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© BDA-Neugebauer
On
top of the food chain. This 7000-year-old
farmer from Austria was
buried with a stone
adze (at his back), a sign that he was
part of the
social elite.
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Occupy the Neolithic by Michael Balter
Even the most democratic societies are rife with social and economic
inequalities, as the current tension between the poorer "99%" and the
richest "1%" vividly illustrates. But just how early in human events
such social hierarchies became entrenched has been a matter of debate. A
new study of skeletons from prehistoric farming communities across
Europe suggests that hereditary inequality was an early feature, going
back more than 7000 years ago.
Most researchers agree that social hierarchies began with the advent of
farming. The earliest known farming communities are found in the Near
East, dating back almost 11,000 years.
Archaeologists have looked for evidence of social stratification in
these societies with mixed results. Some early farming societies show
signs that people played different roles and that some were buried with
greater ritual - shuffling off this mortal coil with a number of
elaborate "grave goods," including pottery and stone tools. However,
there is little evidence that social inequality was hereditary or
rigidly defined.
That seems to have changed sometime after farmers moved into Europe from
the Near East, beginning about 8500 years ago during a period known as
the European Neolithic. One of the best studied farming cultures is the
Linearbandkeramik
(LBK), which arose in what is today Hungary about 7500 years ago and
spread as far as modern-day Paris within 500 years, after which it
appears to have been superseded by other cultures.
Archaeologists have long noted signs that the LBK culture might have
been socially stratified. For example, some, but not all, males were
buried with stone tools called adzes, which were thought to be used to
build the wooden houses in which the farmers lived. But a few
researchers have argued that this stratification took place only
gradually over the 500 year period of the LBK.
To get a better handle on the timing and nature of
these social inequalities, a team led by Alexander Bentley, an
archaeologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom,
analyzed the tooth enamel from more than 300 skeletons from seven LBK
burial sites across Europe. These cemeteries, located in the Czech
Republic, Slovakia, Austria, and France, ranged from 7400 to 6900 years
in age, and covered most of the LBK's territorial spread.
Specifically, the team looked for the element strontium in teeth and
measured the ratio of two isotopes, or types of the atom with slightly
different weights. Strontium atoms enter the body in the water that we
drink and the food we eat, and the ratio of the heavier isotope
strontium-87 to the lighter isotope strontium-86 reflects the kind of
soil and geological formations a person lived on, particularly as a
child, when the tooth enamel was laid down. The strontium isotopes are
increasingly
used by archaeologists to track movements of populations.
Previous studies have shown that the kind of soil favored by European
farmers, lowland sediments known as loess, has a slightly lower
strontium-87/strontium-86 ratio than less fertile areas such as upland
hills made from granite or sandstone. Yet because of Europe's variable
landscape, in which fertile and non-fertile areas can be as close as
several kilometers apart, the team relied more heavily on the degree of
variation of strontium ratios among the skeletons in a burial site than
on their absolute values.
The results of the study, published online today in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
suggest that men who were buried with adzes - thought to be an
indication of higher social status - were more likely to have grown up
on loess soils than men who were buried without adzes. For example,
among 310 burials the team analyzed, 62 featured adzes. But only one of
the 62 skeletons from the adze burials had a strontium ratio in its
teeth typical of a non-loess landscape, whereas all of the others were
consistent with growing up on loess. Moreover, the variation in
strontium ratios between adze skeletons was significantly lower than the
variation between non-adze skeletons, suggesting to Bentley and his
co-workers that the adze skeletons came from one kind of landscape, most
likely loess, while the others came from a variety of other landscapes.
A similarly striking pattern was seen when the team looked at the female
skeletons, which made up 153 of the total 311 individuals analyzed. The
variation in strontium ratios for females was significantly greater
than for males, suggesting that a greater number of females than males
had grown up in non-fertile areas. Moreover, the patterns in the male
and female burials appeared in both earlier and later LBK settlements,
suggesting that
the patterns of social inequality were established from the beginning of the LBK period and did not develop gradually over time.
The team came to two main conclusions: First, some males had greater
access to fertile soils than others, probably because they were the sons
of farmers who had inherited access to the best land. And second, LBK
societies were "patrilocal," meaning that males tended to stay put in
one place while females moved in from other areas to mate with them. A
number of recent genetic studies have shown
similar patterns among early European farmers.
"The signatures from these skeletons reinforce other indications of
male-dominated descent and even land inheritance," Bentley says, adding
that such social inequalities "only grew in extent and scale" over the
course of history.
Joachim Burger, an anthropologist at the University of Mainz in Germany,
says the authors are on firm ground: "The amount of data is huge and
the interpretations are straightforward." He adds that the new data,
particularly the differences seen between men and women, are "absolutely
coherent" with the pattern seen in more recent farming societies, up to
the present day.
| Comment: So it would seem these very concepts are also embedded within the English language which begins with an etymological root of ad- followed by ag- where the tool and the land are combined and then becoming many things taken for granted. To learn more about etymology, visit my other blog. |
