Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: Breaking and Entering the Ecosystem - Gender, Class,

and Faction Steal the Show

Author(s): Elizabeth M. Brumfiel
Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Sep., 1992), pp. 551-567
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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ELIZABETHM. BRUMFIEL
AlbionCollege

Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: Breaking

and Entering the Ecosystem-Gender, Class, and
Faction Steal the Show

Thisarticlewaspresentedas the thirdannualDistinguishedLecturein Archeology at the90th

annualmeetingof theAmericanAnthropological Association,November 22, 1991, in Chicago,
Illinois.

OR ALMOST THIRTY YEARS, American archeology has been operating under the as-
F sumptions of the ecosystem approach. The longevity of this approach is no accident;
the ecosystem program has been highly productive. From ecosystem theory, we have ac-
quired a sensitivity to structural causation and an appreciation for the interconnected-
ness of social and ecological variables. We have also gathered much relevant information
about energy exchanges, information flows, scheduling, risk, nutrition, labor intensifi-
cation, and demographic trends in prehistory. But while the ecosystem approach has
been very productive in some areas of research, it has retarded progress in others, partic-
ularly in the analysis of social change.
The analysis of social change has been hampered by ecosystem theory's insistence
upon whole populations and whole behavioral systems as the units of analysis. In focus-
ing on whole populations, and whole systems of adaptive cultural behavior, ecosystem
theorists have neglected the dynamics of social change arising from internal social ne-
gotiation. Social negotiation consists of conflicts and compromises among people with
different problems and possibilities by virtue of their membership in different alliance
networks. Most frequently, these alliance networks arise on the basis of gender, class, and
factional affiliation.
This paper argues three points. First, the ecosystem theorists' emphasis upon whole
populations and whole adaptive behavioral systems obscures the visibility of gender,
class, and faction in the prehistoric past. Second, an analysis that takes account of gender,
class, and faction can explain many aspects of the prehistoric record that the ecosystem
perspective cannot explain. Third, an appreciation for the importance of gender, class,
and faction in prehistory compels us to reject the ecosystem-theory view that cultures are
adaptive systems. Instead, we must recognize that culturally based behavioral "systems"
are the composite outcomes of negotiation between positioned social agents pursuing
their goals under both ecological and social constraints.

The Ecosystem Approach

The ecosystem approach rests upon two basic tenets. First, ecosystem theorists propose
that human populations adapt to their environments through culture-based behavioral
systems. Our role as archeologists is to record stability and change in these behavioral
systems over time and to explain this record as a product of population-environment in-
teraction (Steward 1955:36-42; White 1959:56; Binford 1962:218; Flannery 1967:121;

ELIZABETH
M. BRUMFIELis Professor,Department andSociology,AlbionCollege,Albion,MI 49224.
ofAnthropology

551

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552 ANTHROPOLOGIST
AMERICAN [94, 1992

Sanders and Price 1968:71; Hill 1977:88; Redman 1978a:13; Struever and Holton
1979:84-85). Second, ecosystem theorists assert that humans play a very limited role in
determining the course of culture change. Applying the model of natural selection to cul-
tural systems, ecosystem theorists argue that human decisions, intentions, and creativity
are simply sources of behavioral variation. Systemic context determines the differential
survival of these behaviors. Behavioral changes that produce viable cultural systems en-
dure and leave their imprint on prehistory; behavioral changes resulting in nonviable
cultural systems disappear as the cultures, themselves, fail (White 1949:141; Flannery
1967:122, 1972:411; Sanders and Price 1968:73; Hill 1977:66-67; Redman 1978a:10-13;
Dunnell 1980:62; Braun and Plog 1982:506; Price 1982:724).
Together, these two propositions focus attention on the cultural-behavioral system
rather than the social actor. This focus is clearly evident in that diagnostic artifact of
ecosystem archeology, the flowchart of culture change (see Figure 1; other examples in-
clude Wright 1970, 1977; Flannery 1972; Harris 1977; Johnson 1978; King 1978; and
Hassan 1981). For example, the emphasis on systems rather than social actors determines
the perspective of the flowchart, which is "etic" rather than "emic." That is, the chart
provides an overview of the system as a whole, rather than a view of the system as it might
look to a member of the society. As Cowgill (1975:506) notes, ecosystem theorists have
no real interest in "the needs, problems, possibilities, incentives, information, and view-
points of specific individuals or categories of individuals" within the system. The empha-
sis on systems rather than social actors also determines the units that constitute the boxes
or components in this flowchart, which are activities rather than agents, functions rather
than performers. Social actors are reduced to invisible, equivalent, abstract units of labor
power. Finally, the ecosystem theorists' reliance upon natural selection as the mechanism

