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Archaeology as a social science
Michael E. Smith
a,1
, Gary M. Feinman
b
, Robert D. Drennan
c
, Timothy Earle
d
, and Ian Morris
e
a
School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85298;
b
Department of Anthropology, The Field
Museum, Chicago, IL 60605-2496;
c
Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260;
d
Department of
Anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208; and
e
Department of Classics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
Edited by Patrick V. Kirch, University of California, Berkeley, CA, and approved April 3, 2012 (received for review February 8, 2012)
Because of advances in methods and theory, archaeology now addresses issues central to debates in the social sciences in a far more
sophisticated manner than ever before. Coupled with methodological innovations, multiscalar archaeological studies around the world
have produced a wealth of new data that provide a unique perspective on long-term changes in human societies, as they document
variation in human behavior and institutions before the modern era. We illustrate these points with three examples: changes in human
settlements, the roles of markets and states in deep history, and changes in standards of living. Alternative pathways toward complexity
suggest how common processes may operate under contrasting ecologies, populations, and economic integration.
anthropology
|
cultural evolution
|
economics
|
sociology
|
political science
Scholars and the public typically
think of archaeology as an en-
deavor to find earliest examples of
such things as the domesticated
horse or writing or cities. All too often,
articles with archaeological themes in the
popular media focus solely on our recovery
of things associated with the particularities
of history. This emphasis misrepresents
archaeology, a scientific discipline that has
advanced greatly in recent decades. We
argue that archaeology can now make
significant contributions to the broader
social sciences. This advance results from
two major trends: the accumulation of
considerable new fieldwork data from
around the world and the development of
new methods and concepts that transform
our evidence into reliable reconstructions
of past social dynamics. In recent decades,
scientifically minded archaeologists from
both the anthropological and the classics
traditions have found common ground in
the rigorous analysis of past human soci-
eties and their changes through time.
At first glance the raw data of archae-
ology—things like broken pieces of pots,
stone tools, and fragmentary architectural
remains—might not seem ideal for ana-
lyzing past social systems, economic pro-
cesses, or political dynamics. However,
analytical advances, including increasingly
sophisticated applications of methods
from chemistry and physics, now permit
many past economic phenomena to be
reconstructed with considerable detail.
Archaeologists can pinpoint the places of
origin of many raw materials and objects
and reconstruct ancient technology
and manufacturing. Scientific and ar-
chaeological techniques now permit
increasingly precise dating of sites and
artifacts. And new computer power allows
archaeologists to find and compare pat-
terns in the extraordinary richness of small
finds from archaeological sites. Concep-
tual advances then allow the new data to
be used to reconstruct many phenomena
of basic interest in the social sciences,
from inequality and stratification systems
to market economies and political
institutions.
Archaeological data have several
advantages for studying past societies.
First, they are the only source of infor-
mation about the human past before the
invention of writing and the development
of historiographic traditions. Thus, ar-
chaeology gives scholars access to the full
range of the human experience, including
social forms unlike any that have existed in
modern or historical times. Second, ar-
chaeology can inform about all segments of
society, including commoners, peasants,
the underclass, and slaves, groups often left
out of early historical accounts. Third, ar-
chaeological findings provide a long-term
perspective on change, documenting the
origins of agriculture, the Urban Revolu-
tion, and other transformational social
changes. Indeed, archaeology is crucial to
a renewed interest in what is now called
“Deep History”(1). Fourth, the standard
use of random (or quasi-random) sam-
pling methods and quantitative analysis
in modern archaeology allows rigorous
conclusions about past conditions and
changes. Fifth, we now have archaeologi-
cal data from many regions, allowing
systematic comparative analysis of these
changes and social patterns. Sixth, most of
the societies reconstructed by archae-
ologists are independent of the western
cultural tradition that has been the focus
of analysis by most of the social sciences.
