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Ann. Rev. Anthropo£ 1979. 8:1-20 Copyright © 1979 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved
ARCHAEOLOGY +9624
AND HUMAN DIVERSITY
Grahame Clark
Emeritus Professor of Archaeology, Cambridge University, The Master's Lodge,
Peterhouse, Cambridge CB2 lQY, England
An invitation to contribute an essay to the Annual Review of Anthropology is flattering to the self-esteem of anyone engaged in the profession of Anthropology. Nevertheless, I intend to resist the tempation to reminisce or recapitulate. Instead, I intend to step out from my narrow corner and examine what experience of prehistoric archaeology leads me to think about the way we have all been heading since the Industrial Revolution. In particular, I would draw attention to the nature of the threats posed to some of the attributes which distinguish the archaeological from the merely palaeontological record, above all those epitomized in the cultural diversity of man. I would suggest that danger threatens not merely from the homogenizing pressures of natural science and mass production, but also and perhaps even more from an ideology that seeks to justify the destruction not merely of our heritage but of our very humanity in the name of economics and an ostensibly liberal political philosophy.
The este.em which archaeology has always enjoyed, particularly in the Old World, has derived in the main from its ability to dignify and validate the status quo by investing it with the sanction of antiquity, at the same time as providing the visual images needed to attract and sustain the adherence of the common man. The patronage traditionally accorded to archaeology by heads of state related not merely to the material symbols of their own sovereignty, but even more significantly to establishing, validating, and displaying the identity of peoples and their attachment to their native lands. Archaeology has been harnessed equally to ideologies distinct from, and in the long run inconsistent with, the maintenance of national identity. Much
0084-6570/79/1015-0001$01.00
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2 CLARK
of the impetus behind the rapid development of archaeology during the nineteenth century came from the objective support it appeared to give to the idea of progress. Conversely, the dominance of this idea itself helped to determine the preoccupation of archaeologists with establishing an overall sequence of development from rude beginnings to the complexity and sophistication of modern industry, as first comprehensively display,ed in the Great Exhibition of 1851. The idea of progress which archaeology appeared to validate not merely obscured or compensated for some of the less pleasing aspects of industrial society, but it also made possible and in a sense inevitable the conscription of nonindustrialized peoples both in Europe and overseas. Archaeology has been no less esteemed by protagonists of another by-product of the Industrial Revolution. It has been accorded favored treatment and systematically cultivated by the Institutes of the History of Material Culture maintained by the several academies of the USSR and its satellites in the simple faith that excavation, by recovering the material products of former states of society, automatically validates the central doctrine of Marxism.
According to the English summary of Historical Relics Unearthed in New China (peking, 1972):
The remarkable achievenlents in the excavation of historical relics since the founding of New China have been Ine mainly to the emphasis the Party and government have laid on this work. At the same time, the active support and participation in the work by the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers has been very important. The broad masses of people fully understand that these priceless historical relics represent in essence the ancient working people's wisdom, their sweat and blood. They recognise these as the best teaching material in knowing their own history and creative power, as well as in studying dialectical and historical materialism (my italics).
In a sense this expectation is self-fulfilling. At the very least, the muteness of archaeological evidence ensures that it is hardly in a position to be contradicted.
It follows from the privileged position of their subject that archaeologists have tended to conform to the canons of the societies in which they operate. Protest in anthropology on such topics as racism or imperialism has issued exclusively from physical and social anthropologists. One of the main purposes of this essay is to suggest that archaeologists may also have something to say, not indeed on overtly political problems, but on matters of arguably greater importance bearing on the very quality of human life. Archaeologists base their claim to speak with professional authority on such key issues primarily on the unique perspective opened up by their subject. Archaeology not only ranges over the whole earth but spans the entire period of man's existence. The artefacts that provide its basic documents form a continuous network. They encompass and indeed provide the most reliable
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ARCHAEOLOGY AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 3
diagnostic evidence for the earliest manifestations of human culture, and they document progressive advances in man's ability to exploit and shape his environment in accordance with his desires up to and including the phase of literacy during which he has become increasingly aware of himself and his context in time and space. The mere fact that archaeology spans the gap between biology and recorded history, between primate behavior and that of civilized man, helps to account for its ambiguous position in the hierarchy of knowledge. In the final resort, archaeology-and prehistoric archaeology in particular-is concerned with nothing less than the identity of man. The converse is also true. The way an archaeologist approaches his data, the view he takes of his subject in the hierarchy of knowledge, depends ultimately on the view he takes of man.
From one point of view, archaeology can be held not merely to document and validate the materialist interpretation of history, but to extend the range of this over the entire prehistory of man (4). It is true enough that, barring local vicissitudes, the archaeological record reveals a progressive growth in the complexity of material culture, that is, in the apparatus by which men supplement their limbs in manipulating and shaping their environment, from the most primitive stone industries to the most advanced products of modern science-based technology. To anyone satisfied to regard man as a mere animal, as a biological species that fulfills its highest destiny by utilizing its environment with ever greater efficiency in competition with other species, the archaeological record and the future of mankind can be contemplated with an equal measure of equanimity. It is only if he prefers to concern himself with the quality of life that an archaeologist may feel impelled to question the wisdom of succumbing unreservedly to the ideology and way of life envisaged by modern industrial society.
