and those are not of the Flint to make those is not available locally it's pretty much any calculator excite people seem to be going some distance or trading with pastoralists who know where to get this and the court making these and then bringing them back we think we have identified some of the sites some of my colleagues have not myself in Jordan where they're making it which is very far away for most calculus excites so there is an element of a little bit of trade and tools and pottery something of an exotic nature or fancier things that aren't just ritual objects perhaps these are analysis computer scientists consistent history there there there hasn't really been a lot done and now the political situation within sort of the Antiquities Authority these be the religious authorities in Israel is causing problems for any future physical remains the physical remains have been turned over to their religious right move and reburying them so even though they're not it's not a Jewish population I think they're enough to say and but but there have been some analyses done and so for example at the site of qalaat the evidence for well a number of different maladies many of them relating probably to poor nutrition as well as possibly malaria various forms of anemia that suggests that that population is not eating that well that seems to be pretty typical of the period from what we know of other areas other sites it's not unusual it's not unusual with these early agricultural populations yeah you're producing more you're producing more grains and grains are not a good source of protein it's just a good source of sugar to keep people going there are animals but of course people are trying to create cheese and yogurt and keep their animals going for the second dairy products to be able to use the hair for making wool and for the for making butter and yogurt and cheese and so probably people aren't eating that much meat all the time and so nutrition doesn't seem to be that great in the cup with a period at all and most of the populations that we know of have not shown I believe so and I don't think that that was it wasn't really published in detail in that article so I think that we'll get more at because I think the preservation was quite good at that site and clearly the animal remains have been partially studied which is how they knew that there was a lot of pig being consumed but the botanical remains I don't think there's really anything published in detail so but I think there will be I think the preservation was good so there will be in the future I think it would be very interesting to know you know just just what it is whether or not it's it's wheat or if it's you know if it's a more wheat or if it's something else I was unique in that area the question where this technology came from is still an open one but it does seem like there was comparable technology in and it's sort of stretching outside of my realm of good clothes knowledge but I think that further north in Iran and possibly in Syria there was and this may be the source of some of the copper that there was comparable technology about the same time yeah I think so but I'm just wondering are you finding any colleagues that are arguing at this point that I certainly will and I think and I'll tell you why this sort of comes out of looking at with with my colleague and something of a mentor a person who was on my dissertation committee years ago and still you know a friend who was the proponent of the idea that the calculus was where we see the first chiefdoms in the region where we see the first development of elites and and inherited status thus chiefdoms and I'm arguing that to some extent that might be true but I am minimizing it and I am suggesting that contrary to what he has offered for the reason for that which was that it's risk management that there are more people and there's more conflict over land over farming land versus those who are pastoralists and so out of that arose the need for somebody who's sort of a good leader a good manager of diminishing resources it's it was a pretty not unusual argument in the 80s and and and the you know something of a pretty convincing one it but without a lot of the evidence for chiefdoms isn't really there the the lack of monumental architecture the lack of burials with individuals with a lot of the goods we certainly have the good certainly have impressive artifacts we just simply don't have them associated with elite residences we precincts you know the individual we have lots of burials but we don't have the evidence to suggest a burial with a particular type of artifact so the the idea of an inherited status which is fundamental to arguing for this elite chieftain model I I would argue isn't really there and instead I would suggest that the the rituals that would have still been part of a chiefdom are part of what drove this this increasing economic intensification you know I'm trying to avoid something of a tautology so they have a chicken and egg argument but but I do see this as a lot of this equipment seems to be ritually affiliated and not in any sort of sense standardized efficiency the creation of you know lots of artifacts that are similar yeah right well there were five skeletons the problem is these are excavated in the 60s and when excavated don't think they were really looking for anything Kalka lithic that's just what they have a define I think there are more interested in like text scrolls and stuff in the Dead Sea and so the details of where things were and where the burials were are a bit sketchy and we're never going to be able to resolve that because even when you go to the original hebrew publication that was translated english you don't sort out the problems so i don't know i have no idea but you're right if that is a mortuary assemblage and if there's only save one individual or even if there's only a couple of individuals that would argue for somebody if you're gonna argue that that's really mortuary assemblage yeah yeah yeah if not now then when it would something probably in the next period in the in the early bronze when you start to see really sort of larger urban centers at you oddly much of this cool stuff that you see from the calculus the the Asti where is the copper the ivory all this inventive sort of creative stuff the the wall murals that disappears in the early bronze there's still metallurgy but it's really functional we need all's and we need a few axes and that's all that's being made no more copper scepters and where copper may says it's not that the technology disappeared people still knew how to make this stuff maybe it was a break with the providers of the ore so that might have been a problem so you know some sort of disruption in the trade and if in doubt blame it on the Egyptians right but there's it's not clear why that all sort of fell apart all this what I would argue is this ritual practice that's got so much fancy non-local goods involved with it really sort of disappears and yet there are still people there they're living in larger sort of something close to urban communities the site of a rod in the northern Negev is a great example where there's actually a wall around the town nice thick wall it's not clear that they needed to defend themselves but they had it they had a big thick wall and so things really did change rather dramatically and it does seem like they're people starting to manage sort of making a large urban like wall reservoir and towns like Arad so I would suggest a little bit later but something very different happened something that was not I would not argue that's ritually driven in that in that next period well thank you all thank you very much really appreciate your questions

Channel: The Oriental Institute

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Keywords: Ancient, Economy, Archaeology, Oriental Institute, Museum, Lecture, History, Economics, documentary, Caanan, Chalcolithic, University of Chicago, Yorke Rowan

Id: ylpmyu8y73M

Length: 74min 38sec (4478 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2013