Many findings from our own fieldwork
projects—and those of our colleagues—
relate to major themes in the social sci-
ences. In the past the dissemination of
archaeological data was oriented primarily
toward the disciplines of anthropology
and classics. Wider access to our data was
(and remains) limited due to publication
practices, including the assembly of
lengthy technical reports and publication
in specialized journals. As active field-
workers in both the anthropological and
the classical traditions, we, the authors of
this report recognize the applicability of
some of our results beyond these narrow
disciplinary contexts and we present
three topics as illustrations. We begin with
the earliest sedentary villages and later
urban settlements, omitting the lengthy
earlier record of Paleolithic hunter–
gatherers because these societies are of
less relevance to the social sciences
outside of anthropology. Our next two
examples focus on ancient state-level
societies: market economies and standards
of living. We then discuss current trends
in multidisciplinary research in which ar-
chaeology is positioned at the intersection
of the social and natural sciences. The
above examples are only a small selection
from the many archaeological studies rel-
evant to the social sciences today, but they
provide an idea of the new relevance
of archaeological data to the social
sciences, particularly when viewed from
a multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary
perspective.
Villages and Cities
The concept of the village has become
reified and romanticized in both popular
and scholarly discourse. Phrases such as “it
takes a village”(2) and “urban village”
(3) idealize village life as a stable and
normal pattern of social interaction
stretching back to Neolithic origins. Ar-
chaeological fieldwork around the world
has now accumulated considerable data
on human settlements—from villages to
cities—and their dynamics of change
through time. Empirical data now show
that some things widely considered to be
ancient and timeless (e.g., forms of com-
munity life and social interaction in urban
Author contributions: M.E.S., G.M.F., R.D.D., T.E., and I.M. de-
signed research, performed research, and wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
1
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
mesmith9@asu.edu.
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1201714109 PNAS
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PERSPECTIVE
villages) are in fact modern adaptations,
whereas other settlement traits consid-
ered to be modern innovations (e.g., the
shantytowns that surround many cities in
the developing world) turn out to have a
time depth of millennia.
During the past two or three decades,
archaeological information about early
settled human communities from the
Neolithic era ∼5,000–12,000 y ago has
become much more abundant. These early
communities show far more varied orga-
nizational patterns than previously sus-
pected (Fig. 1). Some were the size of
modern villages (a few hundred people),
but a surprising number were quite small,
consisting of 10 or 12 nuclear families at
most. Other early sedentary occupations
were not even recognizably villages at all,
consisting of dispersed single-family
farmsteads even less conducive to in-
tensified social interaction than the mobile
residence patterns of hunting and gather-
ing groups or migratory herders, which
provided for periodic gatherings of many
families in one place. Once established,
either the dense webs of social interaction
of large compact villages or the necessarily
more diffuse interaction patterns among
dispersed farmsteads can become persis-
tent features of a region’s organization,
lasting for thousands of years. Under some
circumstances, however, this trajectory can
also change. Dispersed residence patterns
apparently represented economically self-
sufficient families and high labor in-
vestment in individual family farm plots,
among other things. Compact village
dwelling, on the other hand, may produce
and be produced by greater economic
specialization, forms of organizing
agricultural labor that involve frequent
cooperation, and/or high levels of conflict.
Much larger regional-scale social for-
mations, quite often with pervasively
hierarchical social relations, can emerge
readily from either compact village com-
munities or dispersed living. Such a
transformative increase in the scale ofsocial
integration is observable in some regions
within two or three centuries after the es-
tablishment of sedentary life. Elsewhere
large compact villages had remarkable
social stability, with little indication of or-
ganizational change for a millennium or
more. The conflict often thought to result
from larger numbers of people living in
closer proximity in compact settlements
may have been managed by emergent
leaders with increasing social or coercive
power or averted by a strong communal
ethos. A surprising frequency of traumatic
injuries seen in the burials of some Neo-
lithic villages shows that interpersonal vio-
lence does not necessarily destroy the bonds
of local communities. Now that we have
archaeological evidence of early human
communities, the origins and outcomes of
village life seem more complicated than the
generalizations of social philosophy (4).