Expansion into New Regions and Extension of Water Control Systems

Food ofFoodstuffs
Specialized

Production
Induce
Surplus
Redistribution Ability to

Production Taxation and Corvee

Cormee
Niche I)• tiontand
Need for Manufacturing
Foreign Ra Industrie
Materials Distance
4 Specialization
Long Craft

PotentiallColonization of Class
Stratified
Potentially Mesopotamia
MesopotamiaNew Markets o etietad
Productive with Adequate A
Administration
e
Unoccupied Technology Differentiations Elite
Niche (e.g. Irrigation)

Intensification
Limited
Access
in Wealth Due to

to Strategic
Control

Population of Agriculture Resources

Increase

Increase in Warfare

SizeNI
in
Increase
Information

(after Redman 1978b:3333).

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Brumfiel] LECTURE
DISTINGUISHED INARCHEOLOGY 553

of systemic change determines the nature of the connections between systemic compo-
nents. The connections between boxes are either functional responses to population needs
(for example, specialized food production requires the redistribution of foodstuffs) or
"necessary" consequences of one variable for another (for example, the intensification of
agriculture necessarily entails the differentiation in wealth). These connections are stim-
ulus-response or input-output relationships. The motivations, decisions, and actions that
actually link variables are not diagramed, so that a small "black box" intervenes between
each pair of linked components (Clarke 1968:58-62; McGuire 1983:92).' This chart is
clearly concerned with system-level evolutionary consequences and not the processes of
social change.
The ecosystem focus on the cultural-behavioral system has several drawbacks. First, it
makes invisible the past activities and contributions of particular sets of social actors, for
example, women, peasants, and particular racial or ethnic groups. When archeologists
fail to assign specific activities to these groups, dominant groups in contemporary society
are free to depict them in any way they please. Most often, dominant groups will overstate
the historical importance of their own group and undervalue the contributions of others,
legitimating current inequalities (Williams 1989; Patterson 1991a). In addition, when
women, peasants, and ethnic groups are assigned no specific activities in the past, profes-
sional archeologists make implicit assumptions about their roles and capabilities, result-
ing in the widespread acceptance of untested, and possibly erroneous, interpretations of
archeological data (Conkey and Spector 1984; Nelson 1990). As archeologists, we have a
professional responsibility to present our prehistories in ways that make distorted appro-
priations of the past as difficult as possible, and, as scientists, we need to work with
models that expose our implicit assumptions concerning human roles and capabilities to
critical reflection and hypothesis testing. The systemic models of ecosystem theory hinder
both these efforts.
Second, the ecosystem focus on the cultural-behavioral system leads us to seriously
underestimate the difficulties of systemic change. All institutional innovation has person-
nel and energy requirements (D'Altroy and Earle 1985), and if these requirements cannot
be met, the institution, no matter how beneficial, will not come into being. But, in human
society, access to labor and resources is defined by social categories, and this allocation
is maintained not by cultural norms, which are frequently flouted by actors pursuing their
particular goals, but by alliance networks that organize coercive force. Typically, such
alliance networks materialize on the basis of gender, class, and faction. A major task in
understanding systemic change is to understand how realignments in these alliance net-
works are brought off, permitting a redefinition of social categories and a reallocation of
resources and personnel (see Eisenstadt 1963). But ecosystem theory focuses on abstract
behavior rather than the groups of actors that control resources and power. This focus
obscures both the processes and possibilities of systemic change.
Finally, the ecosystem focus on the cultural-behavioral system leads us to overestimate
the external as opposed to the internal causes of change. As Adams (1978:329-330) ob-
serves, "Much of the flux and dynamism of the historic record derives from the periodic
convergence and divergence of the partly disarticulated geographic, ethnic, class, kin,
and other components of human society." Cause-effect regularities may exist because of
the logic of social negotiation instead of the logic of adaptive response. Rather than re-
garding prehistory as a long-term, systemic-level process of adaptation to environmental
change, it may be better to see prehistory as a string of short-term, composite outcomes
of social conflict and compromise among people with different problems and possibilities
by virtue of their membership in differing alliance networks.
Archeology has much to gain from focusing on the organization of actors rather than
behavioral systems, especially groupings of actors defined on the basis of gender, class,
and factional affiliation.

