More on Social Stratification in Bronze Age Europe

Abstract

Gilman's (CA 22:1-24) article is a welcome and exemplary addition to the growing corpus of recent literature on the development of social stratification in the European Bronze Age. He illustrates many of the deficiencies of earlier models while proposing one of his own as an alternative. I have reservations about a few of the specific causal linkages in his model that stem from research conducted by myself and others on Bronze Age developments in the Lower Morava Valley in Yugoslavia. Gilman's proposal views the development of social stratification as a by-product of an alteration in the subsistence system of Bronze Age Europe. The introduction of capitalintensive agriculture created security problems which provided elites with the option to interfere in local community affairs. In addition, the greater labor investments in fields inhibited group fission as a means of regulating self-aggrandizing behavior; abandoning production systems which had required heavy energy investments would have been detrimental to the households concerned. As a result, rudimentary elites were able to continue to exact concessions, and this involved increased recognition of their status. The end result was social stratification. This model appears to be most applicable to Mediterranean Europe. The situation in temperate southeastern Europe, and especially in central Yugoslavia, would appear to be much more complex. Gilman's view that increased investment eventually inhibits fission is not easily validated beyond the Mediterranean. In fact, the reverse often appears to be closer to the truth. With the introduction of more labor-intensive means of agricultural production (i.e., the plough, cattle for traction and milking, etc.; see Sherratt 1980b) at the end of the Neolithic in temperate southeastern Europe, the rate of social-unit and settlement fission appears to have increased. Settlements decrease in size-the reverse of Gilman's prediction. The implication is that the use of technologies requiring higher initial energy investments cannot directly or solely account for the complex process of fission and population redistribution. In fact, it appears in this case to have merely speeded it up (Bankoff and Greenfield n.d.). The survey data recovered in 1977 by the Lower Morava Archaeological Project (Bankoff, Winter, and Greenfield 1980) show several differences between sites of the Late Neolithic and those of the Bronze Age. The latter tend to be more closely spaced and smaller, have horizontally displaced occupations, lower artifact and feature densities, and insubstantial structures, rarely contain more than a single occupation stratum, tend not to reoccupy Late Neolithic localities, and show little evidence of the kind of internal organization characteristic of the Late Neolithic (Chapman 1977, Bankoff and Greenfield n.d., McPherron and Ralph 1970). The data indicate an apparent population redistribution from one of great nucleation, with regional population concentrated in relatively few, large, but evenly distributed settlements, to a larger number of smaller and more widespread