Counterpoint: Essays in Archaeology and

Heritage Studies in Honour of Professor Kristian Kristiansen

Edited by

Sophie Bergerbrant Serena Sabatini

BAR International Series 2508 2013

Published by

ArchaeopressPublishers of British Archaeological ReportsGordon House276 Banbury RoadOxford OX2 7EDEnglandbar@archaeopress.comwww.archaeopress.com

BAR S2508

Counterpoint: Essays in Archaeology and Heritage Studies in Honour of Professor Kristian Kristiansen

© Archaeopress and the individual authors 2013

ISBN 978 1 4073 1126 5

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Genes and aGenTs: ClosinG The TheoreTiCal GaP

John C. Barrett

Abstract: The search for a general theory of evolution that is applicable to both biological and human socio-cultural histories currently stands or falls upon the acceptance that evolutionary theory is, necessarily, Darwinian in form. This chapter questions the adherence to Darwinian mechanisms of evolution whilst accepting that the evolution of all forms of life, at its various levels of organization, operates upon the basis of a common principle. That principle is that life is sustained by its ability to read the conditions necessary for its own existence. Forms of life are differently structured catalytic systems that identify the necessary information, and import the required energy, to undertake the work of self-creation. Different forms of life cannot be reduced to a single determinate such as genetics. The role of archaeology is to establish the evolutionary histories of those living systems within which humanity has variously defined itself.

Keywords: Autopoiesis, Darwin, Evolution, Genes, Neolithic, Bronze Age

Introduction

My purpose in this contribution is to demonstrate that both biological evolution and socio-cultural evolution operate upon the same fundamental principles. This does not imply that the reproduction of socio-cultural conditions is reducible to the level of a biological determinate (contra Wilson 1998). My argument will move away from the principles that govern the ‘modern synthesis’ of Darwinian evolution (Huxley 1974) and I offer this contribution to Kristian for two reasons. First, it questions the operation of current theories of cultural evolution and theories of human agency that Kristian has correctly identified as following divergent paths in the development of archaeological theory (Kristiansen 2004). Second, it offers a perspective upon the changing scales at which the ‘forces of history’ have operated in the processes of social evolution (Kristiansen 2011).

Employing the term evolution as a descriptor for various historical processes has proven problematic (Trigger 1998). On one reading the term merely describes the emergence of one formal arrangement out of its predecessor, although this belies the challenge of identifying the mechanisms that might drive such a trajectory, and of assessing the controversy that arises when these mechanisms give rise to historical trajectories that appear to be progressive and directed. Carneiro provides an excellent review of the application of evolutionism in cultural anthropology and Yoffee has critically reviewed earlier models of social evolution with particular reference to generalized typologies of social development as they have been applied to the rise of early states (Carneiro 2003; Yoffee 2005). My concern is to question the use of the Darwinian theory of evolution and its reliance upon natural selection to explain the evolution of networks of human behaviour. By so doing (and perhaps somewhat counterintuitively), I hope to establish that a common structure exists between biological reproduction and the evolutionary forces of human agency.

The Darwinian model

The concept of evolution is inexorably linked to its application in biology, and because the adoption of Darwinian principles to the analysis of social development has long been an issue of contention (cf. Barlow & Silverberg 1980) we must begin

with some comment on the Darwinian theory of evolution. It is important to distinguish between the factual observation that all life is related through a history of evolutionary development, and the problems that come with attempts to explain how such an evolutionary process might operate. The Darwinian theory of evolution deals with the latter by proposing that two, relatively autonomous forces explain the evolution of life: the reproduction of inherited variability and natural selection (Godfrey-Smith 2009). The former supposedly generates a spectrum of variable traits (phenotypical characteristics) that are distributed across the members of a reproducing population, whilst the latter supposedly acts to secure the reproductive success of some of those variables over others. ‘Population thinking’, which Mayr (1976: 26-29) attributed to Darwin, therefore treats populations as comprising competing and variable individual carriers of inherited traits upon which natural selection operates. Whilst populations are made up of organisms of limited life expectancy their histories have been characterized as long-lived lineages of phenotypical variation. In stressing the centrality of genetic inheritance Dawkins drew the distinction between the transience of the individual life-span compared to the enormous longevity of successful genetic lineages (Dawkins 1976).

