Contents MATERIAL List of Figures vii List of Tables xi 1. Surplus: The Politics of ProductionDISTRIBUTION and the Strategies of Everyday and Life—An Introduction Christopher T. Morehart and Kristin De Lucia 3 FOR 2. The Cost ofCOPYRIGHTED Conquest: Assessing the Impact of Inka Tribute Demands on the Wanka of Highland Peru Cathy Lynne CostinNOT 45 3. Surplus and Social Change: The Production of Household and Field in Pre-Aztec Central Mexico Kristin De Lucia and Christopher T. Morehart 73 4. Surplus in the Indus Civilization: Agricultural Choices, Social Relations, Political Effects Heather M.-L. Miller 97 v vi Contents 5. Surplus from Below: Self-Organization of Production in Early Sweden T. L. Thurston 121 6. From Surplus Land to Surplus Production in the Viking Age Settlement of Iceland Douglas J. Bolender 153 7. Surplus Capture in Contrasting Modes of Religiosity: Perspectives from Sixteenth-Century Mesoamerica E. Christian Wells 175 8. Surplus Houses: Palace Politics in the Bight of Benin West Africa, AD 1650–1727 Neil L. Norman 203 9. Surplus Labor, Ceremonial Feasting, and Social Inequality at Cahokia: A Study MATERIALin Social Process James A. Brown and John E. Kelly 221 10. The Sociality of Surplus among Late Archaic Hunter-Gatherers of CoastalDISTRIBUTION Georgia Victor D. Thompson and Christopher R. Moore 245 11. The Transactional DynamicsFOR of Surplus in LandscapesCOPYRIGHTED of Enslavement: Scalar Perspectives from Interstitial West Africa Ann B. StahlNOT 267 12. Conclusions: Surplus and the Political Economy in Prehistory Timothy Earle 307 List of Contributors 327 Index 329 Figures 2.1. Inka empire MATERIAL 47 2.2. Ubiquity of hoes in Wanka II and Wanka III contexts, by household status 49 2.3. Evidence for the differential production and preparation of maize in Wanka II households DISTRIBUTION 50 2.4. Results of stable isotope analysis of Wanka II human bone collagen, illustrating similarity in eliteFOR and commoner diets 51 2.5. Distribution of tools used in cloth production in Wanka 53 2.6. Increase inCOPYRIGHTED maize production and consumption from Wanka II to Wanka III NOT 61 3.1. Map of the Basin of Mexico showing location of Xaltocan and other sites 78 3.2. Reconstructed map of Xaltocan’s chinampa system 79 3.3. Map of Structure 1 showing locations of rooms and features 81 4.1. Map of the Indus Valley and surrounding areas 102 4.2. Land-use zones of the Indus Valley floodplains 103 4.3. Water management regimes and zones of the Indus Valley floodplains 104 5.1. Sweden in the eleventh and twelfth centuries 122 vii viii Figures 5.2. Småland Plateau 124 5.3. Cairn areas of early vs. late clearance 131 5.4. Development of infrastructure in early Jönköping 134 5.5. Four study blocks with varying proximity to state-building infrastructure 137 5.6. Example of settlement phases and expansions—Skärstad-Ölmstad Valley 140 6.1. Land claims and later farm properties in Skagafjörður, northern Iceland 156 6.2. Chayanov’s model defining labor effort to meet household subsistence needs based on the marginal utility and increasing drudgery associated with increased work 157 6.3. Chayanov model of household production limits modified to define marginal threshold for surplus farmland 160 6.4. Settlement pattern in the Langholt survey region showing the timing and size of new farm establishment 162 6.5. Chayanov line defining expected laborMATERIAL effort based on household consumer-to-work ratio and the relative position of “overproducing” tenant and “underproducing” landlord households 167 6.6. Shift ni relative marginal utility of land as landlord households establish tenant farms on their land 168 7.1. Folios 97b and 102d from the MadridDISTRIBUTION Codex (ca. AD 1300–1500?) 185 7.2. Folio 64 from Book 9 of Sahagún’s Florentine Codex (1575–77), showing Nahua “featherFOR workers” with rectangular panels of green maguey cactus fiber and white cotton 193 8.1. Gbe polities,COPYRIGHTED Bight of Benin region, West Africa 205 8.2. ArchaeologicalNOT survey of Huedan countryside 207 8.3. Broken vessel fragments along curving arc of wall 211 8.4. Vessel containing human cranium 212 8.5. Contents of a shrine during excavation 213 9.1. Map of the center of Cahokia showing areas discussed in text 233 10.1. Location of selected shell ring sites in the American Southeast 250 10.2. LiDAR map of the Sapelo Island Shell Ring complex (9MC23) 253 10.3. Sapelo Island Shell Ring complex in relation to the broader landscape showing islands, ocean, and marshland 255 Figures ix 10.4. Photograph of Ring I and profile drawings of the crushed shell lens from the 1950 excavation 258 11.1. Metallurgical workshop at Ngre Kataa in the Banda area, Ghana 270 11.2. “Capping” shrine cluster centered on unit 48N 8W, Ngre Kataa, Banda, Ghana 271 11.3. Model of “Wealth-in-People” depicting overlapping constituencies of free and enslaved groups and the movements into and out of free and enslaved status through fictive kinship, pawning, and witchcraft accusation 278 11.4. Map of Banda in relation to Saharan and Atlantic networks 281 11.5. Shifting