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554 AMERICAN
ANTHROPOLOGIST [94, 1992

Gender
In the focus on behavioral systems rather than actors, gender disappears. Despite the
widespread recognition that age and sex provide universal bases of social status and the
division of labor in human societies, gender (and age) have received very little attention
from archeologists. Flowcharts of social process, such as that cited above, never assign
gender to the activities they diagram. The lack of attention to gender has continued
through the 1980s, even in archeological studies of the household, where production, dis-
tribution, transmission, and reproduction are based in very direct and concrete ways on
a gendered division of labor and a gender-based definition of social status (Tringham
1991:101; for examples, see Wilk and Rathje 1982; Wilk and Ashmore 1988; Stanish
1989). Even when analysis involves the definition of probable male and female activities
and activity areas (e.g., Clarke 1972; Flannery and Winter 1976), it stops short of recon-
structing integrated male and female roles. This failure to define gender roles is an un-
derstandable consequence of the emphasis on behavioral systems. The unstated attitude
is, I think, that it really doesn't matter who did what in prehistory, as long as the neces-
sary subsistence functions were performed. This is thought to be especially true of house-
hold subsistence tasks, since the household is regarded as a cooperative unit based on the
pooling of goods and services. But it matters very much who did what, for at least three
reasons.
First, when gender roles are not explicitly defined, they are implicitly assumed (Conkey
and Spector 1984; Conkey and Gero 1991). It has been taken for granted that men, or
men and women, procure food while women process it. Men conduct trade and warfare;
women engage in household maintenance. Men make states; women make babies, or so
it is assumed. And assigning a task to women has virtually assured that variability in the
archeological data pertaining to that task would go unrecognized and unexplained.
Compare, for example, the extensive analysis of food procurement using sophisticated
models such as optimal foraging theory and game theory with the perfunctory attention
given food processing. There is a greater literature on the heat treatment of chert than on
the heat treatment of food (but see Stahl 1989). Studies of ceramic production far out-
number studies of ceramic use. Spatial and temporal variability in nutting stones, grind-
ing stones, cooking vessels, fuels, hearths, and ovens has not been adequately studied (but
see Jackson 1991; Bartlett 1933; Clark 1988; Braun 1981; Costin 1986; Brumfiel 1991;
Hastorf and Johannessen 1991; Hayden 1981). The same has been true for tools and fa-
cilities associated with hide-working, textile production, and the manufacture of cord and
cord products such as traps and nets (but see Weiner and Schneider 1989; Kehoe 1990).
I believe that the explicit effort to assign activities to female or male actors might make
some of these disparities obvious and stimulate ground-breaking research into these little-
known classes of archeological data, delineating both their range of variability and the
strategic factors that explain their variation.
Second, assigning activities to male or female actors is a first step in constructing in-
tegrated models of the gendered division of labor. Such models provide a baseline for
estimating work loads and pinpointing scheduling conflicts, both of which have impor-
tant implications for strategic decision making and behavioral change (Claassen
1991:277). Flannery (1968a:75) pointed out some time ago that the division of labor along
the lines of sex is one common solution to scheduling conflicts in subsistence strategies.
But only recently has it been suggested that scheduling problems in women's subsistence
activities might explain observed changes in the exploitation of some resources, such as
shellfish and plants, including plant domestication (Claassen 1991; Watson and Kennedy
1991), or that maximizing the efficiency of women's work routines may be the decisive
factor in structuring some settlement patterns (Jackson 1991).
Third, the calculation of gender-specific work loads has important implications for
modeling systemic change. For example, most models of emerging nonegalitarian rela-
tions assume the ability to generate surplus production, a "fund of power" (Sahlins

