Ideologies in Archaeology

7. Inventing Human Nature

175 7 Inventing Human Nature kathleen sterling Since the late nineteenth century, anthropology, particularly archaeological and paleoanthropological studies and the ethnography of hunter-gatherers, has changed our understanding of what it means to be human. A question that was theological or philosophical found new answers in science. Unfortunately, many of these answers have been framed in the model of the hunter-gatherer as the basic human, a cultural tabula rasa and the standard of life in harmony with nature . Modern archaeologists, like other scholars, no longer explicitly present hunter-gatherer groups this way, but the influences both of the history of the discipline and of contemporary popular culture are strong and undoubtedly color archaeological narratives. Many thinkers in a variety of disciplines have given some thought to how hunting and gathering peoples are represented and what they stand for in industrialized society. The influence of Hobbes’s (1950 [1651]) ideas of ruthless struggle and Rousseau’s (1968 [1762]) picture of the “noble savage” are still strong, if opposing, portrayals. Popular culture, following sociobiology/evolutionary psychology, uses an essentialized hunter-gatherer as the explanation for a whole host of modern behaviors. Indeed, the idea that certain human traits—what we see as traits, rather than practices—evolved through Darwinian selection because they helped us survive and thrive seems so logical that most people never ask themselves if the present organization of 176 kathleen sterling societies could or should be different; or if there are other explanations of how modern societies came to be as they are, and if the paths they followed were inevitable. An argument could be made that the rest of the world has not yet caught up with the field of anthropology in its evolved understanding of hunter-gatherers, but what about anthropologists themselves and specifically archaeologists? Are they part of the perpetuation of stereotyped portrayals of hunting and gathering peoples that serve to reify current ideology about human nature, either deliberately or through neglect? Gilchrist (1994: x) notes that “archaeology seems to be all things to all people. The discipline . . . increasingly strives to engage with current political issues.” While archaeology may be a source of information and inspiration for other fields, this does not always come with the collaboration or assent of archaeologists. In the case of huntergatherer archaeology, in some quarters there has been a reluctance to engage with current political issues, perhaps because this is seen as a distraction from “doing science.”1 The lack of engagement does not, however, result in greater objectivity; quite the opposite. The view of hunter-gatherers as people who behave in a way that is more natural than what we see in modern society serves to obscure variation among groups and their individual histories; it results in a lack of attention to aspects of culture we may find distasteful, such as violence; and it naturalizes and dehistoricizes other aspects, such as sex and gender. “Common-sense” views of human behavior are reflected in most archaeological discourse on the Paleolithic, particularly ideas about rational economic behavior and gendered division of labor. These ideas are so pervasive in Western capitalist societies, the societies in which most archaeologists are socialized, that we have difficulty separating our assumptions from our evidence. The conventional wisdom of hunter-gatherer archaeology speaks volumes about our attitudes about humanity in general. These attitudes participate in a vicious circle: on the one hand, we assume hunter-gatherers behave and behaved in the ways that are natural to humans, so we look to them to find out what is natural for human behavior; on the other hand, we understand certain aspects of human nature to be the same as what is normal for us, either because it is what we live or it is what we believe. This is the framework for interpretations of hunter-gatherer groups. In order to address the problems with using hunter-gatherers as Inventing Human Nature 177 the means by which we understand human nature, we must first investigate what archaeologists mean by hunter-gatherers and what arguments are made or implied for using them in this manner. Then I will address one social construction: gender, in the broadest sense. A number of other supposed universals could be used in place of gender to illustrate the fact that many of the interpretations we make in archaeology are based on what we believe to be true about human behavior rather than what we...