The position taken in this essay is humanist only in the sense that it accepts that the unique interest of man resides in the degree to which he diverges from the other primates and the rest of the animal world. Artefacts, as animal behaviorists are never tired of reminding us, are not entirely unique to man. Nor is man the only species whose behavior is influenced by cultural patterns acquired by belonging to social groupings constituted by sharing common histories, rather than being transmitted by genetic inheritance. The uniqueness of man resides in the degree to which his behavior is conditioned by culture and in particular in the way his artefacts have until quite recently displayed an ever greater increase in diversity as well as mere complexity. From this point of view the main interest of prehistory is the scope it offers for tracing the process of humanization. The artefacts which provide the basic archaeological record embody and exem-, plify the very attributes that enable us to recognize men as beings distinct from apes or monkeys.
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4 CLARK
There is no intention, on the other hand, of falling into the basic fallacy of liberal humanism and forgetting the animal nature of man. The zoological classification of modem man as Homo sapiens sapiens expresses more an aspiration than a commonly accomplished fact. When Teilhard de Chardin (8) spoke of the noosphere he merely hypothesized a new dimension that man is uniquely capable of inhabiting, surely not one that men automatically inherit by the mere fact of belonging to this species. From a paLlaeontological point of view, distinctions between fossils of Australopithecus and Homo and again between successive stages in the evolution of Homo are sufficiently blurred to occasion serious differences of view on matters of classification and nomenclature (12). The fact that the fossils in effect form continuous series should be enough to remind us that men, even of the most advanced culture, remain animals and inherit genes that issue from far up the stream of life. Without strong evidence to the contrary, it can hardly be supposed that the basic appetites of men are any more widely separated from those of his primate forebears than is his bodily structure.. On the contrary. we must accept the fact that the basic drives and appetites of men are likely to resemble those of their closest relatives and are not likely to differ widely from those activating even lowlier organisms. It is at this level and only at this level that the findings of animal behaviorists are directly relevant to the study of man.
The Hebrews of old were so appalled by what they saw as the wickedness of man that they could only suppose him to have fallen from a fonner state of grace. Darwin and his followers have shown that the evidence suggests a more economical explanation. The hypothesis of biological e:volution ought to have prepared us for the almost unimaginable horrors perpetrated by the Nazis or the masters of the Kremlin during the second quarter of the twentieth century, not to mention the atrocities still being practiced in and by societies equipped with advanced technologies. Pain or at least surprise can only stem from ignoring the continuing role of our animal natures. Paradoxically, the converse also applies. If we sin, it is not: because we are still animals, but because we are men with the faculty of selfawareness. As our own times so grimly emphasize, the mere elaboration of the cultural apparatus by no means ensures that human values prevail in our affairs. On the contrary, it may even amplify the scope and intensify the destructiveness of our animal appetites. The idea of automatic progress at any other than a material level is surely one of the silliest as well as among the most pernicious illusions of our time.
The case for culture is not that it can make us better unless indirectly by making us more acutely aware of the beastliness, in its most literal sense, of our uncontrolled natural appetities. It is rather that it is capable of making life fuller, richer, and more human in the sense of diverging increas-
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ARCHAEOLOGY AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 5
ingly from the primate prototype. Because archaeology depends for its main source on the material embodiments of cultures in the form of artefacts, it ought to be capable of assessing rather precisely the degree to which they embody human values. In this sense archaeology allows objective assessments to be made about whether at any particular juncture conditions are favorable or unfavorable to the further enrichment of human life in the sense of making it more or less possible to enjoy experiences accessible to men alone, whether in a word they enhance or impair the quality of life.
Archaeology shows very plainly that we have achieved our humanity only to the extent that we have constrained our animal natures by means of artificial conventions acquired in the course of history and incorporated in cultural traditions. The most palpable index of progression from mere animality is provided not merely by the increasing complexity but still more by the cultural diversity of the artefacts which constitute the archaeological record of human history down to quite modem times. If a main part of this essay is given to an examination of the process of cultural enrichment, this should not be taken to endorse the idea of progress as this has commonly been understood, still less the complacent doctrines of liberal humanism. On the contrary, it is offered as a reminder of the heritage that mankind stands in imminent danger of losing in the name of science and social justice. From this standpoint archaeology by no means stops short at validating contemporary trends and goals. Instead it poses questions more radical than those commonly asked by political science or sociology because they are framed in an ampler perspective.
The most palpable and also the most pervasive attribute of man featured in the archaeological record is his capacity to make artefacts. These artefacts owe part of their importance to the mere fact that certain of them, notably those made of stone, constitute a continuous network extending over the last two million years. Moreover, artefacts and the technology that informs them illuminate not only the way man has adapted to and manipulated his environment but also his ideology and social life. They preserve an unrivaled record of the way human culture has increased in complexity and diversity.
It is worthy of note that the earliest material equipment, that of Homo erectus, was not merely elementary and uniform but also remarkably static. The first significant change came in the Middle Pleistocene with the addition of bifacially flaked hand axes (mode 2) to the earlier repertoire of elementary flake and core tools (mode 1). These hand axes were so uniform in style over their entire territory that, short of recognizing local materials, an archaeologist might have difficulty in deciding whether individual specimens came from England, the Cape, or Madras. As Desmond Clark, our leading authority on this phase of prehistory, has so well expressed it:
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6 CLARK
One of the most striking things . . . about the broad cultural pattern of the Middle Pleistocene is its general "sameness" within the limits imposed by the stone industries ... Handaxes from Europe, South Africa, or peninsular India are all basically similar tools, and this is also true for the rest of the heavy duty and the light duty elements (7, p.45).