There is however a significant ambiguity in the way the concept of natural selection is employed in the literature (Brunnander 2007). In one usage, natural selection winnows the variable products of reproduction to secure the success of some (the better adapted). This usage implies that the reproductive process that is acted upon by natural selection is in itself blind, having no inherent direction other than to draw upon the available reproductive resources. It is therefore natural selection that, over time, is given the task of guiding the evolving trajectory of the population as a whole. In the second usage, the consequence of reproduction appears to be that the organism adapts to its environment, as if the mechanisms of reproduction had some inherent (i.e. directional) propensity to select for the adaptive optimum. The routine failure to distinguish between these two uses, and indeed to use the two interchangeably, is one target in Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s recent critique of the Darwinian theory of evolution (Fodor & Piatelli-Palmarini 2010).

In the Darwinian theory of evolution the phenotype therefore

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describes the form and behavioural characteristics of the organism upon which natural selection supposedly operates. The lives of individual organisms contribute to an evolving population whose history tracks towards an adaptive optimum. It has become commonplace to describe the inherited resource upon which an organism’s development depends (and which until relatively recently was treated as fully determining that development) as a source of information (Maynard Smith 2000), with the inherited genetic material (the genome) being ascribed the role of encoding that information (Godfrey-Smith 2000a, cf. Kay 1998). In developing this analogy Maynard Smith (2000: 179) proposed that the information being encoded by the genome was the consequence of natural selection. If we were to assume that the genome determined the design of the organism then we would have to assume that natural selection was issuing the command ‘make the organism in this way because this design has worked well in the past’. If we now consider the two uses of the concept of natural selection we have already identified we are confronted by two options concerning the way a population of traits, bundled together as phenotypes, might track towards an optimum level of adaptation over the course of a reproductive cycle. In the first, natural selection is treated as an externally derived input into the process of reproduction which, by suppressing the reproductive potential of the least adaptive traits, achieves the optimum output. Thus, as Maynard Smith proposed, natural selection is the command encoded by DNA. In the second, the inherited information is treated as an internally generated mechanism that manages, in ways that are undefined, to self select for an output that is the optimum combination of traits for adaptation.

If natural selection were to act as an in-put selecting for the most adaptive phenotypic outputs of a reproducing system, then natural selection would seem to ‘explain’ the evolution of the phenotype within the limits of its inherited resources. Selection is therefore taken to act holistically on the phenotype such that ‘[A]ll that is being evaluated by evolution is the selective value, the “fitness”, of individuals’ (Mayr 1976: 45). However the traits that contribute to the individual’s phenotype are often explained as having a functional role in solving an adaptive problem, as in an animal’s camouflage solving the problem of protection against predators. This results in an ‘atomistic’ view of the phenotype as comprising an assemblage of traits that are expressions of particular combinations of the genetic code which has been selected for. Although this conforms to popular assumptions that there are ‘genes for...’ this or that characteristic, the position is not sustainable. There are two problems. First, many traits are neutral to selection and may be carried forward on the back of quite different traits that are selected for (Gould & Lewontin 1979). Second, and more importantly, genes do not function in this way and therefore neither can natural selection: ‘To consider genes as independent units is meaningless from the physiological as well as the evolutionary viewpoint’ (Mayr 1963: 263 & 1976: 45). One reason why the human genome project has been such a surprise (or failure, depending upon your point of view) has been that the assumed uniqueness of humanity is not represented by a similar level of uniqueness genetically (cf. Strohman 1997; Lewontin 2001: 133-195). It seems increasingly difficult to see how natural selection can operate with the necessary targeted precision on the genome if it is to fulfil the very demanding role required of it by the Darwinian theory of evolution (Ho and Saunders 1979; Fodor & Piatelli-Palmarini 2010).

