How can surplus food production be used to anyone’s benefit? There are a number of possibilities, but two of the most important and recurring ethnographically documented strategies involve using surplus food to create prestige goods and to hold feasts, both of which are central features among almost all complex hunter-gatherers.
In terms of prestige items, one can use surplus food to ‘pay’ or support other individuals to produce finely crafted items or to travel to distant places to procure exotic materials. Thus, obsidian, shells, beads, and exotic stone materials occur at many complex hunter-gatherer sites, even if they are hundreds of kilometers from the sources of raw materials. Among ethnographic transegalitarian societies, prestige items were used in five important ways, and we may expect that they were used in similar ways among prehistoric complex hunter-gatherers. The functions of prestige items included:
1. as a means to establish debts (due to the essentially reciprocal contracts involved in gift giving and the high investments entailed);
2. as a means of displaying economic and social success;
3. as a means of confirming, validating, or emphasizing the value of important social transactions (especially marriages, alliances, the taking of important positions, and peacemaking);
4. as a means to convert surplus food into other desirable materials (wealth) or relationships; and
5. as a substitute for human life (payments for brides or as compensations for injuries or deaths in lieu of revenge killings or the reciprocal transfer of children in marriages).
The traditional models of cultural complexity and technological advances (as reflected in the opening quotation of this article) consider features such as sedentism, monumental architecture, pottery, metal use, calendars, record-keeping, slavery, and various forms of wealth as the result of the domestication of plants, animals, and agriculture. However, it is evident from both ethnographic and archaeological remains that all of these features actually occur first among complex hunter-gatherers and are related to the development of the kinds of prestige economies discussed above. Thus, most of the major technological and social changes usually considered as resulting from domestication are clearly not the result of domestication but stem from much more fundamental transformations that begin in complex hunter-gatherer societies and also continue into agricultural societies, becoming even more developed in the most productive agricultural contexts.
Because of the advantages conferred by prestige items for the five purposes mentioned above, there should have been significant pressures within complex hunter-gatherer societies to increase food production in order to produce or acquire prestige items on an ever-increasing scale. Once surplus production became the basis for acquiring mates, military allies, and decision-making power, people must have begun to compete in order to see who could produce the most surpluses. And this appears to be a new cultural phenomenon beginning with the appearance of complex hunter-gatherers. However, aside from increasing surpluses in order to produce more prestige items, an even more effective way of using surplus food was in feasts. In fact, the most valued foods used in feasts can be considered prestige items. It is no coincidence that the usual context in which almost all types of prestige items were displayed was in feasts, often as gifts creating debts.
Feasts were used for a wide variety of purposes, including all of the purposes prestige items were used for (see Food and Feasting, Social and Political Aspects). Above all, feasts constituted extremely effective means of converting surplus food production into other desired materials or relationships (whether debts or alliances). The ability of individuals to marry and reproduce, survive hostile attacks, and defend their own interests in the community depended, to a large degree, on the successful cultivation of support networks within and between communities. The production of surpluses for feasting was the most important means of creating these networks, and it is not surprising that considerable competition among support groups (usually loosely kin-based) and communities characterized a great deal of feasting. People tried to outdo competing groups in terms of the size and lavishness of feasts in order to obtain the best marriage partners, the most wealth, the most influence in decisions or disputes in villages, and the best military assistance. There are repeated references in the ethnographic literature of complex hunter-gatherers and simple horticulturalists to the effect that the most powerful forces that intensified production were not periodic food shortages, but the social and political competition between factions and communities over desirable marriages, alliances, and decisionmaking roles.
Because surplus production and the control of the most productive resource sites (whether fishing sites, patches of fertile land, or hunting locations) conferred so many advantages for people in complex hunter-gatherer societies, it is to be expected that these sites would have been owned or controlled by the most ambitious families and that these rights would have been passed down from generation to generation. In this context, ancestor worship and the establishment of corporate kin groups would be very advantageous. Not surprisingly, ownership of resource sites and the importance of ancestors characterize most ethnographic complex hunter-gatherers, whether on the Northwest coast or elsewhere. Thus, the type of religious, social, and mythological structures that are often thought to characterize food-producing Neolithic societies (strongly centered on ancestor worship and corporate kin totems) occur among complex hunter-gatherers and probably appeared well before domestication.
In sum, complex hunter-gatherers and simple hor-ticulturalists share many important basic characteristics. While it is not possible to discuss all of these in detail in this short section, some of the most salient features include similar or overlapping population densities, settlement sizes, levels of sedentism, technologies, use of prestige items, types of feasts, socioeconomic inequalities, secret societies, human sacrifice and slavery, ancestor worship, corporate kinship groups, cemeteries, and a heterarchical type of sociopolitical organization. The only aspects that seem to distinguish simple horticultural societies from complex hunter-gatherers are the techniques that they use to intensify production: some groups include cultivation and domestication among the array of intensification techniques used, others such as fishing or reindeer-herding societies do not. Thus, at a general level, we may refer to both complex hunter-gatherers and simple horticulturalists as a single type of society. The term ‘transegalitarian societies’ is used herein. Transegalitarian societies exhibit the characteristics listed as well as the previously discussed features of prestige items. Most pastoral nomad societies also fit the characteristics of transegalitarian societies, although their economic base is different from both complex hunter-gatherers and simple horticulturalists.
World History
