Classically, archaeologists have used different aspects of the identities of people and groups as focal perspectives for different analyses, even if they understand identity to be fluid, actively constructed, and multiscalar. Thus, there is a substantial archaeological literature on categorical aspects of identity. These can be viewed as framed either at the level of the group (e. g., ethnicity, class, race) or of the individual (status and role, sex, and age). Each of the major approaches to identity has its own problems, its own history within archaeology, and often, specific forms of evidence routinely used. In the history of archaeology, there is a general trend from consideration of the regional linguistic-cultural group (understood as ethnicity) toward more concern with persons (and their gender, sexuality, and age). But already in the earliest scientific archaeology, status and role identities at the level of the person were part of models, and contemporary archaeology continues to be concerned with group identification.
Ethnicity, Language, and Culture
Nineteenth - and early twentieth-century archaeology took regional distributions of artifacts as the beginning point to define localized patterns of material culture. These ‘cultures’ were seen as the material expression of unified groups of people, who shared history, values, and identity. In nineteenth-century archaeology, taking place within developing nationstates, each culture was presumed to have also had a singular, authentic language of its own. As nationstates consolidated and began to confront internal segmentation, archaeological culture-linguistic groups were often conceived of as analogues of localized identity groups, ethnicities, that the modern nation-states were attempting to absorb. Localized factional identity thus could be represented simultaneously as authentic, and as obsolete. Archaeology was actively employed to relate modern factions within nation-states to specific pasts. Factions within nation-states embraced these localized vestiges of the past in the same way as nations themselves did, if for different reasons. Archaeologists often contributed to the identification of spatial distributions of stylistically distinctive materials as evidence of ancestors of contemporary ethnic groups through their desire to be able to interpret the archaeological materials in terms of actual living culture.
This equivocal history of association of style of material culture with language and ‘ethnic’ identity has continued to create problems for archaeology. On the one hand, because the material patterns were seen as reflecting an existing essential identity, it blocked consideration of the active use of material culture to create, reinforce, and recreate identities. By associating material culture identities with singular languages, it blocked research on the distinct ways that material culture works in identification, which may not always or even usually be analogous to the ways that language works. But at the same time, ethnicity provided a vocabulary to use to call out the distribution of distinctive material culture across the landscape. It allowed archaeologists to focus on how boundaries were created through differences in material culture, and how certain intimate practices, such as those of dress and foodways, were particularly important in the recreation of identity over time.
Today, distributions of similar material culture are not assumed to represent evidence of identities on their own. Rather, bounded distributions of similar materials are taken as problems to be interpreted. In some instances, such as colonial Uruk settlements in Mesopotamia, or the neighborhoods of people from Oaxaca that persisted as enclaves for centuries in the great Mexican city, Teotihuacan, assemblages of distinctive material culture within communities with different patterns can be believably interpreted as evidence of ethnically distinctive groups. In these cases, the kinds of practices maintained as distinctive (especially religion and foodways) are particularly appropriate means for a group of people to maintain their differences from a larger, distinct, population. In the case of Teotihuacan, as these differences persist they remain more stable than the culture of the home region, eventually appearing archaic in comparison with contemporary Oaxaca. Similar situations can be amply documented in historic archaeology of European colonial enclaves, of Chinese communities overseas, or of communities of people of African descent.
In the latter case, ethnogenesis and reproduction of ethnic identities routinely employed material culture of the dominant European culture in distinctive ways, demonstrating that our search for such factional identities within complex societies needs to observe not just the obvious stylistic distributions but more subtle differences in practices that might be taking place. So, for example, imported majolica pottery used in colonial Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador in the sixteenth century involved selection of bowl forms that were similar to those previously made of local materials.
Ethnoarchaeological studies of the production and use of painted pottery in Amazonian Ecuador offer another example of the need for attention to subtler distinctions in order to see ethnic identities, while reminding us that these factional identities may be heterogeneous linguistically and historically. Here, within a single community, people from two different political factions produced vessels with structures of exterior ornamentation that were consistently different, even if the member of the political faction spoke a language different from the majority of the faction, and had learned to paint pottery in a different political and social setting. What this ethnoarchaeological work underlines is that identification is a process in which people use material culture, not an essence reflected or expressed in it. This work also underlines the fact that even in societies without institutionalized distinctions of social status, identity is political.
Status and Role
Early archaeologists complemented their interpretation of localized distributions of artifacts as cultures with identification of distinctions in material culture within these homogeneous culture areas. Here, the main axis of distinction was understood to correspond to differential social status, prestige, wealth, rank, or class (or all of these at once). Drawing on anthropological studies of the mid-twentieth century, processual archaeologists systematized approaches to these within-group identities. Drawing on the theoretical work of Elman Service, archaeologists assumed that as societies progressed from egalitarian bands (in which no permanent social distinctions other than gender were found) to tribes, chiefdoms, and states, distinctive individual or group identities would develop. In bands, persons were understood to temporarily occupy roles (such as leader of a hunt), but these were not usually treated as archaeologically perceptible identities. In tribes, differences in achieved rank were expected, such that for every person who achieved distinction (in skill, authority, or knowledge) there would be a position of differential status. In chiefdoms, in addition to achieved rank, ascribed rank was understood to be institutionalized, so that shared, higher social status could be perpetuated from generation to generation. In both of these situations, archaeologists allowed for the potential to identify rank statuses held by individuals through their use of distinctive symbolic ‘status badges’, especially in burials. These individualized status markers might be shared among members of an institutionalized ranked group. In state-level societies, institutionalized classes occupied distinctive prestige or wealth strata. These distinctions were perceptible not only in the individualized contexts of burials, but also in the shared residential contexts where members of one social stratum lived. Materially, these indicators of identity linked individuals to groups, which in the archaeology of complex societies and in historical archaeology are generally understood as social classes.