The second form of adaptationist explanation we have identified implies that the mechanism of reproduction is able to direct the organism towards an optimal adaptive design. The process

by which such directed transmission of variability could occur appears unspecified but might presumably involve an internal means of generating phenotypical designs as a response to external stimuli. In other words, this would involve a form of learning that appears to veer away from Darwinian and towards a Lamarckian theory of evolution (Gould 2002: 145). As unlikely as this seems, directional transmission has been incorporated into explanations of cultural evolution as if such a move were unproblematic from a Darwinian perspective (Boyd and Richerson 1985: 81ff. Shennan 2002: 56ff.). The problem posed by this form of explanation for the direction travelled by an evolutionary lineage exposes the conflict that currently arises between narratives of biological and socio-cultural evolution. Given that socio-cultural behavioural patterns are part of the human phenotype, and given that the human phenotype is supposedly a product of natural evolution, it is difficult to see how we arrive at directed evolution from what are assumed to be Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection.

Post-Darwinian evolution

Darwin opened his case for the evolution of life’s diversity with the observation that breeders of racing pigeons and dogs could select breeding pairs to ensure the preservation and development of desired traits across the generations (Darwin 1899 [1859]). He concluded that inherited variability was a general feature in the reproduction of all living things and that natural selection could fulfil a role analogous to that of the breeder. Natural selection was given the role of fixing the characteristics of a population over several reproductive cycles and of giving rise to speciation by diversifying the conditions of selection on a single population, split perhaps between environments by migration. The history of life was thus presented as gradually branching phylogenies (Darwin 1899 [1859]: diagram). Being unaware of Mendel’s evidence for particulate inheritance, Darwin assumed that inheritance through sexual reproduction involved the blending of parental characteristics.

With the synthesis that was established by the 1930s between Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics, and following the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in the early 1950s, the basis for treating genetics as a ‘code’ for the expression of different forms of life appeared to be confirmed. The evolution of life could now be regarded as the product of the chance generation of genetic mutations and genetic migration, coupled with the necessity for survival through natural selection.

The gene-centric model of evolution reached its clearest expression in the dogma of molecular biology, which defined life in terms of genetic lineages (replicators) that are transferred between the short-lived vehicles represented by the organism (interactors). Indeed one might be forgiven for thinking that this dogma promulgated the popular belief that DNA is the only material to pass between parent and offspring and this can result in the confusion, already noted, as to whether or not natural selection can be regarded as ultimately acting upon the genome. We are left to wonder as to what has happened to the developing organism through which genes find an expression of their function and upon which natural selection is supposed to work? Is it not odd that ‘[T]he organism as a real entity, existing in its own right, has virtually no place in contemporary biological theory’ (Webster & Goodwin 1982:16)?

If a Kuhnian revolution is currently taking place in biology (Strohman 1997) then it is doing so courtesy of the organism’s renewed claim to be the object of study. Given that evolution

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is essentially about the ways the reproduction of organisms either maintain or transform their form and behaviour across the generations, then the symmetry between biological and social notions of evolution will turn upon the mechanism or mechanisms that enable either the maintenance or transformation of different levels of biological order, from the level of the organism through to that of the social group. Given the complexity of the issues I aim simply to indicate some of the common principles by which systems of organic order are constructed, whether that be at the level of the organism or the community, and in which cultural production finds common ground with biological production (cf. Griffiths & Gray 1994: 278-9 & 301).

The most basic form taken by an organism is the cell. This contains the chemical mechanism which, by means of the manufacture of different proteins, generates cells that have quite different functions in the construction of the multi-cellular organism. In sexual reproduction the fertilized cell (the gamete), which is itself the symbiotic combination of two cells, the sperm and the egg, divides to produce the particular cells that build the various organs in the developing foetus. What is remarkable in this process, apart from its very existence, is that each cell, whatever their functional differences (cells for heart, liver, lungs and so on), contains the same genetic material. The implication is that the developmental process directs protein development during cell division.

The important point to take from this is that an agency immanent to the organism itself is doing the work that generates the growth and sustains the functioning of the multi-cellular structure. The minimal definition of agency is that it does work and this has three implications: 1) agency requires an intake of energy, 2) it is directed by referencing itself towards some condition (it has intentionality), 3) it has a material consequence. The genetic material itself cannot do the work involved in developing an organism, for it is but an inert chemical structure comprising complementary pairs of four chemical bases that are bonded opposite one another along the double strands of nucleic acid that form the DNA helix. This chemical resource is just one component of the portfolio of conditions that the gamete inherits from the parents and the environment, and within which the foetus will develop. These conditions include the chemical, nutrient and temperature gradients that exist within and around the fertilized egg, the behavioural patterns of the parents, and the wider niche environment that will have been modified by the behaviour of previous generations. Not only does this entire environment constitute the wider context within which the work of development is undertaken but, as Oyama has argued, it questions the status of the dichotomy often taken to exist between inherited biological resources that focus in particular upon genetics, and the resources of nurture: in other words it questions the viability of maintaining the nature/nurture dichotomy (Oyama 2000a).

