Production

The initial developments in economic archaeology focused on food procurement/production (subsistence activities), although the theoretical frames for these early studies (and so the questions being asked) tended to be more ecological than explicitly economic.

Subsistence

During the mid-twentieth century, increasing attention was given to the collection of faunal and floral evidence relevant to the reconstruction of past diets and how people utilized available resources. In the excavations at Star Carr, the 9000-10 000-year-old Mesolithic site in northeastern Great Britain, Grahame Clark incorporated scientists from a number of disciplines into his research team. Some of these specialists analyzed pollen and faunal remains to document how the settlement served as a camp site at the margins of a lake where the occupants largely hunted red deer and gathered a range of plant foods in a shifting landscape following the end of the Pleistocene. The Star Carr studies illustrated how much could be learned by supplementing traditional artifact analysis with other classes of archaeological data.

By the 1960s and 1970s, it became standard practice for archaeologists to recover macrobotanical remains from their excavations through dry-screening (or sieving) and flotation (the sorting and recovery of light plant remains from heavier sediment matrices through the use of fluid suspension). The collection of plant materials (and more recently the direct radiocarbon dating of these remains using accelerator mass spectrometric techniques) has laid the empirical foundation for the great progress that has been made in the study of plant domestication over the past four to five decades. For example, early multi-disciplinary projects led by Robert Braidwood in the Near East and Richard MacNeish and Kent Flannery in highland Mexico were able to distinguish precisely when phenotypically wild grains were supplemented (and ultimately largely replaced) by domesticated varieties. These breakthroughs (and others that have followed from these pioneering efforts) have documented that different suites of plant foods were domesticated in Southwest Asia, eastern Asia, Europe, the Pacific, Africa, and South, Middle, and North America. At the same time, they have shown that the nature of the relationships and timing between plant agriculture and sedentary village life, animal domestication, and major technological innovations, such as the production of ceramic vessels, were far from uniform from one global region to another (see Agriculture: Social Consequences). Economically, these findings are significant since they not only document that the material underpinnings of each global region were in certain key respects different, but they have helped rule out the long-held rather romantic notion that the ‘literal and figurative seeds of civilization’ diffused out in some simple, beaconlike manner from a small number of central locations or hearths. Instead, scholars have learned that local factors and indigenous resources played key roles in each region.

Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, systematic archaeological settlement pattern studies in several regions of the world also were adding a new larger-scale perspective to the investigation of subsistence as well as the relationship between populations and available food resources through catchment analyses. These studies examined the distribution of communities on landscapes in relation to the surrounding plant and animal resources or agrarian potentials (based on crops, soils, and water). Such survey research has made it more feasible for archaeologists to evaluate and assess theoretical claims that serious stress on local subsistence resources prompted other key cultural transitions (including the beginnings of farming and the rise of state governments). Such assessments were really not possible before we had empirically derived regional distributions of past settlements for specific areas over time. Careful comparisons of settlement and resources at the regional scale allowed archaeologists the opportunity to disentangle the phenomenon of population growth (based on the size and number of settlements) from population pressure on potential food supplies (how population indicators and estimations compared to potentially available resources). Although no consensus has been reached and the causal links likely were not uniform in diverse times and places, neither starvation nor resource stress have stood up convincingly as prime motivating forces for either the advent of farming or the emergence of new political institutions.

In recent years, the examination of subsistence production has been enhanced by biophysical studies of human bone and teeth, which have provided more direct insights into what actually was consumed. The chemical analysis of human bone has proved to be valuable both to quantify relative meat intake within and between populations as well as to determine the comparative significance of local plants versus imported domesticates in the diets of specific past peoples. For example, the latter studies have been fruitful in documenting the consumption of exotic maize (from Mesoamerica) as a staple in eastern North America and when maize beer became a key component of Andean diet during the late prehispanic era. On a theoretical level, archaeologists have not only elaborated their investigatory repertoire for deciphering what foods people collected, produced, and consumed, but the new data generated by these numerous methodological innovations have enabled them to probe and answer questions about variation and change in subsistence production that largely were not even contemplated five to six decades ago. Current investigations are able to evaluate how food procurement strategies compare at particular points in time to the estimated availabilities of different resources (allowing for the quantitative assessment of optimization models), while other multi-disciplinary researches, involving foot surveys with botanical studies and other techniques, have shown how with major labor inputs some past agrarian landscapes (such as in parts of the Amazon and the lowland Maya Petsin of Guatemala) were able to yield greater food bounties in the past than often are produced in these same areas today.

Nonagricultural Production

The systematic investigation of nonagricultural production did not receive serious archaeological attention until the 1970s. The first studies began with efforts to identify locations where pottery and chipped stone tool manufacture occurred in the past. Sets of archaeological correlates were devised from ethnographic and other sources to recognize these eco-nomic/craft activities at excavated sites (and with less confidence at a regional scale using surface findings). These correlates generally have been shown to have high degrees of cross-cultural utility and validity. Importantly, these archaeological signatures rely not only on specific classes of artifacts (such as ceramic wasters or defects to identify pottery production) but also on relational data or the spatial coincidence of several kinds of evidence including the wasters, the remnants of ceramic firing features, the implements of manufacture, and high densities of pottery.

Of late, archaeologists also have developed similar expectations and indicators to document empirically (with excavated data) the production of a range of other, less prevalent craft (and other manufactured) goods including bone tools, shell ornaments, metal objects, ground-stone implements, fiber/cloth, and alcohol (see Craft Specialization). The formulation of broadly accepted criteria for the recognition of craft manufacturing contexts has generated an empirical record from which archaeologists are able to examine long-held, but little tested, notions regarding how the nature and degree of suprahousehold labor specialization shifted as human polities became larger and more hierarchically organized.

Although it is not surprising that labor divisions by age and sex have been found in most human societies, it perhaps has been less expected to find that household or domestic group self-sufficiency is not as common among hunting/gathering and village farming peoples as may have once been believed. Domestic craft manufacture, likely often on a part-time basis, appears to have been a common occurrence even in relatively small-scale societies. Also unexpected has

Been the frequent finding that craft production was generally situated in domestic contexts even in large complex societies. This pattern is particularly evident in the prehispanic Americas where nondomestic workshops or factory-scale manufacture appears to have been relatively rare. Larger-scale nondomestic production contexts have been found with greater frequency in Eurasia, where the land-transport technologies (wheeled vehicles and a greater array of beasts of burden) were more efficient, but the preconceived notion that nonresidential workshops generally supplanted domestic craft manufacture in all or even most archaic states needs to be reconsidered. As has long been proposed, the nature and degrees of specialized labor do seem to increase with political complexity, but the increments are not necessarily stepwise or uniform.