Class and Wealth
Classes are a defining feature of complex societies, states, and the modern world. In modern social sciences, classes are sometimes treated as objective groupings of people of the same relative social standing, based on things such as level of education, income, or kind of employment. But the original selection of criteria actually stems from the kind of class distinctions social scientists recognize. For example, in countries like Great Britain, where there was a history of inherited noble titles, these inherited statuses still define different classes even though the members of the different classes (royalty, nobility, and commoners) may overlap in wealth and education, and even though employment categories crosscut these inherited classes. What distinguishes classes of all kinds is that they involve ranking of groups of people, so that one class is of higher wealth, prestige, or status than another.
Archaeologically, then, class distinctions involve shared identities and ranking. Where a contemporary social scientist can use interviews and histories to establish identification and ranking, archaeologists must use material proxies. Archaeologists define classes based on materially observable criteria.
Household wealth has been one of the easiest potential bases to define for class distinctions in archaeological settings. Nonetheless, there has been substantial debate about how to measure household wealth. Some approaches convert everything into labor equivalents, reasoning that the consumption of human effort is independent of any social conventions of value. Experimental archaeology can provide a basis to project how much work was involved in building such things as the residences of Maya nobles, or the tombs of Egyptian workers, nobles, and rulers. Assessing the labor value of movable objects can be more complex. Distance from the sources of raw materials or of production of finished products contributes to the expense involved in obtaining movable objects, so such exotics or products of long-distance exchange may receive special attention in assessing household wealth. Within any category of things, the amount of work involved may vary. ‘Production-step measures’ are a rough way to assess the different values of objects produced with more steps (more work) or fewer steps (less work, and thus less expense or value). Using ethnographic and historic analogies, archaeologists have suggested that the least useful way of stratifying groups in the past using movable objects is sheer numbers of things; this is much more strongly tied to such things as group population size, longevity of occupation, and approaches to disposal of materials.
While archaeologists can produce reasonable arguments for the existence of different classes based on household wealth, these differences may crosscut more socially significant class identities, just as they do in many present-day societies. So another approach to class differences in archaeology has been to examine the symbolism of group status in things such as architectural form, decoration of artifacts, location of housing within settlements, and use of written or graphic symbols. From this perspective, it is not just important that some people’s houses took more labor to construct: they may be made of materials that distinguish them, they may follow models of higher status, and they may be embellished with elements that themselves are symbolic of social orders. This is as important an approach in historical archaeology as it is in the archaeology of states in Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the Classical Mediterranean. Unlike household wealth, which actually creates a continuous scale of distribution of groups, these symbolic approaches lend themselves to identifying discrete strata or parallel segments within urban societies, like Indian castes or Aztec calpulli.
When written documents are available, as they are in historical archaeology and in many complex societies, the material and visual symbols may be matched to literary terms that designate different class strata. While class is above all an identity of a group, class membership may be an important aspect of the identity of an individual as well. Documentary sources can offer critical indications of the class identity of individuals, whether these come in the form of tomb inscriptions or historical documents such as wills or legal cases.
Sex, Gender, and Age
Gender has been another focus of archaeological research on identity that links individuals and groups. Gender identities are sometimes treated as simple analogs of biological sex. Mortuary and bioarchaeological studies identify adult males and females from specific traits, and then the nonbiological aspects of burials may be used to project aspects of gender identities. For example, the inclusion of certain kinds of pins in burials of females in British and European archaeological sites is taken as one of the material markers of female identity, contrasting with other kinds of clothing fasteners found with male burials. An emphasis on the display of gender differences in costume has thus been a second material route adopted by archaeologists attempting to discern gender identities. Representation of dichotomous patterns of dress in visual media provides a third way to see categorical gender identities.
These approaches have been subject to considerable debate, critique, and refinement within archaeology, starting with the realization that sex itself is not really dichotomous, even if we do not consider the possible presence of biologically intersexed persons in a population. Children cannot be assigned to biological groupings on the same bases as adults, so there is always a third term in mortuary analyses, persons who may be assigned to the same gender identity as adults based on shared material patterns, or who may form a distinctive group based on age. Even within a group of adults assigned to the same sexed category, age distinctions may be relevant. In a study of burials from the central Mexican site of Tlatilco, it was noted that older males and females shared characteristics of burial treatment, as did younger adult males with younger adult females. Relatively
Little material culture linked the older and younger adults of the same sex. Considerations like these shift attention away from presumed identity groups symbolized by use of certain objects, to the way material culture was used in processes of identification.
Race
Like gender, race has been treated as an essentialized identity inherent in biology. So too, as with gender, race has been subject to serious reconsideration by archaeologists, especially those involved in the study of the African diaspora and the history of European colonization. A simple forensic model takes race as something inherent in national origins that concentrated certain variants of physical traits in different world areas. A notable example of the pitfalls of this approach to race was the African Burial Ground Project in New York City, where the initial archaeological team failed to notice signs of distinction within the biological population that were important evidence of differences in identity among these people of African descent. Archaeologists now approach race as a historical identity created with reference to biology but not given in biology, and examine material evidence for distinctions of identity among people with similar biological characteristics. Archaeologists examine how specific practices, including religion, healing, and personal adornment, were reproduced within racially identified or identifying groups. With attention to racial identity, and the contrast between simple models archaeologists might once have used and the nuanced historical approaches they now routinely employ, archaeologies of identity most clearly intersect with contemporary issues of power.
World History