The problem with the biological literature at this point is its failure to accept the necessary existence of an agency to undertake the work of building the organism and to evaluate the mechanisms that direct that agency. It is the emergence of such an agency that characterizes the biological level of organization and thus lifts the processes of organic development above being considered simply the product of, and therefore reducible to, a chemical reaction. The failure to recognize the emergent role of agency as the characteristic of biological developmental systems has resulted in the confused claims that seek to identify the causative mechanisms responsible for protein synthesis with a mixture of genetic and wider environmental factors (cf. Godfrey-Smith 2000b). Such claims are therefore restricted to evaluating the extent to which

either genetic or environmental factors ‘code for’, or determine, the development of the phenotype. The only course of action to overcome choosing between the strictly determinist options presented by the nature/nurture dichotomy is to favour a broad assemblage of determinate conditions providing for a ‘causal democracy’ (Sterenly, Smith & Dickison 1996; Oyama 2000b).

The force of the ‘coding for’ analogy might imply that genetic material, either alone or in tandem with other conditions, encodes and transmits information necessary to synthesize the amino acid sequences of protein molecules where, as we have already seen, that information is suggested as deriving from, and thus determined by, natural selection. However the analogy with information cannot be taken to indicate that genetic material carries meaning for it has no semantic content. Rather, if the analogy is to have any force then it must be that this material reduces error by constraining the range of future transcriptions (Kay 1998). Meaning is only generated when an agency responds by synthesizing amino acid sequences in the reproduction of the protein molecules of cells. That agency is manifest in the work achieved by the structurally complex procedures of RNA transcription. RNA are single chains of nucleotides that contain the energy (sugar) and the potential to catalyse through the production of enzymes, the processes that are necessary to synthesize and fold amino acids into proteins. This work is done by responding sequentially to certain sections of the DNA structure and, to continue the analogy, it is the RNA procedures that express a reading of the DNA in their construction of proteins. Meaning, in other words, is not encoded in DNA, but is brought into being through the reading that is undertaken by the agency of RNA of certain base sequences carried on the DNA. This undoubtedly complex process means that sections of DNA are selected for the construction of particular proteins, although this process is still at some remove from the construction of the particular characteristics of the maturing phenotype. A considerable and complex level of interaction between proteins is then involved in the further development of the organism (Dupré 2005: 199). The classical concept of the gene as the determinate for a physical characteristic is now open to significant revision (Portin 2002). Indeed, if genes exist they do so in virtue of being recognized as units of significance by RNA: they exist only in the expression of being read. This process of reading requires a certain orientation or intentionality towards the genetic text and this might be partly informed by the available energy sources, environmental context and stage in the developmental sequence at which this process occurs. This opens the possibility that the development of the organism is directed towards the environmental context in which it will grow.

From here it is possible to sketch a model of developmental and evolutionary processes that forms an axis of symmetry between social and biological evolution. This model must allow both for the reproduction of systemic order over time and the generation of transformations in that order. The stability of the system may be for the long term whilst transformations may be relatively rapid describing a history of punctuated equilibria rather than the gradualism that Darwin ascribed to phylogeny. This shape is familiar to the histories traced by the social sciences and it also seems likely, although this is contested, to describe the shape of the paleontological record (Eldredge & Gould 1972; cf. Dennett 1996: 282ff.).

