Consumption is the third segment of an economic network that begins with production and is mediated by distribution or circulation. In general, consumption practices have been less intensively investigated than the other aspects of economic behavior. To evaluate consumption, archaeologists require some sampling of houses or other kinds of comparable and meaningful archaeological units. More than 25 years ago, scholars such as Paul S. Martin in the American Southwest and Kent V. Flannery in Oaxaca, Mexico, conducted excavations of large numbers of contemporaneous houses in single regions. Yet such sets of data ideal for the examination of consumption remain relatively rare in the discipline today. In addition, like many aspects of economic archaeology, the study of consumption practices depends on and requires an examination of relational patterns in the archaeological record, or how certain kinds of artifacts were distributed across specific features. Again, such a relational approach to the record is only beginning to become ‘normal science’, a conceptual transition that became possible, thanks to the rapidly expanding capabilities of computerized recording, data storage, and analysis over recent decades.
Consumption practices are valuable for economically oriented archaeologists to examine and understand, as they provide a window into access patterns, or which items (within the range of goods available) do specific peoples or groups have the ability to procure and in what quantities. The outcome of such relational patterns for certain goods provides a key underpinning for the determination of socioeconomic stratification in the archaeological record (and so in the past). In other words, if a series of household units at a particular site are compared, it is important to assess whether all households had access to the same goods or whether select domestic units had more exclusive abilities to procure certain items, in particular those of high value, but also staple goods may be at the heart of basic subsistence.
Marked disparities in access to portable wealth (usually objects that are highly crafted, exotic, or rare) as well as other goods provide an indicator for assessing the degree of socioeconomic stratification or inequality at a particular site or across a specific social grouping. Such empirical assessments are significant, as it is clear that stratification systems are highly variable over space and time. Recognized variation in the manner of socioeconomic stratification also has been found not simply to be a simple consequence of (although related to) the level of sociopolitical complexity. In some societal settings, where people lived (the elaboration of their residences) and how they were buried at death served as the main means by which some people or groups distinguished themselves from others, while in other places relative access to certain movable goods was a prime manifestation of socioeconomic stratification. The nature and degree of coincidence between these aspects of stratification also vary to different degrees from one time and place to others.
World History