The contemporary urban villages discussed
by planners (3, 5) owe little to ancient vil-
lage organization and are better seen as
rather typical urban neighborhoods as
found throughout history (6).
Unlike the supposedly ancient nature of
village organization, the informal settle-
ments surrounding many cities in the
developing world (also called squatter
settlements or shantytowns) are assumed
by most scholars to be a modern phe-
nomenon. Although the notion that
“squatter settlements occur only under
capitalism”(ref. 7, p. 382) is widespread,
in fact their history is considerably older,
and archaeologists have mapped and
excavated the remains of informal settle-
ments in numerous premodern cities.
For many people, Classical Greek
cities—with their modern-looking orthog-
onal plans—are the archetypical model
for ancient urban centers (Fig. 2, Left).
Comparative data indicate that such or-
thogonal urban plans are found in cities
whose political authorities (in both
democratic and autocratic regimes) have
a strong interest in regulating the lives of
their urban subjects (8). Research by
archaeologists and historians, however,
shows that orthogonal planning of resi-
dential neighborhoods is quite rare among
early urban traditions. Far more common
is a design in which the civic architecture
is concentrated in a well-planned central
district, which is surrounded by residential
neighborhoods exhibiting little formal
spatial planning (Fig. 2, Right) (9).
Archaeologists are developing methods
and concepts for the spatial analysis of
ancient urban neighborhoods, including
energetic measures, models of planning
diversity, and space syntax methods
(9, 10). The planning and construction of
neighborhoods was a dynamic process. In
some cases, the imposition of strong
imperial political control was accompa-
nied by the spatial regularization of
formerly irregular or informal urban set-
tlements. This process of imperial re-
organization occurred in both capital cities
such as Teotihuacan, Mexico (11), and
provincial centers such as the towns con-
quered by the Inca Empire in the Mantaro
Valley of Peru (10). In other cases, in-
cluding Roman provincial cities from
Britain to Syria, the withdrawal of an im-
perial power led to spatial dispersal as
planned neighborhoods were gradually
Fig. 1. Regional-scale archaeological evidence for small clusters of compact villages during the fourth
millennium BCE in the Daling River valley of northeastern China (Upper), contrasted with dispersed
farmsteads during the first millennium CE in the Alto Magdalena of Colombia (Lower) (graphic is by R.D.D.).
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transformed into informal settlements
(12). This archaeological research greatly
expands the sample of urban informal
settlements available for study and pro-
vides considerable historical time depth on
the trajectories of their formation and
dissolution. We now know that informal
neighborhoods were the norm for an-
cient cities, where the predominant plan-
ning policy was one of neglect by the
authorities.
States and Markets in Deep History
Since the mid-20th century, models of
human economies have been stuck be-
tween two main visions (13). One
perspective ignores history and relies on
generalized notions that all humans have
fundamental instincts to think rationally
and economize. From this bottom–up or
methodologically individualized vantage,
culture and context, like history, are rarely
seen as fundamental to economic behavior
or systems, and the natural path of eco-
nomic change is said to conform rather
closely to that found in the recent history
of the contemporary West (14).
The alternative framework, championed
by Karl Polanyi (15), holds that although
the above perspective may well have rele-
vance for the contemporary West, such
a model is not applicable to ancient or
nonwestern societies. Although valuing
context and history, this model generally
has viewed non-Western economies as
“command economies”dominated in
top–down fashion by governing authorities
and institutions, allowing little room for
commercialized exchange, markets, or
economizing behavior by individual eco-
nomic actors.
Archaeological fieldwork has now pro-
vided sufficient data on ancient economies
to show that neither of these polarized
views accurately fits economic dynamics
across the global past. There is far more
variability in the nature of ancient econo-
mies than was suspected previously, and
supposedly universal features of modern
capitalist economics were absent from
many areas. Here we review just two of the
significant findings in this area: the exis-
tence of dynamic nonmarket state econo-
mies in some regions and the distinctive
character of early market economies in
others. This work was made possible by
methodological advances in tracing the
exchange of goods and conceptual advan-
ces in establishing the material correlates
of commercial and noncommercial eco-
nomic institutions (16–18).