Kauffman and Clayton (2006) propose that biological agency emerges at a particular level of organizational complexity when a minimal set of physical conditions are in existence. The case

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being made here is that biological agency emerges at the lowest level of organization that is necessary for the reproduction of organisms and that it is the emergent condition that distinguishes the reproduction of life from the processes associated with chemical reactions and to which it cannot be reduced. Biological agency therefore constructs forms of life and this, by extension, takes place at various levels of organizational complexity, from cells through to populations. Each level may be characterized by emergent forms of agency that operate according to certain common principles. Two of these principles are key to our minimal definition of agency. Agency works by intentionality which means that agency has to be orientated towards some object, such as the disposition to read sections of the genetic sequence in a certain way. To do work and thus to construct order requires the transference of energy, which means that the developmental system, such as the cell or the population, can only sustain an agency by means of a permeable boundary across which energy may be imported. Of course this describes the process of metabolism, which is a defining characteristic of life, but it also allows for energy to be differentially appropriated, stored, and distributed in a complex structure. Consequently we now replace genetic causation with the contingencies of construction, where life, if one might put it this way, is the construction of meaning, the operation (and therefore the outcome) of which is partly contingent upon the material to be read and the sources of energy that are available to be utilised. Indeed we might reiterate the point that significant changes in energy sources derived from the wider environment might either disrupt or redirect the way inherited resources are read and therefore shift the outcome of the developmental process.

The characteristic of the agency that defines the common axis between biological and social reproduction is therefore that it metabolizes the energy necessary for the work of making complex organisms with internal flows of energy and matter and which range from biological individuals to populations. It undertakes this work by orientating itself towards, and extracting meaning from, the order it finds embedded within certain resources. This accommodates the evolutionary processes discussed by Hodder elsewhere in this volume. Such systems can therefore be regarded as self-organizing. It follows that complex self-organizing systems maintain themselves in states that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium (Kauffman 1995: 9-10). As an outcome, populations develop in ways that direct themselves towards the conditions of their continuing existence, which means living towards, and coping with, the external conditions that they inhabit. Life, in other words, has a direction in its claim to future existence. Varela described this as being the means by which the organism experiences the environment as having significance and value for itself (Varela 1996).

The question of social evolution

Human societies are particular kinds of population comprising particular kinds of organisms. Maturana and Varela (1998) developed a general model for a living organism based on cellular life and which described the organism as a network of processes operating within a semi-permeable boundary. The organism grows by the self-generation of that same network and of its boundary conditions. Described as autopoiesis, the work of growth demands, as we have seen, the operation of an agency orientated towards an information source and sustained by a system of metabolism. In the terms of this general model a question arises: should the self-generation of self-organizing populations that include human societies, be considered as a form of life? These populations

obviously represent a level of organization at some considerable remove from that discussed by Maturana and Varela, and the suggestion that they be treated in this way is certainly contentious (Luisi 2003: 57). One important distinction is that autopoiesis lays emphasis upon the development of the organism rather than upon the processes of reproduction. On the other hand reproduction is obviously the focus of both neo-Darwinian and Marxist theory: Friedman, for example, has argued cogently that the unit of analysis in the case of human social evolution ‘is neither society nor a particular institution, but the total process of reproduction’ (Friedman 1982: 179). How might we resolve the relationship between the growth of the organism and the reproduction of a population?

The Darwinian claim that the ‘fitness’ of the phenotype is established by natural selection that determines the relative reproductive success of inherited variability within a population, would require us to maintain the analytical distinction between the organism’s behaviour (which is part of its phenotype) and its environment which selects for it. However the selective reproduction of behaviours from one generation to the next must also have material consequences for the organism’s environment. Dawkins refers to these consequences as the organism’s ‘extended phenotype’ (Dawkins 1999) and this introduces a problem, for how are we to view material culture? Darwinian archaeologists echo Dawkins by treating material culture as an extension of the human phenotype, and thus treat the functionality of material culture as determined by its adequacy for environmental adaptation (Mesoudi et.al. 2004). But material culture is also a dominant component of the human environment. When humans do things they do so with reference to, and as the expression of, their practical competence in exploiting the material cultural environment in which they find themselves. The analytical framework that sets the fitness of behaviour against the forces of environmental selection is therefore compromised given that material culture is both behavioural out-put and environmental in-put.

