Characteristics of Ancient Civilizations

Characteristics of Ancient Civilizations

ByK. Kris Hirst,About.com Guide

Definition:

Archaeologists recognize that in some cases, in some places, at some times, simple societies for one reason and another morph into more and more complex societies, and some become civilizations.

The reasons for this are quite controversial, but the characteristics of complexity recognized in ancient civilizations are pretty much agreed upon:

Ranking and SocialInequality

Different persons within a society have different quantities or qualities of power, rights and responsibilities.

Different tasks are assigned to specific people, called craft specialization: the assignment of specific tasks to specific people or subsets of people in a community. Allows a community to get large projects completed—wars fought, pyramids built—and yet still get the day-to-day operations of the community done as well.

How Does Craft Specialization Develop?

Archaeologists generally believe that hunter-gatherer societies were/are primarily egalitarian, in that most everyone did most everything. Even though a select portion of the community group goes out to do the hunting for the whole (i.e., hunting specialists), when they return, they pass the knowledge on, so that everyone in the community understands how to hunt. Should something happen to the hunters, unless the hunting process is understood by everyone, the community starves. In this way, knowledge is shared by everyone in the community and no one is indispensable.

But, as a society grows in population and complexity, at some point certain kinds of tasks became overly time-consuming, and, theoretically anyway, someone who is particularly skilled at a task gets selected to do that task for his or her family group, clan, or community. Someone who is good at making a specific item in some process unknown to others dedicates their time to the production of that item.

Sometimes specialization leads to status changes.

Why is Craft Specialization a "Keystone" to Complexity?

Craft specialization is considered by archaeologists to be the “keystone” to societal complexity.

1.  First, someone who spends their time making pots may not be able to spend time producing food for her family. Everybody needs pots, and at the same time the potter must eat; perhaps a system of barter becomes necessary to make it possible for the craft specialist to continue.

2.  Secondly, specialized information must be passed on in some way, and generally protected. Specialized information requires an educational process of some kind, whether the process is simple apprenticeships or more formal schools.

3.  Finally, since not everyone does exactly the same work or has the same lifeways, ranking or class systems might develop out of such a situation. Specialists may become of higher rank or lower rank to the rest of the population; specialists may even become society leaders.

Archaeologically, evidence of craft specialists is suggested by patterning—by the presence of differential concentrations of certain types of artifacts in certain sections of communities. For example, in a given community, the archaeological ruins of the residence or workshop of a shell tool specialist might contain most of the broken and worked shell fragments found in the whole village. Other houses in the village might have only one or two complete shell tools.

Identification of the work of craft specialists is sometimes suggested by archaeologists from a perceived similarity in a certain class of artifacts. So, if ceramic vessels found in a community are pretty much the same size, with the same or similar decorations or design details, that may be evidence that they were all made by the same small number of individuals—craft specialists.

Elman Service (Primitive Social Organization, 1962) and Morton Fried (Evolution of Political Societies, 1967) argued that there are two ways in which ranking of people in a society is arrived at: achieved and ascribed status.

Achieved status results from being a warrior, artisan, shaman, or other useful profession or talent.

Ascribed status (inherited from a parent or other relative) is based on kinship, which as a form of social organization ties the status of an individual within a group to descent, such as dynastic kings or hereditary rulers.

Archaeologically, in egalitarian societies, goods and services are spread relatively evenly among the population. High-ranking individuals in a community can be identified archaeologically by studying human burials, where differences in grave contents, the health of an individual or his or her diet can be examined.

Ranking can also be established by the difference sizes of houses, the locations within a community, or the distribution of luxury or status items within a community.

Increasing sedentism: Sedentism ( the process of settling down to live in groups in specific places for periods of timeis partially but not entirely related to how a group gets required resources--food and stone for tools and wood for housing and fires.

For example, hunter gatherers, by and large, were primarily mobile, moving from resource to resource, following herds of animals (e.g. bison/reindeer) or moving with normal seasonal climatic changes.

By contrast, farmers tended to stay close to their fields for at least part of the year.

To state it simply, hunter-gatherers hunt game and collect plant foods (called foraging) rather than grow or tend crops. Hunter gatherers is the term used by anthropologists to describe a specific kind of lifestyle, that of all human beings until the invention of agriculture about 8000 years ago. Anthropologists have traditionally defined hunter-gatherers as human populations that live in small groups and that move around a lot, following the seasonal cycle of plants and animals.

Recent studies have identified the importance of fish and maritime resources as a component of some coastal-based hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers who rely on marine resources are known as hunter-gatherer-fishers.