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Brumfiel] LECTURE
DISTINGUISHED INARCHEOLOGY 555

1968:89; D'Altroy and Earle 1985), either to use in adaptively advantageous activities
such as "banking" and redistribution (Flannery 1968b; Halstead and O'Shea 1982), or
to incur the social indebtedness of followers (Rowlands 1980; Kristiansen 1981; Brumfiel
and Earle 1987; Clark and Blake 1993), or to sponsor feasts that enable would-be leaders
to claim to be intermediaries between the living and their sacred ancestors (Friedman
1973). Because the vast majority of production in agrarian societies is household-based,
political change almost always involves the restructuring of household labor. The initial
stages of social inequality ought to be marked by high birthrates, polygamy, and/or the
inception of dependent labor within the households of would-be leaders (Chevillard and
Leconte 1986; Coontz and Henderson 1986). As inequality increases and goods and labor
are extracted from a widening circle of clients and subjects, a growing proportion of
households will experience changes in composition and organization. But whatever spe-
cific changes occur in household labor, they will always be a function of the existing time/
energy budgets of household members as established by the gendered division of labor.
For example, among the historic Blackfoot, women were responsible for hide-working.
When the markets for tanned robes expanded during the 19th century, polygamy pro-
vided an obvious avenue of advance for wealthy, ambitious men. According to Lewis
(1942:38-40), polygamy did expand, accompanied by increased social inequality among
men and increased oppression of women who were taken as third or additional wives.
Had the division of labor made male rather than female labor the key to obtaining Eu-
ropean goods, then would-be leaders would have had to resort to other strategies of labor
mobilization and surplus accumulation. Thus, to explain strategies of accumulation, and
to understand their limits, archeologists must examine the gender-specific organization
of household labor.
In studying the organization of household labor, archeologists may note changes that
placed household members in opposition to one another. For example, Hastorf (1991)
presents botanical evidence from the Mantaro Valley, Peru, that suggests that maize beer
production intensified under Inca rule. In the Andes, maize beer production is tradition-
ally a woman's task. At the same time, skeletal evidence indicates that under Inca rule
women consumed less maize beer than did men. One would have to ask, how did it come
to be that women produced more beer and yet consumed a smaller proportion of what
they produced? Did this arrangement somehow maximize the joint benefits of the collec-
tive household economy? Or does it indicate the flow of benefits from female to male
household members? If so, how was this flow of benefits achieved? Similarly, we could
look back to the previous example and ask, what alterations of situation or allegiance
permitted the institution of a less egalitarian marriage relationship for third and subse-
quent Blackfoot wives? Rather than attributing change to a heavy-handed selection pro-
cess, we must acknowledge the extent to which a cultural system is an outcome of active
negotiations between individuals with differential power, both within the household
(Hartmann 1981; Moore 1990) and beyond (Wolf 1982:385-391).
To explore this issue more fully, let us consider the way in which ecosystem theorists
have dealt with the relationship between classes in prehistoric societies.

Class

There is an interesting asymmetry in the way that ecosystem theorists have treated
dominant and subordinate classes, as is evident in our flowchart example (see Figure 1).
Elites constitute the only people-filled component of the system, and they are a very active
component-there are a lot of arrows leaving this box as well as entering it.2 In contrast,
the activities and interests of subordinate classes are divided among various systemic
components and are nowhere regarded as a coherent force in determining ecosystem
structure. The existence of this asymmetry is a straightforward consequence of the as-
sumptions of ecosystem theory. Elites are viewed as performing managerial functions
and, therefore, as being endowed with the ability to impose their decisions upon the social

