A recent trend in exploring emergent social complexity is examining nuanced patterns in community organization and cooperation, rather than the traditional focus on conflict and competition. Whereas the latter approach often seeks the causal factors leading to hierarchy and domination, the former explores other forms of power present within and among communities in the past. In Cooperation and Hierarchy in Ancient Bolivia: Building Community with the Body, Sara L. Juengst explores community and power on the Copacabana Peninsula from 3000 BC to AD 400; this was a period in the southern Titicaca Basin characterized by increased sedentism, domestication, the rise of a shared religious tradition, and new forms of social organization—all against a backdrop of a fluctuating climate. Juengst's approach typifies the more recent trend, exploring social dynamics and power relations through the lens of community. Moreover, Juengst employs bioarchaeology, a direct and insightful approach that is being increasingly used to examine community identity and power relations in the past. This book is the third volume in a series by Routledge titled Bodies and Lives, all of which explore aspects of identity and power using bioarchaeological analysis.
This well-organized and refreshingly slim volume is organized into six chapters. The first chapter outlines the theoretical framework that anchors the bioarchaeological analysis. Juengst begins by defining communities as social networks that structure daily activities and interactions, serve as the foundation of identity, and continually change. She shows how ancient communities can be revealed through multiple lines of evidence, including the geographic proximity of people, biological and symbolic relationships among individuals, and power disparities within and between groups. This final line of evidence is the crux of her study: how power relations in the past, once identified, can provide insight into complex forms of social organization within and between ancient communities.
In her discussion of power in the past, Juengst questions the entrenched view among anthropologists that early complex societies universally tended toward hierarchical top-down organization. She discusses alternative forms of organization, including systems of cooperation, heterarchy, and anarchy. These models of social organization emphasize a lack of competition, nonlinear ranking, and checks on domination and coercive control. This does not mean, however, that power was not exerted within these social systems. Rather, nonhierarchical social organization and power are evident, Juengst argues, in human skeletal remains.
Juengst goes on to outline her method of exploring community and power through bioarchaeology and how social structure has a significant impact on human biology. She responsibly outlines the ethical implications of human skeletal analysis and the need to consider the cultural and political ramifications of such research. Importantly, she clarifies that her research was conducted with permission from local descendant populations, and local engagement and education are key components of her work in the region. What follows is a succinct primer on how human skeletal analysis is used to investigate an individual's life, revealing their experience with power through the lens of community.
To provide a cultural context, Juengst describes the chronological periods in the southern Titicaca Basin central to her study: the Preceramic, Early Horizon, and Early Intermediate periods. Although these period designations are not typically used by Andean scholars working in the Titicaca Basin, they are used as chronological designations for the Andes in general, suggesting that this book was written for a broader audience, which I appreciate. The span of time central to Juengst's study was characterized by a shift from a hunting/foraging adaptation to increased reliance on domesticated plants and animals, decreased mobility patterns, and new social institutions and belief systems like the Yaya-Mama Religious Tradition. In addition, Juengst emphasizes that during this time there were periods of environmental stress linked to drought and associated lower lake levels, resulting in a depletion of resources. Juengst illustrates in the remaining chapters that these cultural and environmental factors had measurable impacts on individuals’ bodies, sometimes in surprising ways.
Juengst's burial sample includes 153 burials from seven sites on the Copacabana Peninsula in the southern Titicaca Basin that were recovered in Yaya-Mama Project excavations from 1992 to 2009. This sample includes people from different time periods, different types of sites, and with different forms of social organization and ideological systems. At the most basic level, burials were categorized by age and sex, and Juengst clearly explains how these designations were made using traditional biometric analyses of human bone and teeth. Age determinations (adult vs. non-adult) were possible on most individuals, but there were a large number of individuals for whom sex was indeterminate, resulting in less statistically significant findings linked to sex classification. I appreciate that Juengst is forthright in indicating when results are or are not statistically significant. In addition to identifying age and sex, Juengst examined skeletal evidence of stress, habitual labor, malnutrition, relatedness (biodistance), trauma, and cultural modification, and she conducted strontium and dietary isotope analyses to reveal insight into mobility and diet, respectively.
Through her analyses, Juengst finds that no single type of social organization or power dynamic persisted on the Copacabana Peninsula, with both cooperative and competitive strategies evident at various times. Periods of environmental stress could lead to increased power differentials in the form of violence aimed at some females and at some individuals with identity markers such as cranial modification, but the pattern of violence is neither hierarchical nor uniform. Moreover, environmental stress did not always result in elevated stress or violent trauma. During a period of severe drought around 400 BC, there is both archaeological evidence of cooperative temple construction and skeletal evidence for resource sharing, broad interaction with distant peoples, and a lack of hierarchically patterned stress or trauma. Juengst suggests this was a time when cooperation was emphasized by the Yaya-Mama Religious Tradition, a belief system she argues was rooted in ancestor worship and community building that helped populations navigate challenging environmental fluctuations on the Copacabana Peninsula. Ultimately, Juengst finds that there was no mandate from any one individual or group to conform to a single form of social organization or power regime, and resource scarcity in the context of the challenging environmental circumstances of the high-altitude Titicaca Basin did not require hierarchical organization or competition. Her conclusions are sound, sometimes surprising, and linked to the results of her analysis.
This is a well-written, succinct, and accessible volume that will have broad appeal to readers interested in Andean prehistory, bioarchaeology, or both. It is an excellent case study that presents the reader with a notable theoretical framework that challenges convention; it serves as a methodological primer for bioarchaeology; and it applies a wide variety of analytical techniques that reveal some of the complex social dynamics present in the southern Titicaca Basin during a time of climatic fluctuation, changing subsistence patterns, and emergent sociocultural complexity.