The treatment of material culture as a manifestation of human behaviour (and thus as an adaptation to the environment), rather than being the environment within which human beings live, is part of the foundation upon which the supposed distinctiveness of humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom rests. That humans make artefacts is widely regarded as indicative of their possessing the unique cognitive propensity to design things and to represent ideas. Human evolution ‘out of nature’ is thus written as if it were the emergence of a hominid capable of design and of symbolic representation. As Ingold notes in a critical review of some of his earlier work, the question of the design of environmental modifications as applied to animal and human behaviour (comparing, for example, the beaver’s lodge with the human’s house) has come to rest upon the assumption that the beaver’s lodge is designed by whatever innate mechanisms also ‘design’ the beaver’s body, whereas humans are endowed with minds capable of designing their houses prior to the processes of construction (Ingold 2000: 175). Humans, it would seem, act on their environment whilst animals live in ecologies. But human behaviour expresses the ability to lay claim to occupy some part of the world effectively, a practical ability to cope in the living world of things. Certainly humans do, under various circumstances, objectify the conditions they confront but if they were not part of the world of experience in the first place there would be nothing to objectify. It is therefore the human ability to inhabit ecologies that enables them to objectify an environmental policy.

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To treat the environment as selecting for the reproduction of certain behaviours, and therefore for the reproduction of material cultural traditions as the consequence of those behaviours, is clearly problematic (Ingold 1992 & 2000: 172ff.). So, indeed, is the distinction between the natural and cultural environment. ‘An adequate ecological anthropology’, writes Ingold, ‘must be centrally concerned with the mutual constitution of persons and environment’ and avoid the notion that environment is either an accommodation ‘to the imperatives of nature, or ... an appropriation of nature within the categories of culture’ (Ingold 1992: 40). In drawing upon Gibson’s concept of affordance as being that quality which an environment can furnish for an animal or human (Gibson 1979: 36ff.), Ingold makes the important point that the affordances of objects are their ‘inherent potentials’ where ‘different animals can live in a shared environment, and moreover can share their perceptions of what it affords’ (Ingold 1992: 42-3 original emphasis). The culture/ nature dichotomy is thus dissolved by the recognition that the self-organization of biological populations expresses the individual organism’s ability to act on a reading of their environment that includes the behaviours of near neighbours. Self-organization is the transmission across a population of a common behavioural response to the reading of an environment (Camazine et.al. 2003).

The development of human agency is a particular form of ‘sense making’ which recognizes certain affordances as offered by the environment for developing its own place in the world (Thompson 2007) and which Ingold, borrowing from Heidegger, refers to as the ‘dwelling perspective’ (Ingold 2000: 185). The autonomy of the agent does not mean that the agent is isolated ‘but only that it can act on its own behalf’ (Kauffman & Clayton 2006: 505). In this way the cultural order of the world is constantly brought into being by the work of human learning and development which maintains, elaborates, and at times transforms, the relationships between people, plants, animals and things (Latour 2005). It is by means of these networks that the performances of others become recognizably the manifestations of particular qualities of humanity (Barrett forthcoming), and by being in the world in this way the distinctively human propensity emerges to treat the order of things as if they revealed some underlying or governing logic: a revelation that is often enhanced by ritualized practices and cultural representations. Human societies no more exist to reproduce lineages of cultural resource (‘selfish memes’) than do organisms exist to reproduce genetic lineages. The reproduction of cultural resources, as the reading of environmental conditions over time, occurs within the context of human social reproduction because those resources are the necessary, but contingent, source of interpretable information facilitating the human agent’s development (Ingold 2000: 172-188).

The analytical distinction that autopoiesis introduces between the development of individual organisms and the reproduction of a biological population can now be seen to confirm the view that evolutionary change arises from the ways organisms are able to grow themselves and that the evolutionary trajectory emerges over time by the reproduction of the population. Social evolution is thus an emergent property (Kauffman & Clayton 2006) resulting from the changes in the ways the individual members of that population were able to develop by practical reference to the behaviours of conspecifics and the semiotic values offered by the environment (Hornborg 1996). From the perspective of human societies, this gives substance to Giddens’s Theory of Structuration which concerns the relationship between short-term agency and the long term trajectories of social structural development. Whilst Giddens accepts the possibility of some connection with the ‘conceptual

vocabulary’ of biology (Giddens 1984: 231), the Theory of Structuration has remained concerned with the relationship between abstract concepts of agency and rules and resources, rather than accepting that the development of human agency is fundamentally lived as a question of biological growth.