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556 AMERICAN
ANTHROPOLOGIST [94, 1992

system. Managerial theories postulate no similar role for subordinate classes, and there-
fore do not grant them any similar power to influence the system. In ecosystems theory,
only the emergence of the elites requires explanation; subsistence producers have always
been with us.3
But the emergence of elites does not leave non-elites untransformed. The development
of control at the apex of the systemic hierarchy implies the development of subordination
at lower levels, regardless of whether this subordination is considered beneficial "system-
serving" regulation or pathological "self-serving" exploitation (Flannery 1972). And
many systemic relationships within emerging states are revealed only when subordinate
classes enter the model as people coping with the unfamiliar circumstances of subordi-
nation rather than as abstract performers of disaggregated systemic processes. For ex-
ample, if commoners or peasants appeared in the flowchart diagrams, we would be more
likely to ask two key questions about the process of state formation. First, what impact
did emerging hierarchy have on the lives of people in subordinate groups? And second,
to what extend did commoner response to state formation determine the structure of hi-
erarchy? These questions enable us to account for certain aspects of the archeological
record that the ecosystem approach leaves unexplained.
The first of these questions has seemed nonproblematic to most ecosystem theorists,
who assume that, under conditions of emerging hierarchy, commoners simply main-
tained their homeostatic exchanges with the environment under more stable, better-man-
aged conditions (but see Gall and Saxe 1977). But as we have observed, the emergence
of hierarchy always involves the transfer of goods from the hands of direct producers to
political elites with profound implications for other aspects of the cultural system.
For example, during the last four centuries of the pre-Hispanic era, coinciding with the
emergence of a regional state in the Basin of Mexico, the Basin experienced a surge of
demographic growth, which produced an eightfold increase in population (Sanders, Par-
sons, and Santley 1979:184-186). Earlier periods of modest or even negative growth in
the Basin's population suggest that there was nothing "natural" about this dramatic
growth (see Blanton 1975; Cowgill 1975). The absence of evidence for drastic changes in
the Basin of Mexico environment or its food-producing technology leaves this growth
quite unexplained within an ecosystem framework. However, if we consider the impact
of emerging hierarchy on the lives of subordinate groups, we might suggest that it was
the conditions of state formation, itself, that led to population growth (reversing the usual'
ecosystem proposition that population growth causes state formation). Either because the
state's demand for tribute, levied on a household basis, increased the need for household
labor, or because the increasing levels of violence made less certain the survival of chil-
dren to support parents in their old age, households brought into expanding states may
have desired and produced more children. This and other transformations of the house-
hold, especially gender and kinship relations, under conditions of state formation are
problems requiring much further investigation (see Rapp 1978; Gailey 1985a, 1985b,
1987; Silverblatt 1987, 1988).
Turning to the second question, the extent to which commoner response determined
the structure of emerging hierarchy, ecosystem theorists have usually assumed that the
managerial benefits conferred by hierarchy would make subordinate groups willing par-
ticipants in the system. However, this leaves unexplained forms of activity that appear to
be efforts by dominant classes to work around subordinate classes to avoid provoking
their hostility. For example, early stages of state formation are often characterized by the
development of private estates, controlled by elite individuals or corporations, and staffed
by some sort of unfree labor, such as slaves, war captives, or clients. Examples include
the palace and temple estates of Mesopotamia (Fox and Zagarell 1982; Zagarell 1986)
and the slave villages in African kingdoms such as Gyaman and Wolof (Terray 1979;
Tymowski 1991). Zagarell (Fox and Zagarell 1982; Zagarell 1986), Gailey (1985a), and
Tymowski (1991) suggest that these enclave economies, rather than representing the
power of the state, are symptoms of its weakness. Unable to supply sufficient benefits or

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Brumfiel] LECTURE
DISTINGUISHED INARCHEOLOGY 557

