Recently, while carrying out archaeological survey in the Limpopo National Park, southern Mozambique, our guide/guard, a member of the military forces who protect the Park, had us stop in a small village near the Shingwedze river so that we could meet an important man and his family. Today, each small area with a set of communities and villages has both a traditional figure, either a regulo (king or chief) or a queen (depending on whether the group is a patriarchal or a matriarchal society), as well as a political institutional leader, elected by the people and supported by the central government. In addition, there is sometimes a religious figure, that frequently is the regulo or the queen, believed to have a direct connection with the local ancestors, and who helps to protect the community from natural or human issues and supervises all traditional rituals required to conduct fieldwork in their land (for our protection as it is believed). We invariably visited all of them when we arrived in each territory. This particular man, however, was neither of those figures. Clearly, he was an important person, although without an assigned political or religious position. We were told that he was a little over fifty years old. Apparently wealthy, he displayed a flashy earring and several gold rings in his fingers, a fashion I had not previously seen. His power or status resided on the extension of his family: he had somewhere between eight to eleven wives (we were never able to confirm the exact number), a couple of dozen children, and more than 100 grandchildren (if memory serves me right, 137 in 2019). This family occupied the entire western half of the village. There were three important wives: the first wife who supervised the whole family, including housing, distribution of work, and household economy; the wife who had given birth to more children; and one of the most recent wives, who had extensive knowledge as a healer and medium (we were told that, because of this, she would soon become the most important wife in the family). Due to the size of his family, particularly the number of school-aged children, this man had been able to force the regional political power to build a school just for his family. Based on what we had seen and heard, we rapidly reached the conclusion that since he was financially wealthy, he got married multiple times. We were soon corrected by our guide, that it was exactly the opposite—the man was very wealthy, perhaps the wealthiest in the whole of the National Park, precisely because he had married many times, and each wife had brought an important dowry to the family.
This cautionary tale serves to show the multiplicity and complexity of social inequalities in a single family of horticulturalists/hunters/fishers and its economic and social context in modern Mozambique. The inequality is evident at different scales, among others, institutional, communal, family, gender, and age. None of these issues could ever be registered in the archaeological record, but they are foundational to regional society. This is likely the underlying reason why Luc Moreau states in his introduction to Social Inequality Before Farming that ‘understanding the evolutionary development, intergenerational transmission, and variable levels and forms of social inequality through time and space is one of archaeology's fundamental tasks and current “Grand Challenges”.’ Pretty much every archaeologist that works with hunter-gatherer-fishers, from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, is forced at some point to discuss the meaning and application of the concept of social inequality and its obverse, social complexity. And that is likely the reason why, every decade or so, a new volume on the theme is issued (Price & Feinman, Reference Price and Feinman1995, Reference Price and Feinman2010; this volume), always born out of a specific symposium or session, as it is the case of Moreau's edited volume stemming from an international conference held at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, in early 2018.
This beautiful, diverse, and extensive volume has a preface by Robert Kelly, an extensive and detailed introduction by Moreau on the topic of inequality, followed by eighteen chapters organized into three parts: Social inequality and egalitarianism in extant hunter-gatherer-fisher societies (Chapters 1–7); Social inequality in Upper Paleolithic Europe (Chapters 8–13); and social inequality in prehistoric Holocene hunter-gatherer-fisher societies (Chapters 14–18). The electronic edition also includes an appendix to Chapter 9. This volume is a major contribution to those who work in prehistory and have continuously debated the issues of inequality and social complexity. Every single one of these eighteen chapters is splendid and each forces the reader to review fundamental concepts and ideas on inequality. From my perspective, the only less than positive aspect of the volume is the sequence of the chapters since there is no apparent logic behind the organization of the volume.
In the first part, focusing on ethnographic cases, the authors follow different paths to explain inequality. The main explanatory variable seems to be demographic pressure. This is the case of Chapter 1, where Paul Roscoe discusses the differences between two groups of contact-era New Guinea foragers, arguing that differences in power and inequality seen in those two groups result from population density. The reasoning is that terrestrial game hunters, when compared to fisher-foragers, establish a mobile, low density, dispersed society without the need to establish an expensive network based on power asymmetry. In contrast, sedentary fisher-foragers have a much higher demographic density and develop power networks or prosocial behavior that are used to manage conflicts within social alliances. In Chapter 2, Reckin and colleagues focus on the learning processes by children as a key factor in developing (and understanding) inequality: demographic packing provides a particular environment for same-age and same-gender groups that increases intra-personal competition from early-on and establishes it as a societal trait base for inequality (in connection with gender and power). In Chapter 3, Mark Dyble focuses on residential issues, arguing that more unilocal residency systems where more people are concentrated together lead to more inequality, while Alberto Buela in Chapter 5 bases his argument on the high density, low mobility of the northern Alaska Iñupiaq society. Christophe Darmangeat (Chapter 4) follows a completely different path, based on economic aspects of dowry and dower issues as one of the vectors that influence the distribution of wealth, unlike the traditional view that surplus is the key factor for economic inequality. While Duncan Stibbard-Hawkes in Chapter 6 argues for an egalitarian perspective, in Chapter 7 Robert Layton uses a combination of Marxist and Darwinian theories to argue for ecological limitations to the evolution of social inequality: low productivity and unstable regions will foster egalitarian societies while regular surplus leads to competition and inequalities.