Yet the appearance of these hand axes introduced for the first time an element of industrial diversity, since they never reached as far as East Asia. The inhabitants of Chou-kou-tien near Pekin, while capable hunters and well accustomed to the use of fire, continued to shape their stone tools in an earlier mode.
The first substantial signs of cultural dynamism and diversity appeared in conjunction with the earliest large-brained men of Homo sapiens type. Although the stone industries of Neanderthal man and his cousins north and south of the Sahara shared the same prepared core technique (mode 3), they displayed a wide range of regional differentiation and a more perceptible rate of change. To some extent this reflects a closer adaptation to ecological circumstances than had existed when generalized equipment was used over the total range of environments exploited by man. The grasslands and savannah of sub-Saharan Africa continued to support men equipped with Acheulian-type stone industries, but the colonization of forest zones in that territory elicited the adaptations displayed in the Sangoan and ultimately Lupemban traditions. Similarly, when in northern Eurasia Neanderthal man colonized periglacial territories as far north as th(: Lower Pechora basin close to the Arctic zone, ecological adaptation once again promoted distinctive changes in the industrial apparatus and so furthered cultural diversity.
The increase in cultural responsiveness evinced by the first sapient men was significant more for what it presaged than for what it achieved. The acceleration in cultural dynamism that found its ultimate expression in the rich diversity of the great historic civilizations of mankind was accomplished after all by the men of modern type who emerged as Homo sapiens sapiens only 40,000 years or so ago. The complexity, diversity, and sheer richness of cultural patterns were the achievement and peculiar glory of our own species. 1 The artefacts that archaeologists are privileged to study, and above all those least subject to the constraints of the physical world, such as works of art, insignia of social hierarchy, and symbols of religious cult and observance, are very embodiments and measures of our humanity.
There was scope for diversity even at the basic levels of subsistence and technology. The archaeological record shows an overall trend from a gener-
IThat is why I dedicated the illustrated third edition of World Prehistory to "the diversity of men" (6).
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ARCHAEOLOGY AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 7
alized to a more specialized and therefore more diverse quest for food. This can be discerned at the level of relatively advanced catching and foraging economies, as well as more notably in those based on different forms of farming. A large measure of diversity can be observed in the game and the hunting and catching gear used by the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic communities of Eurasia and neighboring parts of north Africa and, again, by the Paleo-Indian and Archaic inhabitants of different parts of the Americas. The adoption during the last 10,000 years of sedentary economies based on the cultivation of crops and the keeping of livestock lent a further strong impetus to the process of diversification. The mere fact of adopting settled life intensified adjustments to local conditions. Of greater importance is the fact that the great civilizations of mankind have grown up on wealth based ultimately on the cultivation of a variety of highly diverse crops. The raising, harvesting, and preparation of plants as various as rice, maize, beans, manioc, potato, wheat, or barley would alone have served to promote diversity, not merely in subsistence and technology, but also in settlement and social organization. Even within the cereal zone of Europe, widely differing regimes adjusted to regional ecosystems are reflected in the archaeological recOl:d of early peasant communities. One has only to contrast, for example, the dry farming regime of the Mediterranean zone, complemented by the cultivation of vines, almonds, figs, and olives, with the mixed farming based on year-round rainfall in the deciduous zone of Temperate Europe or again with the hybrid economies of the northern territories where the growing season was too short for the cereals available in prehistoric times to play more than a marginal role in relation to catching and foraging.
Th� adoption of settled life based primarily on farming also served to promote hierarchy in the organization both of settlement and of society. The increased yield of cultivated over wild crops and the fact that these could be stored in some cases over appreciable periods of time made it safe for substantial numbers of people to enjoy the benefits of urban life. For their part, the inhabitants of villages, hamlets, and farmsteads in the surrounding territories that supplied the city dwellers with food were able to secure not merely the products of specialized crafts but also such important -services as protection against enemies, insurance against death through access to central granaries and, not least, the possibility of sharing in the intensified religious rites celebrated in the urban temples. Again the adoption of permanent settlement made it practicable to construct buildings more elaborate than mere shelters, as well as to accumulate movable property in the form of artefacts beyond what could readily be carried on the person. In this way, sedentary life made practicable the material embodiments of the varying status of individuals occupying different ranks in the emerging hierarchy.
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8 CLARK
Every advance in technology that allowed a more effective manipulation of natural resources conferred competitive advantages on those adopting it. Progress at a material level was therefore cumulative for ongoing communities (5). One sign of material progress was that artefacts served for progressively more specialized ends. So long as production was organized on a local preindustrial basis, increased specialization resulted in the use of a wider range of materials and the application of novel techniques, as well as in the development of artefacts calculated to attain better results for a smaller input of energy.