Social evolution from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age

Social evolution presents a challenge to a neo-Darwinian reading of history. If the behaviour of a population’s members did indeed track towards an adaptive optimum under the auspices of natural selection then it becomes difficult to understand why change should accrue once a state of homeostasis has been reached between a population and its environment. The widespread assumption that agriculture represented an inherent, and therefore understandable, economic advance on hunter-gatherer economies was challenged with the publication of the ‘Man the Hunter’ symposium (Lee & deVore 1968) and Sahlins’s assessment of hunter-gatherers as representatives of the ‘original affluent society’ (Sahlins 1974 [1968]: 1-39). However it is with the rise of Bronze Age systems that the challenge to account for social evolutionary change appears particularly acute. On most accounts the European Bronze Age witnessed increased settlement densities, increased social ranking, increased levels of craft specialization, and increased dependency on long-distance exchange. All these factors therefore are manifestations of increased structural complexity, and with it a quantitatively increased level of thermodynamic disequilibrium which would have increased the risk of systemic failure. Why might social evolution result in this increased risk rather than stabilize at an adaptive optimum? One coherent attempt to answer this question has proposed that the social evolutionary trajectory was determined by an internal structural logic operating within, but not determined by, certain environmental and technological constraints (Friedman & Rowlands 1977: 203). That structural logic describes the reproduction of the entire system in which production is linked to consumption through exchange, and where the biological reproduction of the social unit plays a central role in structuring debt obligations and alliances that are ultimately linked to the supernatural domain of ancestors and gods (cf. Friedman 1982; Kristiansen & Rowlands 1998). The presumption is, therefore, that the reproduction of a human population is structured by exchange relations which, in turn, structure asymmetrical relations between participants, households and supernatural beings. Such exchange relations appear to be inherently competitive and thus drive evolutionary growth to levels of consumption that might exceed local ecological constraints.

Two linked problems attend all structuralist models: their inherent abstraction, and the resulting treatment of human agency as if it were determined by the logic of those abstractly defined structures (Thompson 1978). If ‘people make history but not under conditions of their own choosing’, then social evolution might be better conceived, as I have already argued, as the emergent property of populations resulting from the practices by which their members generated their own development (but not under their chosen conditions). This is fundamentally an ecological issue. All human agents require the intake of energy (food, sunlight, warmth) for their own development and the practices that have structured the organization of human populations are also the practices by which particular environments have been brought into view. The boundary condition for a populations system is mapped by the application of the technical and labour processes of energy extraction. These boundary conditions might, under certain historical conditions, be objectified as political boundaries when

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Fig. 1 Rock carving images from Stenbacken and Fossum (After Coles 1990)

the resources of nature are claimed as property, or when dominant polities are able to extract energy reserves from the product of subservient systems. The internal order of any evolving social system will also be structured by boundaries whose maintenance involves the processing, flow and the asymmetrical appropriation of energy and materials that sustain the life chances of some portions of the population above others (as is witnessed, for example, in the case of theocracies or class-divided societies, or indeed as constituted in relations of age and gender).

What Sahlins defined as the Domestic Mode of Production (Sahlins 1974: 41ff.) has never been ‘underproductive’ by reference to anything other than an abstract potential, whilst it was an ecology that in reality defined a mode of life developed by those who laid claim to an environment in which ‘meanings ... participate in its construction’ (Rappaport quoted in Hornborg 1996: 52). This perspective allows for the evolution from Stone Age to Bronze Age political economies to have emerged in virtue of the ways human agencies developed themselves by revealing the meanings they found to be present in ecologies.

