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An offprint from

DevelOpment Of pre-StAte COmmunItIeS In the AnCIent neAr eASt

edited by

Diane Bolger and Louise C. Maguire

© Oxbow Books 2010ISBn 978-1-84217-407-4

CONTENTSEditors’ Preface viiList of Contributors ix

INTRODUCTION

1 The development of pre-state communities in the ancient Near East 1 Diane Bolger and Louise C. Maguire

PART 1: SOCIAL ORGANISATION AND COMPLEXITY IN PRE-STATE COMMUNITIES

2 Social complexity and archaeology: A contextual approach 11 Marc Verhoeven3 Late Neolithic architectural renewal: The emergence of round houses in the northern Levant, c. 6500–6000 BC 22 Peter M. M. G. Akkermans4 Abandonment processes and closure ceremonies in prehistoric Cyprus: In search of ritual 29 Demetra Papaconstantinou5 A different Chalcolithic: A central Cypriot scene 38 David Frankel6 Thoughts on the function of ‘public buildings’ in the Early Bronze Age southern Levant 46 Hermann Genz

PART 2: EARLY URBAN COMMUNITIES AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE STATE

7 The Tell: Social archaeology and territorial space 55 Tony Wilkinson8 Rethinking Kalopsidha: From specialisation to state marginalisation 63 Lindy Crewe9 From kin to class – and back again! Changing paradigms of the early polity 72 Anne Porter10 Different models of power structuring at the rise of hierarchical societies in the Near East: Primary economy versus luxury and defence management 79 Marcella Frangipane11 States of hegemony: Early forms of political control in Syria during the 3rd millennium BC 87 Lisa Cooper

PART 3: TECHNOLOGY, ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

12 A household affair? Pottery production in the Burnt Village at Late Neolithic Tell Sabi Abyad 97 Olivier Nieuwenhuyse13 Late Cypriot ceramic production: Heterarchy or hierarchy? 106 Louise Steel14 The domestication of stone: Early lime plaster technology in the Levant 117 Gordon Thomas

vi

15 Domestication of plants and animals, domestication of symbols? 123 Danielle Stordeur16 Herds lost in time: Animal remains from the 1969–1970 excavation seasons at the Ceramic Neolithic settlement of Philia-Drakos Site A, Cyprus 131 Paul Croft

PART 4: AGENCY, IDENTITY AND GENDER

17 Agency in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A 141 Bill Finlayson 18 Understanding symbols: Putting meaning into the painted pottery of prehistoric northern Mesopotamia 147 Stuart Campbell19 Gender and social complexity in prehistoric and protohistoric Cyprus 156 Diane Bolger20 The painting process of White Painted and White Slip wares: Communities of practice 165 Louise C. Maguire21 The ceramic industry of Deneia: Crafting community and place in Middle Bronze Age Cyprus 174 Jennifer M. Webb

PART 5: INSULARITY, ETHNICITY AND CULTURAL INTERACTION

22 Outside the corridor? The Neolithisation of Cyprus 185 Carole McCartney23 Contextualising Neolithic Cyprus: Preliminary investigations into connections between Cyprus and the Near East in the later Neolithic 197 Joanne Clarke24 Was Çatalhöyük a centre? The implications of a late Aceramic Neolithic assemblage from the 207 neighbourhood of Çatalhöyük Douglas Baird25 The birth of ethnicity in Iran: Mesopotamian-Elamite cross-cultural relations in late prehistory 217 Andrew McCarthy

Contents

9

FROM KIN TO CLASS – AND BACK AGAIN! CHANGING PARADIGMS OF THE EARLY POLITY

Anne Porter

In this celebration of Eddie Peltenburg’s career it is more than fi tting to revisit a topic to which he has made such a signifi cant contribution: the genesis and organisation of the early polity in northern Syria. Since it is now widely recognised that the neo-evolutionary models of the early state, as characterised either by developmental stages or classifi catory types, are no longer useful for understanding these issues (see Yoffee 2005 for a succinct treatment), there are a multitude of approaches and frameworks to consider. But whether we consider them in terms of the ‘archaic state’ (Feinman and Marcus 1998), ‘incipient’, ‘nascent’ or ‘transitional’ states (all terms employed by Trigger 2003) or ‘early complex polities’ (Smith 2003), and whether they are implicit or explicit, there is an understanding in any study of the early polity (my own terminological preference) that something qualitatively, if not quantitatively, different has occurred in political history – a new state of political being, not just in grand organisational terms but in terms of the way people conceive of themselves and their interactions with others, has come into existence.