For almost the whole of his history, man's most effective tools were made from flint, stone, and wood. The utilization of an ever-wider range of raw materials necessarily made for greater diversity. The Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-fishers of Eurasia were distinguished in the archaeological record by their sophisticated use of animal skeletal material for a wide range of specialized gear. The adoption of fired clay pottery for recc�ptacles, as well as serving to distinguish pottery making from aceramic communities, provided a medium peculiarly well adapted to a variety of modeling and ornamentation.
Another craft frequently taken up by settled peoples was weaving, and this also assumed a diversity of forms corresponding in part to the materials used in different territories, notably wool of different kinds, flax, cotton, and silk. Metal working also served to distinguish those who adapted it, as well as providing a number of variants according to the kinds of metals and the techniques used in working them. And so it was with every new material, including some such as amber, jade, or jet, occurring only in rc�stricted localities, and others, like faience, manufactured by special processes.
Although it was variation in subsistence and technology that was· most readily documented in the archaeological record, the increasing diversity of artefacts was the outcome in reality more of social than of merely economic factors. Economic ones like the adoption of particular patterns of subsistence or -the multiplication of crafts stemming from specialization and the use of an ever-widening range of materials implied a subdivision of labor far beyond that of age groups and sexes. On the other hand, purely social forces were also important. The larger and more complex communities became, the more insistent was the need to promote identity and cohesion. Conversely, there was the need to emphasize definition from neighbors, something that became more pressing with every increase in the permanence of settlement and the accumulation of wealth that accompanied successive improvements in farming. It is significant that when Gordon Childe first tried to define the frontiers of the early peasant communities of prehistoric Europe in his Dawn of European Civilization (3), he sought to do so by mapping cultures. These he defined by conformities in the whole
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ARCHAEOLOGY AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 9
range of social activities reflected in the archaeological record, notably subsistence patterns, productive techniques, tool and weapon forms, defensive systems, personal ornaments, art styles, religious observances, and funerary practices, stressing in each case abstentions as well as affirmative choices. In a word, his method depended on the extent to which the various communities of Europe had already developed richly divergent cultural e,xpressions between the fifth and the second millennia B.C. This diversity was indeed sufficiently pronounced to make it reasonable to require a firstyear undergraduate to assign assemblages of artefacts from this phase of European prehistory to their correct geographical provenance. And the same would go for any territory that supported peasant communities during early times.
Whereas the hunting bands and peasant kin groups described by Childe in The Dawn (3) were homogeneous and within the primary divisions of age and sex made up of individuals of equal status, the societies that experienced the explosive increase in diversity documented in the finest exhibits displayed in the great museums of the world were invariably of a more complex order. The climax of cultural achievement coincided in various parts of the world with the replacement of segmented by vertically structured societies. It is not my purpose here to examine the forms taken by vertical structuring, still less to propose a typology from chiefdoms and kingdoms to empires. I merely wish to emphasize that in every traditional society known to history, hierarchy and inequality, whatever forms these took in particular cases, were the invariable accompaniment, indeed the formative factor, behind the emergence of high cultures. And by high cultures I mean those most widely separated from the behavioral patterns of animals whose fossils in fact appeared at lower levels in the palaeontological record. In terms of archaeology, high cultures were represented by artefacts farthest removed from the sticks and stones of Homo erectus and far transcending the homely products of Gordon Childe's egalitarian peasants of prehistoric Europe. The material embodiments of high culture invariably appeared as a matter of stratigraphic fact in the context of hierarchically organized societies. Conversely, the archaeology of lower levels in stratified societies incapsulates earlier stages in cultural history. Whereas the peaks of cultural attainment, the finest products of human craft, were exclusively associated with and indeed helped to define and signal the highest levels in the social hierarchy, the objects and structures used by the mass of the population, including the very craftsmen who made the noblest insignia and built the most symbolic monuments, often compared with those made by their remote forebears.
In terms of early Britain, one might recall that the plainer pottery of the Celtic peoples, who created in the metal insignia of their chiefly class (1)
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10 CLARK
one of the outstanding manifestations of decorative art known to man, hardly differs in appearance from that made by stone age peasants two or three thousand years previously in the same territory. Again, if the: jewelry from the Sutton Hoo burial (2) or even some of the richest Kentislh graves of the pagan Anglo-Saxon period (11) would tax the finest craftsmtm of the present age, undecorated pottery of this archaeological phase has on occasion been assigned to the pre-Roman Iron Age or even to the Neolithic. Even more striking comparisons might be made by reference to the material equipment of the peasants who supported the elaborate structures of pharaonic Egypt or from recent times of princely India or Tsarist Russia.
It is no contradiction that the overall cultural patterns displayed by hierarchical societies should have been so much richer and more sharply defined than those of the humbler segmented societies from which they developed. Archaeology documents that, whereas in segmented societies settlements tend to be of approximately the same size and to comprise structures of more or less homogeneous form and scale, stratified societies are often marked by a hierarchy of settlement with major centers ministering to and drawing upon a number of lesser ones distributed over dependent territories and themselves sometimes of more than one order of importance. The precise role of such major centers varied in different societies. They might be primarily foci of religious observance, combining with this social functions and often playing a role in the redistribution of commodities. Alternatively, they might be cities containing rulers and their courts and bureaucracies, temples and their priests, specialized craftsmen and merchants, in fact everyone and everything that rendered specialized services of whatever kind to the communities of which the cities were capitals and foci. The frequent presence at such centers of granaries or other storage facilities reminds us of the redistributive functions implicit in hierarchy. Town dwellers who produced no food depended on rations derived ultimately from the surrounding countryside. Conversely, cities had responsibilities to their dependent realms in times of death. Temple stores were not, as some Marxists have implied, symbols of priestly exploitation so much as prototypes of banks and mutual assurance corporations, mechanisms of social well-being.