to muster sufficient coercion to collect taxes from a resident kin-ordered commoner class,
elites were forced to establish their own income-generating enterprises using the labor of
individuals who were separated from the protection of their kinship groups.
Warfare is another means of financing hierarchy in the face of commoner resistance.
The spoils of war may be used to increase the prestige of leaders by increasing their ca-
pacity for generosity (Santley 1980:142; Gilman 198 1). And warfare may provide a mech-
anism for capturing resources for enclave economies. Both war captives (Gailey 1985a;
Zagarell 1986; Tymowski 1991) and land (Webster 1975) seized in war lie outside the
control of traditional kin groups. Such assets free leaders from dependence upon kinship
status, kinship ties, and, ultimately, the kinship ethic.
In enclave economies and economies based upon plunder, leaders and followers strike
a bargain: intra-group exploitation is minimized so that leaders and followers can coop-
erate to dominate and exploit outsiders. The formation of such alliances or factions is a
frequent means of constructing political power (Lenin 1939:102-108; Gilman 1981; Blaut
1987:176-195).
Factions
When the adaptive value of sociopolitical institutions is assumed, no explicit analysis
of power building is necessary. Ruling elites derive their power from the regulation and
control of a complex subsistence economy, and they fall from power only when their self-
interested activities impede the efficient operation of the economy (Flannery 1972:414;
Johnson 1978:104; Redman 1978b:343-344). Politics becomes a function of subsistence,
and concern over political process disappears. This is reflected in the flowchart example
(Figure 1), where the subsistence economy receives much more attention than the polit-
ical economy, and all administrative elites occupy a single, undifferentiated, box.
However, if ecosystem theorists believe that power building in prehistoric complex so-
cieties can be ignored, they are in sharp disagreement with the leaders of these groups.
In the complex societies known from ethnohistorical records, power building is a central
concern. Much (if not all) of the administrative bureaucracy is devoted to maintaining
power. Typically, early states contain military bureaucracies organizing coercive force,
tax-collecting bureaucracies organizing surplus extraction, and functionaries in charge
of administered trade, elite craft production, and religious ritual, all of which communi-
cate ideologies of elite solidarity and dominance.
Rulers invest heavily in power building because the threats to their survival are nu-
merous (Kaufman 1988). Competing factions form around would-be usurpers within the
highest-ranking nobility, would-be independent paramounts within the provincial nobil-
ity, and would-be conquerors among the leaders of neighboring groups. These groups
threaten a ruler with coup, separatism, and conquest, respectively. Adding to the com-
plexity of the situation, these groups frequently form alliances with each other and with
outsiders. For example, usurpers and separatists may be aided by neighboring rulers who
see ties of patronage as an alternative to conquest for expanding territorial control (Hicks
1993). Commoners frequently support usurpers or separatists to put an end to oppressive
regimes (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940:11; Fallers 1956:247; Gluckman 1956:42-45;
Sahlins 1972:145-148; Helms 1979:28).
Political competition is never fully resolved. Rulers always have siblings and offspring
who conceive ambitions to rule (Goody 1966; Burling 1974). Regional hierarchies must
always depend upon lower-level local hierarchies, and these local hierarchies will possess
some organizational integrity and some ability to pursue autonomous goals (Webster
1976:818; Yoffee 1979:14). No matter how great the territory incorporated into the state,
it always has borders beyond its control where refugees fleeing state expansion can fall in
with peripheral leaders, usually the political clients and trade partners of the state, and
together, refugees and leaders can threaten state control of frontier regions (Lattimore
1951; Bronson 1988; Barfield 1989; Patterson 1991b:107-116). Almost always, in trying
to satisfy some of these factions, rulers alienate others.

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558 AMERICAN
ANTHROPOLOGIST [94, 1992

