Another fascinating post. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before in response to your posts on techniques. One question I have never been able to answer for myself is how it was, in the long pre-axial age, that techniques, for which we have evidence in the archaeological record, changed so slowly, e.g. the same design of arrowheads found in the same area over thousands of years. Obviously, as you note, the hunt, or warfare, had to be in some respects a ritualised activity. Yet they are also the domains which presumably allowed some possibility for winning an unforeseen status through individual skill and accomplishments, making one's marks. An arrowhead might be at times a centralized object of attention but there are also pedagogical and performative aspects to making them that might lead us to think that somewhere along the line someone would make significantly new changes in leading, or attempting to, the other hunters. But why would that only happen slowly over the course of millennia?
The largest of the Gulf Islands between mainland British Columbia and Vancouver Island is Texada, home today to large numbers of deer, and in the fall, their hunters. There is an archaeological site there, at the water's edge (one is never far from the water even on this relatively long but thin island), and from what I remember of the signage memorializing the dig, they discovered that over millennia this site, as evidenced by the middens, was almost exclusively a place of deer consumption. In a region where (almost) all tribes specialized in exploiting the rich marine resources of the North Pacific, which allowed for a fairly hierarchical culture which culminated in the institution of the potlatch, there was one group, which must have known how its neighbours lived, that, at least for part of the year, specialized exclusively in deer, and it, or its successors, did this for millennia, in a world of warfare and some minimal amount of slavery. They must have had deer ancestors they worshiped but why would centrifugal signifying not compromise or supplement this? Obviously the pre-axial is not your focus but do you have any thoughts on how we might think of, or make idioms of, this sort of thing?
I would ask how hierarchical, exactly, these communities are. If there's still a potlatch, it's still tribal/honor/ gift community, and I'm assuming that real technical innovation requires that to be broken up imperially.
The potlatch, as I understand it, is a competition among clan chiefs, within a tribe, to amass the most wealth to distribute. So I think of it as the stage before one big man wins out and takes control of the distribution, ending the destructive elements of the competition. Still, within the clans there was some hierarchy and slavery that was not just capturing people to fill holes in the ritual order, I think, but putting them towards increasing production. How long the potlatch had existed as an institution before the coming of Europeans, who knows? Anyway, while I can appreciate how we need an imperial centre for sustained technical innovation, I can't quite get my head around how it was possible for there to be some degree of centrifugal signification without at least some minimal innovation. Well, over a long time there were some innovations, surely. I just can't grasp what would be reasonable to expect.
Yes, for now I'd have to leave that as an open questions. We might have to distinguish between innovations that are essentially variations on a theme and those that establish a new theme.
Another fascinating post. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before in response to your posts on techniques. One question I have never been able to answer for myself is how it was, in the long pre-axial age, that techniques, for which we have evidence in the archaeological record, changed so slowly, e.g. the same design of arrowheads found in the same area over thousands of years. Obviously, as you note, the hunt, or warfare, had to be in some respects a ritualised activity. Yet they are also the domains which presumably allowed some possibility for winning an unforeseen status through individual skill and accomplishments, making one's marks. An arrowhead might be at times a centralized object of attention but there are also pedagogical and performative aspects to making them that might lead us to think that somewhere along the line someone would make significantly new changes in leading, or attempting to, the other hunters. But why would that only happen slowly over the course of millennia?
The largest of the Gulf Islands between mainland British Columbia and Vancouver Island is Texada, home today to large numbers of deer, and in the fall, their hunters. There is an archaeological site there, at the water's edge (one is never far from the water even on this relatively long but thin island), and from what I remember of the signage memorializing the dig, they discovered that over millennia this site, as evidenced by the middens, was almost exclusively a place of deer consumption. In a region where (almost) all tribes specialized in exploiting the rich marine resources of the North Pacific, which allowed for a fairly hierarchical culture which culminated in the institution of the potlatch, there was one group, which must have known how its neighbours lived, that, at least for part of the year, specialized exclusively in deer, and it, or its successors, did this for millennia, in a world of warfare and some minimal amount of slavery. They must have had deer ancestors they worshiped but why would centrifugal signifying not compromise or supplement this? Obviously the pre-axial is not your focus but do you have any thoughts on how we might think of, or make idioms of, this sort of thing?
I would ask how hierarchical, exactly, these communities are. If there's still a potlatch, it's still tribal/honor/ gift community, and I'm assuming that real technical innovation requires that to be broken up imperially.
The potlatch, as I understand it, is a competition among clan chiefs, within a tribe, to amass the most wealth to distribute. So I think of it as the stage before one big man wins out and takes control of the distribution, ending the destructive elements of the competition. Still, within the clans there was some hierarchy and slavery that was not just capturing people to fill holes in the ritual order, I think, but putting them towards increasing production. How long the potlatch had existed as an institution before the coming of Europeans, who knows? Anyway, while I can appreciate how we need an imperial centre for sustained technical innovation, I can't quite get my head around how it was possible for there to be some degree of centrifugal signification without at least some minimal innovation. Well, over a long time there were some innovations, surely. I just can't grasp what would be reasonable to expect.
Yes, for now I'd have to leave that as an open questions. We might have to distinguish between innovations that are essentially variations on a theme and those that establish a new theme.