A counterpart to the concentration of wealth that more than lmything distinguished stratified from segmented societies was a preoccupation with armament and defensive works. In the archaeological record it is .a matter of observation that whereas it was exceptional for peasant communities to erect defensive works, this was normal practice among hierarchically structured groups more richly endowed with movable wealth. Moreover, the scale of defenses matched the status of particular sites. Central sites housing leaders and the focus of specialized activities were more likely to be de-
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ARCHAEOLOGY AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 11
fended strongly than less important ones. Again, the finest personal armament, weapons, helmets, and body armor were concentrated on leaders and their immediate associates, and the same applies over much of Eurasia to equipment concerned with personal mobility. Mycenaean princes, Celtic chieftains, and Shang knights were conveyed to and from the thick of battle on splendidly accoutred chariots, just as the kings of Ur and the nomad leaders of the Altai were brought to burial in horse-drawn wagons for reasons of status as well as of convenience.
The archaeological record shows that in stratified societies the most specialized craftsmen worked primarily for the uppermost stratum. Foremost among the objects which denoted and enhanced status were personal weapons, helmets and shields and body armor, harness and chariot gear, personal jewelry and ornaments, not to mention mirrors and utensils relating to feasting and drinking. As well as displaying the highest technical expertise available, such things were frequently made of materials inherently precious or valuable because they were only obtainable from a distance and sometimes, as in the case of jade, also extremely expensive to work. Since they were thus precious in all measurable respects, they provided ideal media for conspicuous consumption and display. Exotic artefacts, particularly those originating in more advanced and prestigious cultures, provided another medium through and by which the higher ranks in stratified societies advertised their status. Appropriation of such attributes was not left as in a modern society to individual initiative, but, to judge from usage in historically known situations, was assigned to people occupying particular ranks by custom if not by explicit sumptuary laws. Although the prime purpose of this was undoubtedly to define and validate the hierarchic structure of stratified societies, it also played a significant part in cultural dynamics. Thus the use of exotic artefacts and materials as insignia of status was a potent factor in promoting change in communities marginal to the main foci of cultural development. Within societies, therefore, the degree to which the most skilled craftsmen were specialized and concentrated on the fabrication of the richest objects for comparatively few people acted like a forcing house of innovation and enrichment, not merely for the upper ranks but for all those to whom new types of artefact or decorative motif were in time devolved from above. The myth that the average man was likely to display cultural creativity or contribute to rapid innovation if only given the opportunity is much less dangerous but no less mistaken than the assumption that he would be good if only he were free from the constraints of social hierarchy.
Both the persistence of the myth and its falsity may be illustrated in the attitude towards the finest products of early civilizations adopted by modern communist states. Exhibits from the Han dynasty shown in the recent
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12 CLARK
exhibition of Chinese archaeology on either side of the Atlantic were held, for example, to "glaringly expose the luxury and decadence of the feudal ruling class." In particular the funeral garments made up of jade plates linked by gold wire that formed a focus of the exhibition were singled out as exposing "the feudal class's luxury and depravity at the expense of the labouring people." The same could have been written of the jad1e vessels, the silks, porcelains, fine metal work, lacquers, and paintings of this and later periods of Chinese history or, indeed, the luxury products of any age. The fact is that such things, if not made for superiors in social hkrarchies, would never have been made at all. If the ruling classes had not been luxurious and sophisticated and if they had not been in a position to enlist the skill of the artificers, these things which define and illustrate the essential qualities of Chinese art would never have existed. And the same applies to the treasures of Tutankhamen's tomb or the Sutton Hoo ship. Without a hierarchic structure, without a marked degree of inequality in consumption, the astonishing diversity of Chinese, Egyptian, or Anglo-Saxon culture would never have developed. This is not a matter of speculation. We know what the culture of China, Egypt, or Britain was like before class societies developed in these lands. Archaeology tells us much about their prehistoric peasant populations. They were egalitarian. They were illiterate. And their material products by comparison with the fine things produC(:d in the ambience of class societies were as dull and boring as those use:d by the lower classes in Shang China, Pharaonic Egypt, or Anglo-Saxon England. Archaeology shows unequiVocally that the finest artefacts made by man, the most superb and diverse embodiments of his humanity, were made to celebrate and render more effective the operation of social systems in which craftsmen exercised their most refined skills on the most precious materials in the service of the highest levels of social hierarchies.
