Complex Communities: The Archaeology of Early Iron Age West-Central Jordan

2. Communal Complexity on the Margins

13 Public audiences celebrate archaeology for its investigation of “civilizations”—Mesopotamian, Roman, the Mayan and the Aztec, to name only a handful—that consistently dominate television programming and glossy magazine covers. The broad appeal of civilization persists into the new century as societies remain concerned with maintaining their existence in the face of widespread economic turbulence and global climate change. Indeed, the ancient civilization has become the default category to which the contemporary is compared in hopes that past mistakes will not be repeated. What is striking in these anachronistic valuings of the past is the way other forms of human organization are regularly overlooked despite their persistence in human history. Small-scale societies such as communities are no exception to this oversight despite their popularity in modern discourse. Equally problematic is how nineteenthand twentieth-century social scientists gestured to the community’s primordial past, despite a lack of knowledge about what these iterations looked like in material terms. These assumptions that the community is some kind of “natural” human condition are unconvincing for archaeologists who are charged with explaining cultural phenomena in the past. Still, it is difficult to ignore that the community is the form from which states and empires grew, and it is where groups often returned to once civilizations had “collapsed.” What is so enticing about the community that has made it such a persistent form of social organization throughout human history? Chapter Two Communal Complexity on the Margins 14 · Communal Complexity on the Margins Archaeological Ontologies of the Community Archaeologists have not sought an answer to this question for very long, despite its recognition in earlier social scientific research. One of the earliest references to community appeared in Gordon Willey’s Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Virú Valley, Perú (1953:371–395). Willey described settlements sharing assemblages as united under a “community pattern.” Although he did not venture a definition of community, he did establish it as an analytical unit requiring archaeological investigation. The physical boundaries of the “site” marked the community’s edges, he argued, whereas a shared assemblage between settlements defined a broader community connected through ideological or ethnic connections. Not until a 1955 seminar entitled “Functional and Evolutionary Implications of Community Patterning” was a deliberate attempt made to improve upon Willey’s notion of community (Beardsley et al. 1956). The seminar’s participants adopted a definition of community that found broad applicability : “the largest grouping of persons in any particular culture whose normal activities bind them together into a self-conscious, corporate unit, which is economically self-sufficient and politically independent” (Beardsley et al. 1956:133). From this definition, the seminar participants built a typology of community patterns, each a nexus of relationships between economic, social, political, and ideological structures. In all, seven patterns were identified based on a group’s mobility practices, ranging from “restricted wandering” to “semi-permanent sedentary” and “supra nuclear integrated” (Beardsley et al. 1956:134). For each type, the authors defined a pattern, the dynamics that produced them, economic aspects, social organization , ethnographic and archaeological criteria and examples, and corresponding terminology in other schemes. The 1955 seminar participants wrestled with additional questions that preoccupy any cross-cultural, transhistorical study of communities. Why did communities demonstrate so much diversity in form across time and societies? Central to their explanation was the relationship between subsistence practices, the environment, and resources (Beardsley et al. 1956:150). Community decisions based on these factors determined their form, particularly the level of group mobility. This functionalist interpretation was supported by ethnographic evidence, Beardsley and others argued. Semipermanent sedentary groups, for example, subsisted within an environment with abundant resources that did not require management through permanent agricultural infrastructure. North American Northwest Coast communities could lead a semi-transient lifestyle, leaving for new gardens Communal Complexity on the Margins · 15 when the previous ones had been exhausted. The seminar participants also questioned why the phenomenon of the community could be identified at all levels of social complexity. Self-conscious, economic, and politically independent corporate units existed in all types of societies, from nomadic bands to large-scale nations and even empires (Beardsley et al. 1956:152–153). Furthermore, communities could progress through the seven types, from the simplest, free-wandering form of organization through each pattern, adopting greater levels of permanent residency along the way. The seminar participants described community as a social evolutionary phenomenon, which moved from one stage to the next...