In the past one key aspect of this change in political being was characterised as a shift from kin-based societies – where people both understood their place in the world and their responsibilities to others to be arranged according to their blood relations, i.e. their birth into a certain group – to a class-based society where the affi nities (or lack thereof) between much larger numbers of unrelated people who coexisted in the same space were derived from their position in socio-economic hierarchies (for a random sample see Adams 1966, 80; Yoffee 1993, 69; but cf Yoffee 1997, 261–262; see also Zagarell 1986, 416; Pollock 1991, 177; McCorriston 1997, 518; Trigger 2003, 152–153). The applicability of this change was universal. In some way or another all societies went through it – or didn’t. If a given

society did not, or had not yet, then that society did not qualify as a state. Various terms have been applied to this pre-state/state alternative entity in both the anthropology of the contemporary world and the archaeology of the ancient world: chiefdom (Earle 1997; Flannery 1999) and segmentary society (Stephen and Peltenburg 2002) are two of the most prominent. Both in some way harken back to a kin/tribal basis for these pre/non-state societies despite the problematic nature of the term ‘tribe’. But as the emphasis in American archaeology of the Near East shifted from the problem of state formation to a more diverse set of issues, as excavation results increasingly found not the transition to the state but the remains of functioning polities or complex societies (Stein 1994; 1998), and as political theory shifted at the same time as the practice of archaeology itself changed, evidence began to emerge that the polities of the north, and even of the south (Yoffee 2005, 110, 214), were not quite so ‘developed’ as to have entirely abandoned kin relations for class structures long after such changes were supposed to have been accomplished.

This then seems to require a choice: are the early politics of northern Mesopotamia not far enough along the continuum to really qualify as states? Or should we think about the situation in entirely other frameworks? There is an interesting divergence here between highly local studies of the polity and global ones: those focussed on northern Mesopotamia tend to the former by employing the term ‘tribe’ (Steinkeller 1999; Stein 2004; Cooper 2006; 2007) or, like ‘segmentary society’, a label based on characteristics of the tribe (such as Peltenburg 2007a, 11) and deriving ultimately from a long history of usage in anthropology (Morgan 1877; Evans-Pritchard 1940; Service 1962; Sahlins 1968; see Peletz 1995, 353 for its different meanings). Those situated in a larger discourse opt for other

9. From kin to class – and back again! Changing paradigms of the early polity 73

approaches altogether (e.g. Blanton 1998; Smith 2003; Yoffee 2005). I would like to bring both together in this paper by considering local northern Mesopotamian polities through a different framework, one which does not contrast one state of political being (tribe) with another (state) because practices of social and political interaction, which are entirely interdigitated but not necessarily correlative, vary from polity to polity in northern Mesopotamia. In each polity there are situations where kinship is the dominant mode of interaction and situations where socio-economic position (‘class’ is not really an apt term) and/or civic identity is operable and administrative structures are framed through and deploy all modes of interaction at different times. This variability characterises both early polities and much later ones and extends far beyond northern Syria as well. It is therefore not a matter of viewing the northern polities as less than fully developed states, but of thinking about the state differently, perhaps indeed dispensing with it (and associated terminologies) as an analytical frame of reference altogether.