The second part of the volume is focused on the Upper Paleolithic (UP), with six chapters. Brian Hayden (Chapter 8) raises the issue of the existence of secret societies in the European UP and how they can be the original basis for social inequalities—the thought-provoking argument stems from the fact that certain UP groups, particularly those producing art, show levels of complexity that are likely similar to those of complex hunter-gatherers of the American Northwest. While William Davis argues that ecology during the UP in Europe did not favor the emergence of social inequality, in Chapter 10 Matt Grove suggests that it would be a more parsimonious assumption in our field to use the concept of an ancestral state of inequality, since from the start there were behavioral differences (e.g. in art, prestige, craft specialization) among so-called egalitarian societies. In Chapter 11, we can see Mietje Germonpré and colleagues following a similar path but based on the use of dogs in the Pleistocene. The relation between these companions and humans created a particularly significant wealth that established clear benefits for their owners, resulting in inequality and differential access to power. In Chapters 12 and 13, art is also used as the key proxy for the existence of inequality. While among the Lower Magdalenian of Lascaux, Paul Pettitt sees the human-animal relationship and depiction clearly showing levels of competition that could not be compatible with a fully egalitarian society, Emmanuel Guy argues that art would have been too costly to implement in an egalitarian society, resulting, thus from division of labor and craft specialization.
The third section of Social Inequality Before Farming comprises five chapters, covering case studies from the North Pacific to East Africa. Ben Fitzhugh (Chapter 14) uses the Pacific Kodiak and Kuril archipelagos to argue that ecology is one of the prime movers providing the context for the development of institutionalized hierarchy and inequality. Rick Schulting and colleagues (Chapter 16) focus on the European Mesolithic/Neolithic site of Zvejnieki, Latvia and, based on stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes, argue for a strong case of a clan-organized society. Emmanuelle Honoré (Chapter 17) discusses the rock art site of Wadi Sura II, Egypt, to argue that, although hierarchy is not visible in the depictions, inequality is clearly portrayed. Both Joe Jeffery and Marta Mirazón Lahr (Chapter 15), and Douglas Fry and colleagues (Chapter 18) conduct cross-cultural analyses based on hunter-gatherer databases. Jeffery and Mirazón Lahr focus on African fisher-foragers, arguing: 1) that a much more complex and diverse world that traditionally is said to exist for the fisher-foragers, frequently represented by the Northwest coast populations; and 2) that while high latitude fisher-foragers are marked by high aquatic bio-mass contexts, low latitude groups have a much lower net productivity available. Thus, there is no demographic packing (i.e. concentration of people that may lead to demographic pressure) and a much lower evidence for inequality. This is a very similar argument to that of Fitzhugh. Fry and colleagues focus on warfare and the correlation with increased sociopolitical complexity and population density and pressure.
After reading this volume, as well as the other two cited before (Price & Feinman, Reference Price and Feinman1995, Reference Price and Feinman2010), there are perhaps a couple of ideas that should be listed (and discussed, but in a different venue, since 2000 words is certainly insufficient for such major topics and that is not the objective of this text). Firstly, it seems clear that inequality and social complexity are two points of the same scale somewhere in the middle between egalitarian societies and the fully modernized, economic and political complexity of our own societies. The issue now is, of course, not if there is/was inequality in hunter-gatherer-fisher societies—I mean, it is unequivocal, based on this volume, that inequality is part of the life of those societies, even if based on differences in gender, age, or just specialized skills as Doug Price has argued before (Price, Reference Price, Price and Feinman1995)—but if there was ever a Homo sapiens fully egalitarian society. Secondly, while Moreau's volume goes back in time, when compared to the other two existing volumes, the truth is that it is time limited by the beginning of the UP, specifically in Europe—does this mean (and this is related to the previous issue) that there was no population density and pressure, warfare, individual and group competition, and thus, inequality prior to the UP? I would say, there were certainly all those, probably in a smaller scale in many different contexts. Perhaps to answer that, with a fine and elegant argument, we should turn to Curtis Marean (Reference Marean2014) who suggested that human packing due to the systematic and dependable high biomass marine resources in Pinnacle Point, South Africa, some 160 thousand years ago, created the first situation of prosocial behavior and inter-group competition with a fundamental impact on human cognitive and technological complexity and development.