configuration of Banda production and exchange vis-à-vis the reorientation of trade to Atlantic networks 283 11.6. Shrine cluster, Unit 44N 6W, metal-working workshop, Ngre Kataa, Banda, Ghana 285 MATERIAL DISTRIBUTION FOR COPYRIGHTED NOT Tables 2.1. Estimates of calories in chicha MATERIAL 55 2.2. Caloric loss in producing chicha, assuming 3,470 calories per kg of maiz de jora seca and 280 calories per liter of chicha 55 2.3. Estimates of labor expended in weaving; all items were made of wool and woven on a backstrap loom DISTRIBUTION 59 2.4. Estimates of the amount of land and labor needed to produce chicha for imperial personnel at FORHatun Xauxa 65 2.5. Potential unmet food needs if maize grown in 10-km catchment around the Inka administrativeCOPYRIGHTED center, Hatun Xauxa, was used in chicha production NOT 66 4.1. Possible cropping regimes in Indus Valley floodplains 101 4.2. Agricultural regime models for Indus Valley floodplains 107 4.3. Land ownership implications for Indus Valley floodplains 108 xi CHAPTER ONE Surplus: The Politics of Production and the Strategies of Everyday Life An Introduction Christopher T. Morehart and Kristin De Lucia Archaeologists identify surplus as a central pivotMATERIAL in the big issues of historical change: the development of state society, the emergence of inequality and social stratification, the creation and intensification of agriculture, specialization and technological evolution, the division of labor (including between men and women), the formation of exchange networks andDISTRIBUTION markets, the beginning of sedentism and eventually urban life. Observed through the lenses of such macro-theoretical issues, surplus occupies an interpretive position not unlike other variables considered to be basic “triggers” to societal transformation,FOR such as demographic growth and cli- matological change. Like these variables, the role of surplus in reconstructions of change is often COPYRIGHTEDvague, assumed, and monolithic or is difficult to pinpoint in rela- tion to emergent conditionsNOT in a sociopolitical landscape (Dalton 1960). “The pro- duction of surplus . permitted the . .” is a common phrase repeated throughout archaeological literature to explain why changes occurred but also why societies in the past seemingly became more like our own. Surplus’s legacy in archaeology is associated closely with social evolutionary models of change. Such models tend to emanate from top-down approaches to political economy, conceived either managerially or coercively (see Brumfiel and Earle 1987), and view surplus production as part of macro-level processes. However, the explicit study of surplus as a major intellectual theme has become less common today than during the heyday of the New Archaeology from the 1960s through the 1980s. With the rise of theoretical perspectives influenced by “post-processual” DOI: 10.5876/9781607323808.c001 3 4 Christopher T. Morehart AND Kristin DE Lucia critique, many archaeologists have progressively either rejected the targeted study of surplus or simply abandoned it in favor of the social and cultural dimensions of consumption. The analyses of important social archaeological topics, such as identity, being, temporality, and materiality (e.g., Meskell and Preucel 2007), we argue, are essentially matters of consumption. They represent an intellectual shift toward subjectivity, particularly through its experiential and phenomenological dimensions. Some scholars have argued, however, that when taken to an extreme, such approaches lead to a “bleaching” (Carrier 1997) of production in favor of consumption, either producing an idealized romantization of the past or imped- ing archaeological understanding of history’s material reality (see Brumfiel 1992; Harvey 1989; Jameson 1991; Trigger 1998). These studies also can be overly particu- larlistic, rejecting the existence of common processes operating in otherwise very different sociocultural contexts and inhibiting efforts to promote a comparative anthropology and archaeology. However, as the studies in this volume attest and the critical genealogy of sur- plus reveals, the social dynamics of consumption are inextricably tied to production. The politics that produce subjects and surplus are always entangled with consump- tion (see Ekstrom and Brembeck 2004; MillerMATERIAL 1987), in ways that differ depend- ing on the social, temporal, and geographic scale at which we focus our analytical gaze. A dialectical tie—simultaneously biological, physical, material, and cultural— between consumption and production is a major relationship that shapes not only practice but also historical change, a dynamic that few fields but archaeology can truly capture. Archaeologically, indeed,DISTRIBUTION our narratives of surplus often emanate not from an abstract conception of productive capacity but from the material results of this dialectic—the archaeological record. Even in social anthropology, this duality cannot be easily resolved despiteFOR the ethnographer’s ability to engage with living and speaking subjects.