In his slim but pregnant volume, The Birth 0/ Civilization in the Near East, Henri Frankfort (10) strongly attacked the notion that the early civilizations of Egypt and southwest Asia-and by implication those of Europe, south and east Asia, and the New World-can be adequately appraised as mere representatives of a stage in social evolution. Instead he insisted on the autonomy of cultural manifestations. Each civilization, he believed, had its own peculiar genius and identity. In each, he wrote, we can recognize "a certain coherence . . . a certain consistency in its ori.entation, a certain cultural 'style' which shapes its political and its judici2Ll institutions, its art as well as its literature, its religion as well as its morals" (10, p. 16). This elusive identity, which was nevertheless embodied in the material products available to archaeology, was termed by Frankfort its form. It was this form that "is never destroyed though it changes in the course of time." Although more clearly defined in the more advanC(:<f cultures of
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stratified socieites, it needs to be emphasized that even the humblest cultures of Homo sapiens sapiens were marked by this precious quality of unique identity. It is cultural form that gives meaning and savor to human life, a savor only men can perceive and without which they revert to the status of the primates from which they evolved in the course of prehistory.
Much has been made in this essay of the contributions to cultural diversity and enrichment made by economic and social factors. It is important not to overlook ideology. As Henri Frankfort so clearly recognized, religion and the ideological attitudes associated with religious beliefs have played a role of great importance both in validating individual cultural systems and in promoting their distinctiveness. Ideology is important both because it motivates men over a wide range of their activities and still more, historically speaking, because of its key role in perpetuating and indeed deepening the coherence of social traditions. Religion and the ideas associated with it have not only been leading factors in promoting diversity among men. They also provide keys to defining this diversity since, though by nature incorporeal, they are nevertheless impressed on a wide range of archaeological data including shrines and temples, utensils used in ritual observance, and elements in the iconography of graphic art. Again, the diversity of literate societies is nowhere more beautifully exemplified than in the scripts used to communicate and perpetuate liturgies, histories, and laws (9).
What Frankfort discerned in the civilizations of antiquity available only from their archaeological and epigraphic remains, civilizations which included the Harappan, the Maya, and the Shang no less than the Egyptian or Sumerian, was present also in the cultural traditions known to us from the much fuller sources of recent history, those for instance of Ch'ing China, the France of Versailles, Georgian England, or Tsarist Russia. Anyone traveling through a territory as restricted as Europe as recently even as 1914 could have savored a diversity not merely of material products but of social and political styles transcending that available today in the entire world. The texture of life was so immeasurably richer then that to experience even an inkling of it today people have to resort as they do in their millions to monuments, museums, illustrated books, or the theater.
It is not difficult to see why an archaeologist should view the trends and some of the tenets of modern industrial society with a certain ambivalence or even disenchantment, nor is it surprising that this attitude should be widely shared by laymen. Whereas his studies have documented the attainment of humanity through the gradual emergence of hierarchically structured societies distinguished by patterns of ever-increasing distinctiveness and diversity, the archaeologist finds himself confronted in his daily life by an increasingly rapid reversion toward the intraspecies homogeneity of a prehuman situation. The brutal rapidity at which this process of cultural
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impoverishment has unfolded in the face of science and technology and the economic systems stemming from them explains why men everywhere are registering their dismay. In trying to understand his situation the ordinary person has received little help from the intelligentsia. Indeed, by a supreme irony the undermining of human values has been furthered rather than diagnosed, still less arrested, by those who like to see themselves as leaders of opinion. The quality of human life is threatened not by some supreme cataclysm of nature or untoward social catastrophe so much as by the proponents of self-styled progressive philosophies.
An immediate cause of the homogenization of culture has been the incorporation of traditional societies within the nexus of a world-wide market in the products of machine industry. Whereas in preindustrial societies of the kind most commonly encountered in archaeology the elaboration of hierarchy and the enrichment and diversification of culture were adaptive and for that reason selected not merely for survival but for enhancement, in the case of industrial society the precise opposite applies. Standardized products of the kind most readily manufactured by machines, because of their greater cheapness, have a built-in advantage over handmade ones reflecting local skills and the styles of diverse cultural traditions. Economic forces left to themselves increasingly ensure that handmade products displaying regional diversity become too costly for daily use. Outside museums they can only survive as luxuries, but luxuries imply disparities in consumption which industrial societies serve to reduce. The trend toward uniformity applies not merely to different societies but to classes within them. Articles that deviate from the standard become too expensive to buy in the very societies in which it pays to spend the maximum amount in promoting the consumption of standard ones by means of advertising and persuasion in a variety of media.
The price mechanism is powerfully reinforced in this regard by ideology. The "enlightenment" which generated natural science and in due course modem industrial economies itself seeks to promote equality as a desirable aim of society. Egalitarian notions affect patterns of consumption directly through the impact of steeply progressive taxation, but also indirectly through psychological constraints. Even the very rich are increasingly inhibited from consuming luxuries they can still afford for fear of appearing conspicuous. In striking contrast to their behavior in hierarchically structured societies in which status is in a measure defined by conspicuous consumption, in industrial societies they strive to remain inconspicuous and so to avoid even heavier fiscal penalties for their success. Economic, social, political, and psychological forces thus combine to maximize the production and consumption of common things while penalizing that of uncommon ones. Indeed, the degree to which the common man dominates
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ARCHAEOLOGY AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 15
consumption has come to be accepted by capitalists and Marxists alike as an index of progress. Societies in which the production of exceptional things is matched by marked inequality in consumption have even come to be accepted as backward. The richer in economic and the more "progressive" in political terms the world becomes the more relentlessly it is impoverished with respect to the very attributes that mark the emergence and cultural enrichment of mankind.