The transition from hunter-gatherer to early agricultural systems arose from the redesign of the boundary conditions across which energy was imported to sustain a system of human, plant and animal metabolism. The Neolithic revolution occurred when the forager’s procurement of energy directly from the plants that were gathered and animals that were killed was ‘both temporally and spatially displaced by the propensity to store the energy provided by the fertility of the land in the growth and reproduction of domesticated plants and animals’ (Barrett 2011: 76). The management of land, and the biologically isolated breeding of domesticates, resulted in the creation of new symbiotic communities of humans, plants and animals (cf. Rindos 1984). The labour of human agency brought into view a landscape in ways that secured the maintenance of delineated areas of fertility. These were worked as garden plots adjacent to settlement areas in central Europe (Bogaard 2004), but may have been worked across more dispersed areas in the conditions afforded by different ecologies elsewhere. Either way, the perception of landscape must necessarily have developed over this period as manifesting long-term tenurial bonds between humans and places, partly as the result of the vegetational changes that arose from the long-term and seasonally structured behavioural patterns of hunter-gatherers and animals. Indeed, we might go so far as to suggest that a transformation in discursive practices will have contributed to the way the world was seen afresh, with very different linguistic categories of landscape, tasks and temporality accompanying the development of agriculture (cf. Renfrew 1989). All these changes will have facilitated the inherited rights and obligations of working a defined portion of the landscape over the seasons, rather than negotiating access to a more generalized and seasonally dispersed landscape of resources. The practices that made the land into a resource to be managed also brought into view the human histories that such landscapes now seemed to contain, and which were made manifest in the long-lived settlement architecture and associated cemeteries in south-eastern and central Europe, and in the development of mortuary monuments in northern and western Europe.

The evolution of a population’s complexity arose through the development of its member’s biographies and the Bronze Age evolved from two broad biographical themes. One coped with an increase in face to face encounters and the ability to live in the more densely clustered settlement sites that emerged in many parts of Europe (Earle & Kristiansen 2010: 218ff.). The

stability of these levels of occupational density depended upon the preservation of levels of individual integrity and the suppression of likely conflict, which would have been possible by adopting a more formalized discourse that mapped the relationships between increasingly clearly defined categories of people established as various combinations of age, gender, status and task. In this way the increase in population densities must have harmonised with developments in agrarian practices and craft specialization. These practices, whilst certainly facilitated by the increased reserves of labour, also created a more diverse and seasonally defined palimpsest of environmental resources which gained their reality by the labour of a well defined heterarchy of tasks. The constitution of these ‘taskscapes’ would have been taken as the implicit demonstration of certain kinds of moral order. But it would also appear that, in some parts of Europe at least, these orders became objectified through developing systems of representation. To take a single example: the phallic representation of ploughman and accompanying plough team on the rock carving from Stenbacken, in Bohuslän, northern Sweden conflates ‘maleness’ with ‘fertility’ and the seasonal task of ploughing (cf. Goody 1976). Through the developing imagery on the rock carvings of northern and southern Europe the quality of ‘maleness’ also appears to have elided with the taking of life (warriors) and the maintenance of distant exchange (ships) (Fig. 1).

The second biographical theme of the period was defined by the lives of some members of the population that cut across the more local development of ‘taskscapes’ to situate the meanings revealed in those more intimate ecologies within a cosmology whose central elements appear to have been shared from central and northern Europe to western Asia. The importance of Kristiansen and Larsson’s The Rise of Bronze Age Society (2005) is that it establishes the case that a common discourse on the supernatural forces governing the context of life existed on such a scale. This too was an ecology of meanings: it enabled the occupancy of that ecology by those who could travel but still find their place in the discursive and ritualized practices of distant lands.

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Conclusion

By setting issues of biological and social evolution alongside one another I hope to have made the case that these processes are symmetrical about the mechanisms that enable self-organizing organic systems to develop. By putting aside the Darwinian claim that natural selection directs the historical process, it becomes possible to grasp that biological systems, at various levels of organization, develop by the work of agencies that are orientated towards reading the meanings they find in a structured arrangement of, for example, genetic materials or environmental resources, and are sustained by the importation of energy across the boundary of the system. The theoretical gap that Kristiansen has identified between the traditions of Darwinian archaeology and the archaeological development of agency theory (Kristiansen 2004) and which has been more fully explored in the recently edited volume from Cochrane and Gardner (2011) is not closed by reducing one level of complexity (human society) to another (genetic reproduction), but by recognizing that life is a process of discovering the significance of the conditions that it inhabits.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors for their invitation to contribute to this volume and for their guidance on the text. The errors are, as ever, my own but the text has been much improved by the comments and guidance of Alissa Balfort, Kathryn Barrett and Alexandra Ion.

John C. Barrett: j.barrett@sheffield.ac.uk

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