Glossary

Personhood The recognition of status as a person. social change Change in the nature, the social institutions, the social behavior or the social relations of a society, community of people, or other social structures. social structure Refers to entities or groups in definite relation to each other, to relatively enduring patterns of behavior and relationship within social systems, or to social institutions and norms becoming embedded into social systems in such a way that they shape the behavior of actors within those social systems.

Most archaeology aims to understand the remains of the past by connecting them to the people and societies that generated them, to construct accounts of past societies and the changes they underwent. Even if it is not explicitly acknowledged, this project of a social archaeology requires a body of social theory. This can be defined as a tool kit of concepts that define the components of human society and how they interact (a social ontology), and of concepts that define how knowledge of past society is to be achieved (epistemology). Social theory often involves models of how societies work and has long been divided into different schools of thought: for example, Marxist, functionalist, structuralist.

Building such social theory became a prominent focus of debate from the 1970s in Anglo-American archaeology. Many were keen to make a case for archaeology being a respectable branch of anthropology, a social science capable of developing sound knowledge of the past that was explanatory rather than descriptive - explaining the emergence of state societies, for example, rather than describing in historical narrative the features of the first civilizations. Processual Archaeology in the United States became explicitly concerned with the character of social process among structured human behaviors adapting to the natural environment. It adopted an epistemology that modeled social science on the natural sciences, a program initiated by the sociologist Comte in the nineteenth century.

This effort to build social theory in archaeology accompanied a considerable growth in the numbers of archaeologists researching in universities, investment in tertiary education and its infrastructures, such as state sponsorship for research, and an expansion of academic publishing. By the 1980s social and cultural theory was a prominent part of academic debate generally, with ideas hotly contested about the nature of cultural identity or the social force of economic expediency, for example. Most academic curricula in archaeology by the 1990s came to include a core component dealing with social theory, and the theoretical foundations of archaeological research into past societies have come to be a critical component of research design, funding applications and awards.

There is now a healthy diversity of standpoints regarding social ontology and epistemology and by no means an accepted orthodoxy of social theory in archaeology. There are also several regional traditions, with, for example, a well-developed body of Marxian theory in Hispanic archaeology (Spain and the Americas). Before outlining general features, it should be pointed out that the relative lack of debate in archaeology about social theory before the 1970s should not be taken to indicate that archaeology did without such theory until then. There is a long intellectual genealogy to every feature of current debate that goes back to the eighteenth century and earlier. Social theory is, after all, concerned with understanding the character of social and political order, complexity, diversity and change, economic and cultural values and exchanges - all classic concerns of political philosophy and political economy since the Enlightenment. While much contemporary debate around social theory in archaeology may be about newly publicized, and so intellectually fashionable, perspectives, it is also not difficult to see that debate as the legacy of many of the issues raised with the origins of modern sociology in the nineteenth century. Marx, Durkheim, and Weber are rightly cited for their sophisticated treatment of themes still at the heart of social theory: evolutionary change and the shape of history, the ordered structure of society, social norms and their relation to the individual, the relation of modernity to ‘traditional’ society, the rationality of human practice, the force of cultural and economic values.

The archaeologist Gordon Childe can be appropriately mentioned here as one who openly acknowledged the importance of such general discussion, though he did not call it social theory. From the 1920s Childe used a modified form of Marxian social evolutionary thought, tied to a concept of culture that has its origins in German romanticism as framework, for his archaeological accounts of European prehistory and the ancient empires of the Near East. Soviet archaeologists, again from the 1920s, have also been seen as early exponents of an archaeology that was explicitly informed by social theory - Marxist historical materialism (see Historical Materialist Approaches; Identity and Power; Marxist Archaeology).

After this call for recognition of the long history of social theory in archaeology, here follows a checklist of themes and key concepts. The bibliography will readily supply many examples of each.

Society and culture. While culture may be restricted in its reference to values, attitudes, and ways of life upheld by a community, and society taken to refer to the organization of such groups, a radical distinction between the two concepts is now rarely upheld, and social theory in archaeology is often the same as cultural theory.

Social organization and social order. This is one of the classic concerns of archaeologists - the structure of past societies. Typically, societies are conceived as being organized internally according to horizontal and vertical divisions. Class and rank divide a society horizontally; ethnicity, for example, divides vertically. Such divisions may be quite visible archaeologically, in, for example, the distribution of wealth within a community, or in the way social groups symbolize their identity using artifacts of different style.