The only way to depict such variability is to employ a wide range of descriptive terms on a contingent basis because the production of monolithic paradigms driven by the need for succinct ways of expressing political organisation, as well as the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of its change, leads ultimately to a counter-productive reductionism (see Smith 2003, 40 and note 9). There are many ways of thinking about the constituent relationships contained within the early polity (cf Stein 1998), but there are at least four that top my list and consequently four sets of terminologies to be developed. One way is in terms of the spatial organisation of the polity, which I term polity morphology. It tends to be a given in most discussions of the Near Eastern state that a polity controls contiguous territory, either in a highly circumscribed manner such as the Mesopotamian city state or in the broader manner of the Syrian state, with the empire being the most attenuated, but still contiguous, form. Yet the very idea of colonialism, largely accepted as pertaining in some way in the 4th millennium (Surenhagen 1986; Algaze 1993) raises other possibilities, one of which is the ‘bifurcated polity’ in which two components of the same political entity exist at a distance from each other. A wide range of political relationships may be posited for this spatial situation, ranging from two essentially independent groups only nominally connected, to differential specialisations among the components of the bifurcated polity (Porter 2009). A ‘dispersed polity’ is one that has a signifi cant component of its populace engaged in mobile enterprises, including, but not limited to, both localised and broad-range pastoralism, where territorial usage shifts, either seasonally or over the long term. On this issue I diverge from Smith (2003, 153), who argues that a polity and its catchment area are not coterminous. They may be, if the people who utilise the catchment area are in fact governed by the polity

or consider themselves to be members of, and therefore governed by, the polity. It does not matter if the polity does not have the means to enforce its desires over this catchment area, only that its members think it does.

But a dispersed polity might also include scattered components integrated into a single entity through conquest, for example, where control is more direct than only the paying of tribute (Wattenmaker 1994, 197–198) or as when Samsi Addu appointed one son over Mari, the other over Ekallatum while he ruled at Shubat Enlil (van der Mieroop 2004, 102). An extended morphology, in contrast, posits a more regularised spatial connection, somewhat like an arm stretched out to hold in hand a distant object. The Assyrian trading colonies might provide such an example, where stable and frequently utilised routes of passage and communication between homeland and colony are maintained whether through treaty or tribute, so that it appears as if the homeland controls the space of the routes themselves. While these terms represent different points on a continuum, there are others that represent different ways of spatial distribution entirely, and so multiple terms to describe morphology might be used of any one polity.

Variable polity morphologies are in evidence over a very long period in the Near East, starting at least in the 4th millennium. The relationship between Habuba Kabira and Uruk, for example, might represent a bifurcated polity or a dispersed model if integrated political relationships (as opposed to only economic ones coupled with social memory of chronologically distant origins) really can be demonstrated between Uruk and some of the other sites that share its material culture. In the 3rd millennium Ebla controlled Carchemish (Fronzaroli 2003) and perhaps Emar as well (Archi and Biga 2003, 10).While evidence for these relationships has prompted some to claim that Ebla was a massive empire (e.g. Astour 1992), there is no indication, archaeological or textual, that substantiates a claim for contiguous territory from Emar to Ebla to Carchemish; indeed, the evidence is to the contrary. There were clearly independent kingdoms in between. The dispersed polity of Samsi Addu has already been mentioned, but it may not have been the only non-contiguous polity of the 2nd millennium: the Emutbala kingdom of Larsa may have constituted some form of bifurcated polity with the Yamutbal of northern Syria (Porter 2009; see also Steinkeller 2004).

Ideas about the effective limitations of direct political control over space (e.g. Johnson 1978; Giddens 1981) are no doubt part of the reason that divergent polity morphologies are not well considered, but there are multiple ways of stretching time and space, so that the distance that may be travelled in a day (Flannery 1999, 5) does not condition the degree to which, or the ways, a polity might extend itself. However, the spatial organisation of a polity and the territorial relationships within it do pose a set of problems for political organisation and operation, just as the way a society is organised may

Anne Porter74

constrain the potential for different territorial confi gurations. As I have recently argued (Porter 2009), kinship practices might be part of the way a polity maintains integrity over space, but this should not be taken to mean that this is always the case nor that kinship may not be an equally critical component of contiguous or local polities. Nevertheless, differences in how kinship systems are structured and how kinship practices work between bifurcated, dispersed and contiguous polities would not be surprising.

