Egalitarian Social Organization

Egalitarian social organization - where social statuses are achieved, power is rooted in personal charisma, and permanent political offices are absent - is commonly observed among both nomadic foragers and sedentary horticulturalists, indicating that food-procurement strategy alone does not determine the rise of complexity. Ethnographic accounts of egalitarian groups describe population ranges from microbands of a few individuals to villages of several hundred people. Individuals and families in egalitarian groups maintain wide social networks and change residential locations based on food-procurement needs, as well as to satisfy both positive and negative social needs.

Egalitarianism is thus encouraged by lower ecological and social costs for residential mobility (or, put differently, higher costs for permanent residence), operating most effectively under conditions of modest regional population densities relative to resource potential. Band societies tend to fluctuate between periods of dispersal and temporary aggregation, while autonomous villages are characterized by patterns of population growth and fissioning that discourage the emergence of regional political hierarchies. Egalitarian groups tend to have social leveling mechanisms that undermine the emergence of hereditary status categories - status is gained by underwriting feasts and distributing (rather than accumulating) gifts (see Food and Feasting, Social and Political Aspects). They also practice self-dampening household-oriented economies where intensive resource development is rare and material goods are produced and exchanged to maintain the social networks that constitute an essential risk-reduction strategy.

Archaeologically, egalitarian social organization manifests itself materially at the regional and site level. Regionally, settlement hierarchies are modest or absent, and material culture production and distribution do not pattern in a way that suggests specialized production or hereditary status inequality. At the site level, domestic architecture tends to be fairly uniform, although there may be a distinction between nuclear and extended family residences within or between sites, depending on economic activities. Sedentary groups sometimes construct corporate architecture used for sodality activities (e. g., a structure for initiated men), or to accentuate gender categories (e. g., a menstrual building), but the lack of special offices and full-time ritual specialists may be inferred by the absence of architecture devoted to full-time religious activity. Egalitarian societies typically lack full-time craft specialists; regionally, style should be heterogeneous (with localized or idiosyncratic patterning) and exotic goods and technology should be widely distributed. Mortuary contexts should not communicate differential investments of labor or materials based on inherited statuses.