Archaeologists have now identified sev-
eral regions where dynamic state societies
developed without a strong reliance on
markets, including Hawaii and the Andes.
In the latter area, where states emerged
no later than 600 CE (Common Era), 16th
century documents clearly state that before
Spanish conquest, markets and commercial
exchange existed in only a few peripheral
regions away from the major states and
empires (19). In the Mantaro Valley of
Peru, archaeological fieldwork shows that
95% of the pottery and 85% of the stone
were obtained locally (<15 km), and
almost no goods were obtained from >50
km. With Inca imperial expansion, non-
imperial pottery and stone objects did not
increase in regional trade, demonstrating
that the imposition of peace did not result
in the expansion of markets (20). In the
Hawaiian Islands, where state-like polities
emerged to integrate each large island and
neighboring smaller islands (21), no in-
tegrating markets existed. Most household
goods were made from local woods, fiber,
and gourds; nonlocal materials (basalt and
basaltic glass) were surprisingly rare
among household goods. Another surpris-
ing result of recent fieldwork is the late
emergence of markets in Europe (22).
Fieldwork in Mesoamerica, however,
tells a very different story about ancient
economies. Although 16th century docu-
ments describe the presence of market-
places, merchants, and money in Aztec
Mexico (23), these sources are silent on
many aspects of the economy. Excavation
of Aztec houses has revealed the domestic
side of the economy for the first time. In
contrast to Inca provincial households,
their Aztec counterparts imported nearly
100% of their stone cutting tools and
>15% of their pottery from remote sour-
ces, often >50 km distant (23, 24).
Archaeological fieldwork at earlier sites
has identified markets and commercial
exchange practices going back more than
a millennium before the Aztec period (18).
One surprising result of this work is the
finding that many households produced
specific goods for exchange (25, 26). For
this region of the world, there is almost no
evidence for full-time specialized pro-
ducers or industrial-scale workshops,
and yet household inventories indicate
that very few domestic units were self-
sufficient. At the scale of the household,
economic practice likely was flexible,
reflecting the capability and necessity to
respond to economic opportunities and
constraints.
Such dispersed production was impos-
sible to control politically given the limited
transport and administrative technologies
available in Mesoamerica. Furthermore,
specialized economic manufacture for
exchange appears to have much deeper
historical roots in the region than urban-
ized states, centralized storehouses, or
even large-scale irrigation systems, forcing
scholars to question long-held models that
see surplus, storage, and the state as pro-
viding a unique historical trajectory for
economic specialization. Archaeological
research thus shows that economic models
linking market systems as a “natural”or
“efficient”outgrowth of state development
(27) are incorrect or at least incomplete.
The course to modern, urban life had nu-
merous trajectories that cannot be sub-
sumed under traditional economic models
of development.
Ancient Standards of Living
In Essay on the Principle of Population
(28), Thomas Malthus recognized that
changes in climate, technology, or organi-
zation could increase well-being, but ar-
gued that people always convert surpluses
Fig. 2. Classical Greek city (Priene) with orthogonal planned neighborhoods, compared with a Yoruba city
(Ado-Ekiti) with informal (unplanned) urban neighborhoods. Cities with layouts like Ado-Ekiti were much
more common in the past than those resembling Priene. Graphic is by M.E.S., based on refs. 44 and 45.
Smith et al. PNAS
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7619
into population growth, which outruns
food supplies, pushing humanity back to
bare subsistence. Economic historians
have extended Malthus’s view into an
overarching vision of preindustrial history.
According to Gregory Clark, preindustrial
living standards fluctuated just above
subsistence, and “the average person in
the world of 1800 [CE] was no better off
than the average person of 100,000 BC”
(ref. 29, p. 1).