Kinship systems and practices form a key component of social confi guration, the complex of structures, ideologies and practices that form the basis of social interaction, and the second way in which polities vary in their organisation and operation. Kinship, defi ned ego-centrically or intra-generationally (the living kin of an individual) and socio-centrically or multi-generationally (the relationships accrued through having a common ancestor or common descent; see Holy 1996; Fowles 2002) is in evidence in one way or another, and from a variety of sources, as a powerful component of the social worlds of a large number of sites across Syria. Since kinship is established by both horizontal and vertical relationships and can be socially constructed as opposed to only attributed by birth (Porter 2009, 215), genealogies, ancestor practices such as the kispu (Tsukimoto 1985), certain rituals of association (Durand 1992, 117; Bonechi 1997, 480) and relationship terminologies (e.g. Sasson 1998, 462) may all be considered evidence of it. Archaeological evidence is perhaps a little less direct, but it is nevertheless persuasive and can be found in burial practices (Peltenburg 2007b); architecture (Dohmann-Pfälzner and Pfälzner 1996); the spatial organisation of a settlement (Porter 2009); and even individual artifacts (Hempelmann n.d. a; n.d. b).

Much of the data for some form of kinship, however, is interpreted as creating and perpetuating various kinds of ancestor systems (Peltenburg 1999; Porter 2000; 2002a; Schwartz 2007). There is, of course, the possibility that once having discovered ancestors we are inclined to see them everywhere (Whitley 2002), but the written evidence does support such claims made of burial practices. The relationship between ancestor traditions and political systems is not straightforward, however. Ancestors can be deployed to do different things in different ways at different times. Kinship systems and ancestor practices do not even have to work in tandem, and it is possible that ancestor practices exist without functioning kinship systems as relict of earlier practices that have since disappeared, leaving only a rhetoric of legitimation behind. Kinship rules may work to defi ne who has membership of a network of living relations while the practices that create and perpetuate ancestors, ranging from burial customs to commemorative rituals, may have nothing to do with group membership at all but work to perpetuate an ideal vision of society or implement a socio-civic code of moral authority (Porter 2002a).

In broadest terms, kin relations are “potentially boundless”

(Holy 1996, 40) and can be used to construct inclusionary societies where linkages are made between groups that might sometimes be far distant in time and space, and exclusionary societies where membership of the group is restricted through a narrow conception of kin relations (Porter 2002b). Kinship, moreover, may be used to create and substantiate differentiation within a kin-based system where members of one lineage are privileged over others (usually that closest to the founding ancestor), leading to authoritarian structures of power and/or segregated elites; or it may work to promote corporate political behaviour where social-economic differences are offset by kin connections across hierarchies. Kinship, despite long academic traditions of assumptions otherwise (again, summarised succinctly by Yoffee 2005, 23), implies nothing about political operation. Not all kinship systems are the same, and kinship systems do not in themselves give rise to one form of political organisation and operation or another. Kinship is a set of social rules and resources. The state, on the other hand, is a political structure in which different social confi gurations may pertain.

The equation of kinship structures with a) a particular type of political form or b) pre- or non-state societies, especially when viewed through the lens of ancestor practices, is therefore misleading. Moreover, kinship and a high degree of social stratifi cation are not mutually exclusive, for they may be functional in different arenas of life, so that individuals become embedded in multiple and cross-cutting social networks. This understanding stems from Service (1962) and is one aspect of neo-evolutionary frameworks that has been sadly neglected in archaeological discourse (although see Fowles 2002). Members of a single kin group may occupy different levels of a social hierarchy. A grouping based on socio-economic position may include members of multiple kin groups, and which set of allegiances is invoked will depend on the situation at hand.