The attempt to understand social variability may involve reference to demography - the shape of a population in terms of age, mortality, health, for example. There may be spatial variability - a rich city-state on a fertile plain of farming villages, differences that require a cultural geography of city versus countryside, city-dwellers and peasants, for example. The borders of a society or community may be an issue - intergroup relations are, or course, connected with exchange and interpolity relationships such as imperialism.

Is the variability within a society an ordered system of inter-functioning parts? Society has often been so conceived as a unified whole, or at least aspiring to such a state. Such systems thinking, the mainstay of Processual archaeology from the 1960s, has been augmented with sophisticated understanding of societies as complex networks that display emergent structure - concatenations of individual behaviors out of which emerges social structure. Other approaches to social order inspired by Marxism emphasize contradictions within social organization.

What maintains such social variability? Is it the force of tradition and of social norms? This is the question of social structure - why do people keep on doing what they do? People are socialized through childhood into ways of life, and conformity is maintained through means such as systems of reward, threats of exclusion and violence, as well as the sheer weight of expectation and social institutions. Power is a key variable here. Power over others, and also the power to act in certain ways to realize one’s goals or desires. This is an expanded notion of social power that runs counter to common sense which usually associates power with the ability to command others. Social theory has often developed such counter-intuitive concepts.

So while individual people are born and socialized into social systems, the ordering of those very systems depends upon the collusion of individuals - society is maintained and only exists through the acts of individuals. While notions of public and private may be involved, this relationship between structure and individual is captured in the concept of agency which became current in archaeology in the 1980s. This concept has been a way of reintroducing the individual into archaeology. What capacity do people have to act as individuals, furthering their own ends? Can this be summarized under a notion of rational behavior, people, perhaps, tending to maximize benefit to themselves? Agency also implies a duality of structure - that society is both the medium and outcome of individual practices.

A contrast is often drawn here between behavior, as an expression of a social norm, and practice, as action informed by meaning, performed by agents who think about themselves and their world. This distinction was crucial in the development of postprocessual or interpretive archaeology in the 1980s. Among other things, it has led to considerable work on how people do things or make and use communicated messages and meaning - about the ways people think and about the way their world is structured and categorized (for example, through the making of pottery or the building of a megalithic monument). This connects symbolism and communication with social order and power. It also brings in many more questions of identity, with people frequently communicating through the horizontal and vertical divisions in a society. Key concepts here are gender and ethnicity. Archaeologists are now beginning to explore personhood - how people become persons through actions upon themselves and others, dressing up or down, modifying their bodies and the environments that make them who they are.

This interest in communication and agency has involved an expansion of the archaeological understanding of technology and artifacts from a traditional focus on materials and techniques to an exploration of making as design, with archaeology taking as its subject the materiality of society - the social fabric - from manufacture to discard and decay. Material Culture Studies is now a well-established subdiscipline operating with a principle that making things makes people.

Power is clearly connected with political economy - the distribution of wealth and power through the organization of production, systems of value, the exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods. An influential collection of archaeological case studies in the 1980s, edited by the processualists Colin Renfrew and John Cherry and published by Cambridge University Press, was entitled Ranking, Resource and Exchange - a tripartite summary of a whole social theory.

Social complexity. Why do some societies become more differentiated internally than others - with more horizontal and vertical divisions? This emergence of social complexity is frequently, in history, associated with the state, involving class structures and disparities in the distribution of goods - wealth, monopolies of legal force, and violence, institutions such as organized religion, and manifestations in material culture such as the city. The main approach to such a question of social change is still an evolutionary one. The idea is that the mechanisms of biological evolution offer a way of understanding social change such as the emergence of the state in the wake of agriculture. Do societies adapt to environments like biological species? Selective advantage is certainly a powerful principle that can govern the design of a social institution as well as an organism.

We are here invoking the question of the boundaries of the ‘human’ and the ‘social’. Much social archaeology since the 1960s has focused on social interactions with the natural environment - how a society feeds itself and uses material resources, local and distant, through trade and exchange, and how variability in environment may be a factor in social change. The tendency now is to discount simple causes and to blur a radical distinction between the natural and the human. Just as people are intimately associated with their goods, so too they are intimately connected with other species and the environment - through economic, religious, and communicative practices. Archaeologists, for example, are less inclined now to explain agriculture through environmental factors or economic advantage, but rather locate farming within complex cultural ecologies, which have people thinking of other species in new ways in settled architectures that speak of new cosmological understanding.

See also: Engendered Archaeology; Evolutionary Archaeology; Historical Materialist Approaches; Identity and Power; Individual, Archaeology of in Prehistory; Marxist Archaeology; Postprocessual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology; Social Inequality, Development of.