Another powerful force making for cultural homogenization has been the dramatic advance in systems of communication in the industrial world. Railways, motor vehicles, and aircraft have shrunk the world so that formerly remote territories have been brought within effective reach of a single market dominated by a comparatively few states which share a common technology and modes of thought powerfully influenced by the concepts of natural science. The installations and mechanisms that now girdle the earth not merely conform in all essentials to universal patterns but for the most part are themselves manufactured at a few centers. They bear no more relationship to modes of transport traditional in most parts of the world than they do to local ecological systems.
Even more important as a factor in the process of homogenization than the movement of men and goods is the communication of ideas. Printing and the electronic transmission of texts and the spoken word have brought the peoples of the world within range not merely of a single technology and market but even more significantly of concepts linked with the pursuit of economic profit, scientific comprehension, and notions of social justice. Again, the new facilities have conferred decisive advantages on those able to communicate directly with representatives of the dominant Western culture. Just as mass production involved the standardization of goods, so improvements in communication have promoted the domination of progressively fewer languages. Again, as modem business soon appreciated, television is an unrivaled medium for manipulating, standardizing, and so making more profitable the satisfaction of consumer tastes. More than that, its effect must be to undermine traditional modes of thought and values. The impact of electronics has been further amplified by computers, which by sorting data from the whole range of science and the humanities has helped still further to break down conceptual barriers while at the same time giving rise to a jargon common to all cultures and disciplines. Inevitably, modem media for the transmission of ideas operate to favor universal as opposed to local patterns of behavior. In this way they serve to reinforce uniformity at the expense of diversity both within and between communities.
The process of impoverishment by homogenization, which has already done much to destroy the diversity and richness of the artefacts used in the physical activities of daily life, poses an even more lethal threat to the more
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16 CLARK
spiritual dimensions of human experience. In the traditional cultures recovered by archeology, the products of graphic and sculptural art and architecture mirror cultural diversity with all the greater sensitivity that they are relatively freer from the constraints of utility than the generality of artefacts. The converse is no less true. The graphic and sculptural products of modem society reflect with startling clarity the degree to which the human spirit has already been impoverished by abstraction. In painting the process has taken two main forms but the outcome is essentially the same. At one extreme the artist resorts to elementary geometric forms or covers the whole of his picture with a single color, as with Malevich's famous white on white series or Rodchenko's riposte in black on black. At the other extreme he depicts natural forms of artefacts with a fidelity that rivals the camera. The effect in either case is to deprive the work of cultural content. Geometry and photography operate, like the laws of natural science or the processes of modem technology, irrespective of cultural endowments. Furthermore, the practitioners of modem abstract art, while striving for originality as innovators as though they were scientists, often seek to eliminate personal as well as cultural diversity, if necessary by using spray guns or applying natural or ready-made materials.
Sculptors have equally sought to evade cultural affiliations or <:ven personal identity. This has sometimes been achieved, as with Paolozzi, by combining parts of machines or, as with Vantangerloo or Caro, by using wire or standard products of machine industry. An alternative has been to adopt and improve upon natural forms such as Brancusi's eggs or Moore's animal bones. In architecture it is much the same. Modem structures recalling factory products betray their indifference to ecology by obtruding alike from Brazilian rain forests or Arabian deserts and display their contempt for man and his traditions by overshadowing without prejudice oriental mosques and pagodas or the classical, gothic, and neogothic structures of the Western world. As eloquent as the nature of its products in some respects is the fact that the very term "architecture" has been abandoned by some progressives as in itself anachronistic because of discriminating in respect of quality. The substitute term "built form" serves the dual purpose of advertising the divorce of building from culture and the devaluation of that very discrimination by which men emerged from the other primates and diverse civilizations developed in the course of ages from the base of primitive communism.
A similar process of homogenization deforms the ideas and concepts that once inspired and embodied the identities of the several civilizations of mankind. This is true most notably of the religions that more than anything inform the arts and enshrine the beliefs of these civilizations. The positivist temper until recently prevalent in natural science undermined traditional beliefs in whatever sphere primarily on the ground that their validity was
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ARCHAEOLOGY AND HUMAN DIVERSITY 17
incapable of proof. Religion of whatever description was regarded as incredible, irrational, and superfluous because all phenomena that were real were held to be susceptible to explanation by natural science. Religious belief indeed could even be condemned on the ground that it impeded the progress of natural science and was therefore not merely obscurantist but positively harmful to the prospects of mankind. If rationalism was hostile to religion in general, it was still more opposed to the notion of diversity of belief. It is of the nature of scientific laws to be universal in their application, whereas beliefs, codes of social behavior, or artistic conventions are by their mere origin particular to historically constituted communities. The universalizing character of natural science has so conditioned modes of thought that even those who retain religious faith find themselves increasingly unable to tolerate religious differences. So far from proclaiming belief in the rightness of their own particular creed, religious leaders proclaim the need for ecumenical thought, not merely as a practical necessity but as desirable on its own account. Religions when not flatly repUdiated are increasingly being homogenized not by their enemies but by their friends.