Nevertheless, systems of social standing, kinship and ancestor practices all form a critical part of the third arena in which polities vary, political ethos, by which I mean the way a group conceives of itself and its members’ relationship to it in terms of its character and principles (Porter 2009) and which can be described as, amongst other ways, communitarian, familial, hierarchical, authoritarian, heterarchical, heterogeneous and factional. An ethos, however, does not necessarily correspond to political practice, the fourth element of my framework for thinking about the early polity, for practice is situated in the short-term and may vary considerably over even a generation or may be continually contested (e.g. Fowles 2002, 26), so that what we see in the archaeological record is either an aggregate of that contest, with actual practice and desired practice indistinguishable, or one side of the contest manifest more overtly in material ways. Moreover, a political ethos is established by multiple factors: it is “the political, social

9. From kin to class – and back again! Changing paradigms of the early polity 75

and religious ideologies and practices that produce and/or express and/or perpetuate a group’s self-conception, world views, place within that world, internal organization, and operation” (Porter 2009, 213), whereas political practice comprises just the last two components of that list. It is what people actually do, whatever the structural and ideological content of a society suggest to us it is that they should be doing, or even that they think they are doing. However, the same sorts of terms might well be employed to describe actual political practice as are used for ethos.

More often than not, I suspect, it is ethos that we recover from the material record (and even texts), but we mistake it for practice because of our assumptions about correlations between material categories, such as architectural form and socio-political organisation (see, for example, Porter 2007a, 84; and cf. Smith 2003, 230–231). What is more, ancient representations of ethos must be carefully separated from our own. Large-scale architecture determined to be secular equals a palace; a palace equals at minimum an elite segregated from society and holding a monopoly of power. But heterarchical political practice might be hidden because other authority structures such as ‘elders’ do not necessarily have a dedicated space in which they function, while extensive monumental architecture may convey a more powerful public authority than necessarily exists.

Although arguments might be made for the continued utility of some form of classifi catory system (Fowles 2002, 13–14), my aim here is not to identify a particular kind of political unit or categorise systems of power distribution, but to recognise the multiple sets of social and political networks in which people operate that come together to constitute the nature of any given polity – a close reading of the data in order to produce an “inter-emic” (Campbell 2007, 6) view of existence. I have deliberately refrained from adducing archaeological correlates to any of these descriptive terms because not only do I wish to avoid any implication of reifi cation, but also because recent discussions of materiality (e.g. Miller 2005) indicate that categories of material culture and even individual objects may contain multiple and confl icting situations within themselves, especially “when one chooses to express one’s dissent with a situation through the very institutions [or artefacts (my insertion)] that ultimately recreate it” (Dobres and Robb 2000, 9). One should neither choose which aspect is most relevant nor explain one away in favour of the other; nor, in fact, should one even attempt to resolve the contradiction. Both are equally present and equally valid, and the question concerns only what happens when such contradictions are engaged. A high degree of monumentalism, for example, is seen variously as the product of chiefl y behaviour and an indicator of the state, and it is not that one interpretation is necessarily wrong but that both situations are possible and can occur at the same time. Similarly, a certain form of basket may embody both oppression and resistance (Meskell 2005), so that the point

here is to think about the wide range of possibilities inherent in any given body of material rather than assume that one model should fi t (meaning that another does not).

The four perspectives and accompanying descriptive terms proposed here are only some among many that might be brought to bear as a way of conveying the nature of any particular polity under consideration. Space precludes detailed demonstration of this approach and its outcomes, but a brief summary of some of its implications for one site is possible. At Ebla, religious, administrative and productive functions and activities located in the city lie at the core of a network of related functions and activities located around and outside the city itself, maintained in part by the distribution of members of the ruling family, offi cials and their residences throughout the countryside in smaller towns (Archi 1990, 53; 1992, 25), and in part by royal rituals of pilgrimage (Fronzaroli 1992; 1993; Archi 2005, 90; Porter 2007a). Rather than reading Ebla as the northern archetype of the highly urbanised and centralised state in the 3rd millennium, the archaeological and textual evidence actually presents a decentralised polity in both morphology and practice.