Even after agriculture became a major source of food, hunting and gathering of wild plants remained a large component of people's diets. People who tend stands of natural plants are called horticulturalists; those who farm are agriculturalists.

Hunter-gatherers domesticated dogs, maize, type(s) of millet and wheat. Which came first, domesticated crop or domesticated farmer?

Since the 1970s, however, anthropologists and archaeologists realized that many hunter-gatherers groups around the world did not fit the rigid stereotype into which they were put. For these societies, recognized in many parts of the world, anthropologists use the term “Complex Hunter-Gatherers”. In North America, the most well-known example are the Northwest Coast groups on the North American continent.

Complex hunter-gatherers (aka affluent foragers) have a subsistence, economic and social organization far more “complex” and interdependent than generalized hunter-gatherers.

Here are some of the differences:

·  Mobility: Complex hunter-gatherers live in the same place for most of the year, or even for longer periods, in contrast to generalized hunter-gatherers who stay in one place for shorter periods and move around a lot.

·  Economy: Complex hunter-gatherers subsistence involves a large amount of food storage, whereas simple hunter-gatherers usually consume their food as soon as they harvest it.

·  Households: Complex hunter-gatherers don’t live in small and mobile camps, but in long-term, organized households and villages. These are also clearly visible archaeologically. On the Northwest Coast, households were shared by 30 to 100 people.

·  Resources: Complex hunter-gatherers do not harvest only what is available around them, they focus on gathering specific and very productive food products and combining them with other, secondary resources. For example, in the Northwest Coast subsistence was based on salmon, but also other fish and mollusks and in smaller amounts on the forest products. Furthermore, salmon processing through desiccation involved the work of many people at the same time.

·  Technology: Both generalized and complex hunter-gatherers tend to have sophisticated tools. Complex hunter-gatherers don’t need to have light and portable objects, therefore they can invest more energy in larger and specialized tools to fish, hunt, harvest. Northwest Coast populations, for example, constructed large boats and canoes, nets, spears and harpoons, carving tools and desiccation devices.

·  Population: In North America, complex hunter-gatherers had larger populations than small size agricultural villages. Northwest Coast had among the highest population rate of North America. Villages size spanned between 100 and more than 2000 people.

·  Social hierarchy: complex hunter-gatherers had social hierarchies, and even inherited leadership. These positions included prestige, social status, and sometimes power. Northwest Coast populations had two social classes: slaves and free people. Free people were divided into chiefs and elite, a lower noble group, and commoners, who were free people with no titles and therefore with no access to leadership positions. Slaves were mostly war captives. Gender was also an important social category. Noble women had often high rank status. Finally, social status was expressed through material and immaterial elements, such as luxury goods, jewels, rich textiles, but also feasts and ceremonies.

·  trade or exchange networks, leading to the presence of luxury and exotic goods.

Metallurgy: when used by archaeologists, is the study of the ancient processes of producing objects made of metal, including quarrying, mine construction, and smelting.

The earliest form of metallurgy was hammering copper. Native copper was first used by Old World Neolithic people beginning about the 8th millennium BC; and by New World in South American cultures beginning between 3600 and 1500 BC.

The next step, smelting (again of copper) appeared at Catal Hoyuk, in Turkey, about 6000 BC; lead appears to have been added to the metal working about this same time. Mining of native materials began about 5000 BC. The earliest gold so far is from Varna in Bulgaria, about the same time. The earliest goldworking in the Americas to date is from the Jiskairumoko site of Peru, 3600 and 1500 BC.

·  control of food as in agriculture or pastoralism

The history of agriculture begins in the ancient Near East and Southwest Asia, about 10,000 years ago, but it has its roots in the climatic changes at the tail end of the Upper Paleolithic, called the Epipaleolithic, about 10,000 years earlier.

History of Agriculture Timeline

·  Last Glacial Maximum ca 18,000 BC

·  Early Epipaleolithic 18,000-12,000 BC

·  Late Epipaleolithic 12,000-9,600 BC

·  Younger Dryas 10,800-9,600 BC

·  Early Aceramic Neolithic 9,600-8,000 BC

·  Late Aceramic Neolithic 8,000-6,900 BC

The history of agriculture is closely tied to climate changes, or so it certainly seems from the archaeological and environmental evidence. After the Last Glacial Maximum (ca 18,000 BC ) the northern hemisphere of the planet began a slow warming trend. The glaciers retreated northward, and forested areas began to develop where tundra had been.