Rulers, then, must concern themselves with the successful management of a political
economy, that is, the distribution of wealth to support the distribution of power, and vice
versa. Some ecosystem theorists (e.g., White 1959; Price 1982:724) equate political econ-
omy with subsistence economy, regarding power as a simple function of energy. For ex-
ample, Gall and Saxe (1977:264-265) state, "When intersystem competition occurs ...
complex sociocultural systems persevere because success in the long run goes to the spe-
cialist who can harness the greatest number of kilocalories." But I would argue that suc-
cessful power holders must be effective manipulators of both natural resources and social
relations. Maintaining a following requires wealth, but it also requires a good sense of
timing and an ideology that maintains the loyalty of followers.
Several aspects of prehistoric economies are better understood when viewed as aspects
of a political economy rather than a subsistence economy. As discussed above, the inten-
sification of household production is often the result of the need for ever-larger quantities
of surplus to finance factional competition (Bender 1978; Earle 1978; Hayden 1990;
Brumfiel and Fox 1993). The elaboration of prestige goods and the construction of flam-
boyant civic/religious architecture, both of which commonly occur in the archeological
record in situations of emerging complexity, play important roles in the construction of
political alliances (Webster 1976; Yoffee 1979; Rowlands 1980; Kristiansen 1981; Earle
1987; Brumfiel 1987a, 1987b).
The prevalence of factional competition in complex societies has important theoretical
implications. It suggests that complex society is not the well-integrated adaptive system
implied by the orderly flowcharts of ecosystem theorists. Rather, as Patterson (1992) pro-
poses, it is "a continually shifting patchwork of internally differentiated communities
bound together by interacting contradictions and mediations." Paynter (1989:386) also
comments on the absence of integration in complex societies: "Tensions between cores
and peripheries, civil and kin groups, rulers and ruled, merchants and lords, men and
women, and producers and extractors evoke an unwieldy tangle of [interaction] pro-
cesses." The intensity and diversity of these internal tensions mean that, over long pe-
riods of time, states are guided by short-term crisis management rather than long-term
system-serving goals. This, in turn, calls into question the fundamental ecosystem-theory
assumption that complex societies are adaptive.
In biology, evolutionary success is measured by survival, and no single variable can
predict evolutionary success. Not the amount of energy captured by the organism, nor
the efficiency of energy capture, nor the quantity of biomass supported in the system en-
sures continued survival. If we reject all proxy measures of the evolutionary success of
complex societies and apply instead the only valid measure, that is, persistence, then
complex societies, which are often short-lived (Yoffee and Cowgill 1988; Paynter
1989:375; Patterson 1992), may have to be judged relatively unsuccessful organizational
forms. The history of states is the history of strategy and counterstrategy deployed by
oppositional groups, leading cumulatively to the emergence of social hierarchy and its
dissolution. But the membership of these groups, their sources of strength, and the logic
of their strategies cannot be discovered by systemic approaches that ignore the organi-
zation of human actors.

Systems-Centered and Agent-Centered Perspectives

Finding the proper balance between the individual and the system, between agency
and structure, has been a persistent problem for archeology. Under the sway of ecosystem
theory during the 1960s and 1970s, whole populations and whole systems of adaptive
cultural behavior served as the units of analysis. During the 1980s, a series of actor-based
decision-making models have been introduced to archeology (Keene 1979; Winterhalder
and Smith 1981; Boyd and Richerson 1985; Braun 1990; Durham 1990; Earle 1991; Shen-
nan 1991). To the extent that these models contextualize decision making in a structure
of ecologically and socially determined payoffs, they show considerable promise. But

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Brumfiel] LECTURE
DISTINGUISHED INARCHEOLOGY 559

many of these models have inherited processual archeology's insensitivity to gender,