In many ways the most revealing manifestation of popular feeling in societies of collapsed hierarchy is the cult of what Karl Popper aptly termed "biological naturalism," manifested in diet, the immitigable growth of hair, nudism, sexual permissiveness, and even bestiality. It is encouraging to a prehistorian whose profession leads him to trace the emergence of man from a state of nature, whose subject rests on the assumption that men become human to the extent that they elaborate cultural modes of behavior, to find the following appreciation of the implications of this vulgar heresy set out by this eminent philosopher, more especially since he finds himself unable to accept so much else of his message:
. . . it must be admitted that certain forms of behaviour may be described as more "natural"' than other forms; for instance going native or eating only raw food; and some people think that this in itself justifies the choice of these forms. But in this sense it is not natural to interest oneself in art; or science, or even in arguments in favour of naturalism. The choice of conformity with "nature" as a supreme standard leads to consequences which few will be prepared to face; it does not lead to a more natural form of civilization, but to beastliness (13, p. 70).
As Popper wrote later on in the same work, emphasizing his meaning by italicizing the sentence: "There is no return to a harmonious state of nature. If we turn back, then we must go the whole way-we must return to the beasts" (13, p. 2(0). Indeed, the position of lapsed men is in many ways worse, since they have lost the instinctive guides to behavior on which other animals are able to depend.
The course of history has been shaped less by popular heresies than by the original thinking of outstanding men. This is particularly true when the insights of successive pioneers are incorporated in an organized body of
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codified thought like that presented by the natural sciences. The importance of the sciences far transcends their contribution to advancing the technology of production, distribution, and communication. Of greater significance in the long run is their role in promoting abstract and universal modes of categorizing experience. Whereas cultural traditions by their very nature reflect the diversity of their parent cultures and favor historical modes of thought, scientific laws are abstract and necessarily universal if they are true. As modes of thought proper to the natural sciences spread over the world they served to promote and intensify the process of homogenization exhibited in tangible form in the products of machine industry.
If the natural sciences operated to lessen diversity and impose homogeneity among different societies, another product of increasing human awareness, that of concem for others and specifically for the weak and unsuccessful, not only promoted a greater degree of equality and hence of homogeneity within societies, but made their attainment a talisman of philosophic and indeed political morality. In Karl Popper's rhetoric, the attainment of "open" societies of the kind that stemmed from the experience of Classical Greece was held to be a self-evident aim in contrast with "closed" societies of tribal character which were by the same token considered to be outmoded. What was regarded as particularly reprehensible about "closed" societies is that they were hierarchically ordered and informed by traditional values invested with the sanction of history and even of the supematural. By contrast, open societies, to the attainment of which all the previous experience of mankind was thought of as a mere preliminary, were held to be rational rather than magical, abstract rather than organic, equalitarian rather than hierarchical, and universal rather than tribal. It is paradoxical that Popper, who saw with such clarity of vision the fallacy of naturalism, should have failed to appreciate the contradiction implicit in the very notion of an "open" society. The artificial values that constrain human behavior and make it so distinct from that of the nonhuman primates are neither abstract nor necessarily rational. They are the product not of logic but of history, not the generalized history of mankind, but ,that of particular societies. To speak of abstract culture is a contradiction in terms. A society truly open would soon enough revert to a state of nature with all that that implies. Conversely, culture can only exist by constraining or at least moulding individual men, the sole way of ensuring the viability of traditional pattems and values.
The object of this essay is by no means to advocate reaction. On the contrary, the last thing archaeology should encourage is any disposition to believe that the historical process can safely be ignored. It would be suicidal as well as futile to dream of returning to a golden age before the "enlightenment" spawned the natural science, machine technology, and egalitarian
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philosophies that between them threaten those diverse expressions of the human spirit that we term civilizations. The extended view of history made possible by archaeology is valuable above all for the improved perspective from which it allows us to view the present and indeed the future. If the past is embalmed in history, the future lies open before us. As we peer ahead, our knowledge of the past should nevertheless stand us in good stead by defining perils and reminding us of what we stand to lose if we ignore them.
It has been a main contention of this essay that whereas for long ages the course of social evolution was benign, in that it promoted diversity and so enriched mankind, we are now in a new phase of world history, one in which prevailing trends are malignant and even threaten to terminate the adventure chronicled by archaeology. Our future has been in peril since during our own times the concepts and techniques of modem science have engulfed the world. Unless we can hold fast to the values defined by our history, we shall be reduced not to a pristine and therefore still hopeful state, not to a prehuman so much as a subhuman condition. If our COmmon aim is to enhance our lives, our guiding light must surely be quality rather than quantity, hierarchy rather than equality, and diversity rather than homogeneity. By the same token, we should not be afraid to count archaeology as a humane study. Since men necessarily derive their humanity by virtue of belonging to and sharing the heritage of social groups, it follows that archaeologists must concern themselves with, and where appropriate use methods developed by, the social sciences. Equally, since man is an animal and his societies can only exist in the context of nature, his history can only be fully understood by applying the insights and techniques of the biological and physical sciences. This is not to say that the natural and social sciences are to be worshipped, revered, or even mimicked. They are merely there to be used in order to promote understanding. The objective of archaeology is to elucidate the manner in which in the course of ages we have become human and in this way define what we mean when we declare ourselves to be men. By the same token, a prime objective of social policy ought surely to be not to undermine but to conserve and promote the values by which in the course of their long history men have managed to distance themselves from their primate relatives.
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