By the beginning of the Late Epipaleolithic, or Mesolithic, (12,000-9,600 BC) people moved northward, and lived in larger, more sedentary communities. The large-bodied mammals humans had survived on for thousands of years had disappeared, and now the people broadened their resource base, hunting small game such as gazelle, deer and rabbit, and gathering seeds from wild stands of wheat and barley, and collecting legumes and acorns. But, about 10,800 BC, the Younger Dryas period (lasted until 9,600 BC) brought an abrupt and brutal cold turn, and the glaciers returned to Europe, and the forested areas shrank or disappeared.

After the cold lifted, the climate rebounded quickly. People settled into large communities and developed complex social organizations, particularly in the Levant, where the Natufian period was established. Natufian people lived in year-round established communities and developed extensive trade systems to facilitate the movement of black basalt for ground stone tools, obsidian for chipped stone tools, and seashells for personal decoration. The first stone built structures were built in the Zagros Mountains, where people collected seeds from wild cereals and captured wild sheep. The Aceramic Neolithic period (Early Aceramic Neolithic 9,600-8,000 BC; Late Aceramic Neolithic 8,000-6,900 BC) saw the gradual intensification of the collecting of wild cereals, and by 8000 BC, fully domesticated versions of einkorn wheat, barley and chickpeas, and sheep, goat, cattle and pig were in use within the hilly flanks of the Zagros Mountains, and spread outward from there over the next thousand years.

Scholars debate why farming, a labor-intensive way of living compared to hunting and gathering, was invented. It could be that the warming weather created a "baby boom" that needed to be fed; it could be that domesticating animals and plants was seen as a more reliable food source than hunting and gathering could promise. For whatever reason, by 8,000 BC, the die was cast, and human kind had turned towards agriculture.

The domestication of plants is one of the first steps in moving towards a full-fledged agricultural economy, although the process is by no means a one-directional movement. A plant is said to be domesticated when its native characteristics are altered such that it cannot grow and reproduce without human intervention. Domestication is thought to be the result of the development of a symbiotic relationship between the plants and humans, called co-evolution, because plants and human behaviors evolve to suit one another. In the simplest form of co-evolution, a human harvests a given plant selectively, based on the preferred characteristics, such as the largest fruits, and uses the seeds from the largest fruits to plant the next year.

The following table is compiled from a variety of sources, and detailed descriptions of the domesticates will be added to as I get to them. Thanks again to Ron Hicks at Ball State University for his suggestions and information.

Plant Domestication

Plant / Where Domesticated / Date
Fig trees / Near East / 9000 BC
Rice / East Asia / 9000 BC
Barley / Near East / 8500 BC
Einkorn wheat / Near East / 8500 BC
Emmer wheat / Near East / 8500 BC
Chickpea / Anatolia / 8500 BC
Bottle gourd / Asia / 8000 BC
Potatoes / Andes Mountains / 8000 BC
Squash (Cucurbita pepo) / Central America / 8000 BC
Maize / Central America / 7000 BC
Broomcorn millet / East Asia / 6000 BC
Bread wheat / Near East / 6000 BC
Manioc/Cassava / South America / 6000 BC
Avocado / Central America / 5000 BC
Cotton / Southwest Asia / 5000 BC
Bananas / Island Southeast Asia / 5000 BC
Chili peppers / South America / 4000 BC
Amaranth / Central America / 4000 BC
Watermelon / Near East / 4000 BC
Olives / Near East / 4000 BC
Cotton / Peru / 4000 BC
Pomegranate / Iran / 3500 BC
Hemp / East Asia / 3500 BC
Cotton / Mesoamerica / 3000 BC
Coca / South America / 3000 BC
Squash (Cucurbita pepo ovifera ) / North America / 3000 BC
Sunflower / Central America / 2600 BC
Sweet Potato / Peru / 2500 BC
Pearl millet / Africa / 2500 BC
Marsh elder (Iva annua) / North America / 2400 BC
Sorghum / Africa / 2000 BC
Sunflower / North America / 2000 BC
Chocolate / Mexico / 1600 BC
Chenopodium / North America / 1500 BC
Coconut / Southeast Asia / 1500 BC
Eggplant / Asia / 1st century BC
Vanilla / Central America / 14th century AD

Animal domestication is what scholars call the process of developing the mutually useful relationship between animals and humans. Over the past 12,000 years, humans have learned to control their access to food and other necessities of life by changing the behaviors and natures of wild animals. All of the animals that we use today, such as dogs, cats, cattle, sheep, camels, geese, horses, and pigs, started out as wild animals but were changed over the centuries and millennia into tamer, quieter animals. Some of the ways people benefit from a domesticated animal include keeping cattle in pens for access to milk and meat and for pulling plows; training dogs to be guardians and companions; teaching horses to adapt to the plow or take a rider; and changing the lean, nasty wild boar into a fat, friendly farm animal.