class, and factional affiliation; thus, they fail to inquire how payoffs, and thus decisions,
vary by social category. To strike a proper balance between agency and structure, we will
have to accept the following principles.
First, we must reject the notion that a cultural system is a homeostatic, "living" system
subject to selection and adaptive change. Instead, we should recognize that cultural sys-
tems are contingent and negotiated, the composite outcome of strategy, counterstrategy,
and the unforeseen consequences of human action.
Second, following suggestions by Cowgill (1975), Orlove (1980), Kohl (1981), and
Blanton et al. (1981:23-24), we should recognize that human actors, and not reified sys-
tems, are the agents of culture change. Human actors devise complex strategies to solve
their problems and meet their goals, and these strategies are neither random nor shaped
solely by differential survival either at the population level as ecosystem theorists would
have it, or at the level of the individual as more recent evolutionary culture theorists
claim. This is not to say that humans always "get it right" or that their actions do not
lead to unforeseen consequences. It is simply to argue that human goals are relevant to
cultural outcomes.
Third, we should recognize that to argue that human action is goal-directed is not nec-
essarily to open the floodgates to cultural particularism. For, as ecosystem theory has
taught us, human action occurs within a structural context that shapes both its goals and
outcomes. Goals are achieved via the manipulation of two interrelated systems that bind
human choice to a structure of opportunities and constraints. The first of these is the by-
now familiar natural ecosystem that determines the costs and benefits of different pro-
duction strategies (Trigger 1991). The second is the system of social alliances that struc-
tures access to resources and power on the basis of gender, class, and factional affiliation.
Besides determining people's ability to achieve their goals, the social system also deter-
mines, in many ways, what those goals will be: alliance, surplus extraction, usurpation,
resistance, liberation, and so on. Thus, we must analyze social as well as ecological vari-
ables, what Flannery (1988:58), getting it half right, anyway, has called "man-man" and
"man-land" relationships (also see Adams 1966). In particular, we must insert social
power as a primary structural variable (Wolf 1990). We must analyze how alliance net-
works controlling labor and resources are constructed on the basis of gender, class, and
factional affiliation, and we must study how individuals and groups contrive to bring
about transformations in the membership and resources controlled by these networks.
Fourth, to analyze specific sequences of change, it will be necessary to alternate be-
tween a subject-centered and a system-centered analysis (Giddens 1979). A subject-cen-
tered analysis organizes ecological and social variables by weighing them according to
their importance in specific behavioral strategies. A system-centered analysis reveals how
the implementation of these strategies alters the quality and distribution of ecological and
social resources among the groups, creating new strategic possibilities for the next round
of behavior.
Verifying the existence of strategic action in the archeological record will not differ in
principle from the way that subsistence strategies are verified in the ecosystem approach.
In ecosystem theory, many artifact classes, settlement pattern types, and the like, have
been assigned functions within reconstructed subsistence strategies on the basis of their
technical properties, ethnographic analogy, and archeological contexts. These same ap-
proaches may be used to assign functions to classes of data in reconstructed social strat-
egies. These strategies will leave distinctive imprints on such aspects of the archeological
record as house size and plan, and surplus storage facilities (Saitta and Keene 1990). In
addition, many attributes of ceramics, burials, architecture, personal adornment, and the
use of space, which have been considered stylistic from the viewpoint of ecosystem theory,
may be understood as expressions of claims and counterclaims in ongoing social negoti-
ation (Hodder 1986:8; Shanks and Tilley 1987:133; for examples see Hodder 1982; Miller
and Tilley 1984; Fritz 1986; Small 1987; Moore 1986; Brumfiel and Earle 1987b; Brumfiel

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560 AMERICAN
ANTHROPOLOGIST [94, 1992

1987a, 1987b, 1990; Brumfiel, Salcedo, and Schafer 1993; McGuire and Paynter 1991).
Contrary to Hodder (1986:6) and Shanks and Tilley (1987:132), the discourse of social
negotiation can be studied cross-culturally; similar ecological and social strategies should
leave broadly similar imprints on material culture.
The analytical principles I have suggested here represent a clear departure from tra-
ditional ecosystem theory. This departure should enable us to account more adequately
for the full range of archeological data at our disposal, including variation in the intensity
of household production, variation in household composition and organization, variation
in demographic trends, the occurrence of enclave economies and prestige economies, and
the intensity and organization of warfare and surplus extraction. The approach suggested
here should also enable us to create a more humane archeology, an archeology that will
acknowledge the creativity and discretion that women and men, subjects and rulers have
exercised in the past to fashion their livelihoods and promote their well-being.

Notes
Acknowledgments. This paper has benefited immensely from the comments and criticisms offered
by Len Berkey, Michael Blake, Mary Collar, John Clark, George Cowgill, Antonio Gilman, Mary
Hodge, Roberto Korzeniewicz, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Tom Patterson, Glenn Perusek, Henry
Wright, Rita Wright, and members of the Department of Anthropology, New York University,
where an earlier version of this paper was presented. I am very grateful for their help.
'This is in keeping with the idea of at least some ecosystem theorists that explanation in archeol-
ogy would consist of laws of correlation, rather than laws of connection (Wylie 1982:386). For ex-
ample, Binford (1962:218) defines scientific explanation as "the demonstration of a constant artic-
ulation of variables within a system and the measurement of the concomitant variability among the
variables within the system." This definition betrays an interest in systemic function rather than
systemic structure, that is, a concern with what the system does as opposed to how it operates (see
Salmon 1978:175).
2In fact, Redman (1978b:341) regards the self-interested activities of the elite as a major process
leading to the emergence of social complexity: "the elite . . . were participants in the fifth positive
feedback relationship--that is, purposeful strategies of the elite to stimulate further growth of the
institutions that gave them their power and wealth."
3Adams's (1974) examination of Mesopotamian ecology from the viewpoint of the individual
peasant producer offers interesting contrasts to Redman's (1978a:229-236) more system-focused
approach.

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