Archaeology shows that this extension
of Malthus is mistaken. Malthus himself
distinguished sharply between food and
nonfood calories: “It should be re-
membered always,”he wrote, “that there
is an essential difference between food
and those wrought commodities, the raw
materials of which are in great plenty”
(ref. 28, pp. 99–100). Forty years ago, the
geoscientist Earl Cook (30) noted that
whereas food calories have been tightly
constrained throughout history, total en-
ergy capture per capita (food plus non-
food) has increased greatly, from ∼4,000
kcal·cap
−1
·d
−1
in simple farming socie-
ties to 230,000 kcal·cap
−1
·d
−1
in
1970s America.
Archaeology has now produced a more
detailed picture (31). Some preindustrial
societies experienced sustained increases
in standards of living. In Greece and
Rome energy capture rose from ∼20,000
kcal·cap
−1
·d
−1
in 1,000 BCE (before
Common Era) to ∼30,000 kcal·cap
−1
·d
−1
in 1 BCE (32, 33). Others—like the
Mediterranean between 200 and 600 CE
and China between 100 and 400 CE—en-
dured long declines in living standards (34,
35). In the Andes, Inca imperial expansion
resulted in the establishment of peace
and an unexpectedly dramatic improve-
ment in living standards, but unlike in
China or the Classical world, this increase
occurred in a nonmarket economy (36).
The general trend in standards of living
since the end of the last ice age has been
upward—slowly until 5,000 BCE, faster
until 1,800 CE, and meteoric since then.
Although this trend—as documented by
archaeology—raises a series of new ques-
tions (31), it also helps put our knowledge
of contemporary standards of living into
a broader empirical context.
Multidisciplinary Research at the
Interface of the Social and Biological
Sciences
In addition to archaeology’s relevance to
long-standing issues in the social sciences—
as illustrated by the three previous
sections—the discipline has recently
placed itself “at the center of socio-natural
studies”(37). We refer to recent multi-
disciplinary research involving both natu-
ral and social scientists in which
archaeologists and archaeological data
play central roles. The new development
goes far beyond the long-standing use of
multidisciplinary teams (primarily bi-
ological and earth scientists) for most ar-
chaeological fieldwork projects. We single
out two relevant domains:
i) Studies of human ecodynamics link ar-
chaeological settlement data with paleo-
environmental data to examine long-
term changes in coupled human and
natural systems. This research uses resil-
ience and other concepts from the sus-
tainability literature to address topics
such as mobility, collapse, intensifica-
tion, and a broad range of changes in
human societies and landscapes over
time (38–40).
ii) Modeling of complex adaptive systems is
a second body of research in which ar-
chaeology plays a crucial role in integrat-
ing the social and natural sciences.
Archaeologists (and their colleagues)
are increasingly using methods such as
agent-based modeling and network anal-
ysis to analyze ancient settlement sys-
tems, from early hunter–gatherers to
urbanized states (41–43). These two ap-
proaches frequently overlap within indi-
vidual research projects.
Looking Forward
We have reviewed several topics that il-
lustrate how archaeology, with its groun-
ded perspectives on different pasts,
provides an empirical basis for recon-
structing a variety of deep historical pro-
cesses, thereby reframing and illumi-
nating major debates addressed across
the social sciences. Our objective in
marshalling these cases is to demonstrate
that archaeological data now permit sys-
tematic analysis of variation in economic,
social, and political changes. For those
interested in modeling long-term change
in socioeconomic phenomena or under-
standing the deep background of modern
practices, the days of fanciful speculat-
ion about the past on merely common-
sense grounds or of uncritical extrapo-
lation from the present are over. The
dirt-derived findings of archaeology are
now providing an empirically sound ac-
count of what people actually did, and
how they organized their affairs, in the
distant past.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. We thank Edward Hackett
and the PNAS Editor for helpful comments on an
earlier draft of this paper.
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