The human experience of social transformation: Insights from comparative archaeology

Abstract

Archaeologists and other scholars have long studied the causes of collapse and other major social transformations and debated how they can be understood. This article instead focuses on the human experience of living through those transformations, analyzing 18 transformation cases from the US Southwest and the North Atlantic. The transformations, including changes in human securities, were coded based on expert knowledge and data analyzed using Qualitative Comparative Analysis techniques. Results point to the following conclusions: Major transformations, including collapses, generally have a strong and negative impact on human security; flexible strategies that facilitate smaller scale changes may ameliorate those difficulties. Community security is strongly implicated in these changes; strong community security may minimize other negative changes. The relationships among the variables are complex and multi-causal; while social transformation may lead to declines in human securities, declining conditions of life can also push people to transform their societies in negative ways. Results show that some societies are better able to deal with difficulties than others. One important policy implication is that community security and local conditions can be instrumental both in helping people to cope with difficulties and in staving off some of those difficulties. A multi-scalar approach is essential as we face the increasing problems of climate change in the decades ahead.

Finding Archaeological Relevance during a Pandemic and What Comes After

“…As our contemporary situation shows, contagious diseases have much longer periods in which they affect populations, and they may even come in waves that endure over months, if not years—although some disasters, such as volcanic eruptions, may be sporadic over long periods of time as well. There are, however, many commonalities—population loss and displacement, disruptions in production and supply chains, transformations in social networks, institutional breakdowns, decreases in human and community security, and many other aspects of lived human experience that change in the wake of disasters (e.g., Hegmon and Peeples 2018). On a more aspirational note, Michelle Hegmon and Matthew Peeples (2018) observe that the negative impacts of social transformation are mitigated by a strong sense of community security, which should spur us as individuals and collectives to better create these moving forward.…”

“…There are, however, many commonalities—population loss and displacement, disruptions in production and supply chains, transformations in social networks, institutional breakdowns, decreases in human and community security, and many other aspects of lived human experience that change in the wake of disasters (e.g., Hegmon and Peeples 2018). On a more aspirational note, Michelle Hegmon and Matthew Peeples (2018) observe that the negative impacts of social transformation are mitigated by a strong sense of community security, which should spur us as individuals and collectives to better create these moving forward. The exclusion of pandemics from much of the archaeological literature on disasters drives our comments here, and we hope that they contribute to our own resiliency.…”

Ancestral O'odham: Akimel O'ODHAM Cultural Traditions and the Archaeological Record

“…This down-cutting event happened close to a major climate shift (Dean 2000:102; LeBlanc 1999:35, 2003:147–149; Lekson 2002). In the Phoenix Basin, this shift coincided with various changes: pithouses were gradually replaced by surface structures, red-on-buff ceramics became less common, Salado polychromes appeared in the late A.D. 1200s, ball courts were no longer built, platform mounds became the predominate form of public architecture, the incidence of cremation decreased while inhumation increased, and production stopped of some items (e.g., palettes and censers) that appear to be associated with religious activities (Fish and Fish 2015; Haury 1976:286–289; Hegmon et al 2016; McClelland 2015; Nelson et al 2010; Rice 2016).…”

“…Despite many decades of work, little consensus exists regarding what caused the Hohokam Collapse, and researchers still don't agree about the nature of the relationship between prehistoric and historic populations in the area (Ezell 1963, 1983:149–150; Gilpin and Phillips 1998:28–43; Haury 1976; Hegmon et al 2016; Hill et al 2015; Loendorf 2012; Loendorf et al 2013; McClelland 2015; Mills et al 2013; Nelson et al 2010; Ravesloot et al 2009; Rea 2007; Redman 1999; Rice 2016; Seymour 2011; Tainter 1988; Wells 2006). We propose that understanding the changes at the end of the Classic period has been an intractable issue because researchers have tacitly assumed that major changes in material culture patterns indicate that a different ethnic group migrated to the region.…”

A New Kind of Relevance for Archaeology

“…In recent years an increasing number of archaeologists have conducted research that is explicitlydesigned to address contemporary issues (Sabloff, 2008;Cooper and Sheets, 2012;Ingram and Gilpin, 2015;Nelson et al, 2015;Liebmann et al, 2016;Kohler et al, 2017;Hambrecht et al, 2018;Hegmon and Peeples, 2018;Jackson et al, 2018). Despite many exciting results emanating from this work, as of yet it seems to have had little impact on actual public policy discussions.…”