Morphologically the polity of Ebla is composed of a series of contiguous and non-contiguous elements, ranging from the as yet unlocated URU.BAR (translated as ‘suburbs’) in which many of the workers of the palace are thought to live (Archi 1982, 212; Arcari 1988, 128) to more remote dependent villages in its territory and the separate subordinate towns, such as Carchemish, it controlled. Political practice seems equally complex and may be familial in that power is shared across an extended family structure; heterarchical in that there is some indication that parallel systems of authority exist (but cf. Stone 1999 for a different application of heterarchy and hierarchy); and decentralised if the distributed components of the polity are effectively integrated through an equivalent spatial distribution of power as represented, for example, by the residences of princes and other offi cials. Because the archaeological sources come from one component of that spatial system (the mound of Tell Mardikh, which clearly does not comprise the entire city, let alone the polity of Ebla) and the written sources come from an even more restricted place, the so-called ‘palace’, we certainly have a disproportionate view of the power of the palace’s occupant, the ‘king’ and the range of his control (cf. Biga 1995). Yet the texts also give evidence of other bodies that play a part in governance, even if the lack of equivalent representation of their actions and responsibilities obscures their precise role.

Several factors evident in the documentation indicate the complexity of political practice and ethos at Ebla, as well as the moments of disjuncture between them. For example, the repeated use of EN-EN, plural ‘kings’ (Archi 2001) and the near equivalence of operable power between minister and king raise questions about the assumption of autocracy at Ebla, and might be interpreted as power sharing

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between minister as belonging to a subsidiary branch of the house/lineage/family, and the head of that body, however it is constituted, the king. Another possibility is the idea of a corporate dynasty where rule is in some way passed across a plurality of royals (Michalowski 1988, 271) or collateral lines (Biga and Pomponio 1987, 61). The crown is common property within this extended family even though it was held by one member at a time. But the evidence for ancestor practices at Ebla (Archi 1986; 1988a; 1988b; 2002; Porter 2000) indicates that descent is part and parcel of establishing royal lineages rather than intra-generational ties and so perhaps operates to restrict the people who could lay claim to kingship; the distribution of the holdings of junior members of the line outside the city might also serve to limit competition for kingship. At the same time, I take EN.EN to refer to previous kings and to indicate their importance as complicit, active even, in the continued practice of governance. So while there may be an ethos of extended family rule, an intent, actual practices end up far more restrictive in outcome.

Meanwhile, the presence of elders in the background of royal authority raises other questions of political practice, and although Marchesi (2006, 14) claims that the term ABxÁŠ-sù indicates not elders but a class of offi cials, nevertheless the ABxÁŠ-sù are often present at moments of decision making although their views are not represented in the palace sources. This might suggest they have their own authority, if in a different sphere. It may be a situation of heterarchy where two parallel structures of power and/or authority exist side by side, in congruence, or perhaps more likely, in competition. It may be a function of dispersed morphology where ABxÁŠ-sù constituted part of the administration in locations removed from Ebla itself, and who were present in the city when issues concerning the polity as a whole were at stake.

Rather than conclude that because at Ebla there are ‘elders’ (who are in any case a group not necessarily based on kinship at all), this was essentially, or originally, a tribal society (as does Stein 2004, 74, following Klengel 1992, 33), it is necessary to think more complexly about what the co-occurrence of king and elders means for ethos, confi guration, practice and morphology. Equally, rather than assume that because there is a large and elaborate structure located on an acropolis that there is an authoritarian power structure present engendered by socio-economic hierarchies (class), it is necessary to think more complexly about the relationship between material culture and ethos, confi guration, practice and morphology (e.g. Porter 2007b, 102–105). Conversely, considering the evidence in terms of ethos, confi guration, practice and morphology allows us to think more complexly about the early polity. Polity cannot be understood through categorisation of a few components considered indicative of this way of being or that, only through the various ways a multiplicity of components interconnect.

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