Let us start by ancient hunter-gatherers, the ones who get the worst press: they are represented as simple, primitive, and not very careful with the environment. The representation has it that those nomads of the past were constantly struggling against the elements, defending themselves from a hostile environment that did not offer them enough resources in the way of food and shelter to have a decent, less difficult life. It follows from this model that these peoples, who were always at the brink of sheer starvation, spent most of their time trying to get food and shelter, which is tantamount to saying that they were too busy to dedicate time and energy to undertake activities unrelated to the production and reproduction of life – that is, activities without relation to subsistence patterns. From this academic perspective, it is with the practice of agriculture that certain activities not related to subsistence get better chances to take place.
However, scholars like Marshall Sahlins proposed, in an article from the mid-1960s (Sahlins 1968) that he later developed in his influential 1972 book Stone Age Economics, a hypothesis that presented hunter-gatherers under a different light: as the original affluent society (Sahlins 1972, 166). In his view, high-mobility people whose subsistence pattern is based on hunting, fishing, and collecting know their environment very well and take advantage of all its resources, thus being able to provide for themselves in ways that minimize the amount of time dedicated to the procurement of food, to the point that “half the time the people seem not know what to do with themselves” (Sahlins 1972, 11). Of course, this hypothesis has been criticized and, over the years, it has become more nuanced – among other reasons, because it is not advisable to incur into generalizations when human groups are so different from each other: there is no such thing as a universal template for hunter-gatherers – but it was important, in its heyday, for the refutation of the predominant view that represented them as fragile people at the mercy of the elements.
Let us now discuss a number of studies that helped view hunter-gatherers in a different light, leading to the discussion of some of the assumptions about their relation to monumentality. Several years ago, archaeologists like Jon Gibson and Joe Saunders, working on the archaic mounds of the US Southeast, reached the conclusion that the earthworks known as Indian mounds (human-made earthen elevations) located in the US Southeast (Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, and other locations) were the work of peoples without agriculture. These mounds were built, in some cases, 5,400 years ago (Watson Brake, extensively studied by Saunders, is a case in point), and they were the product of societies without agriculture. This was something unexpected, to say the least, because archaeologists had trouble picturing nonagricultural societies staying at a place for long periods of time and with free time to construct massive works that required, without a doubt, a significant organization of the community as a whole – the construction of the mounds requires great quantities of earth and, therefore, a high number of human labor hours.
Thus, a new model started to emerge: it was possible to view these societies (the mound builders of the archaic period) as capable of producing monumental collective works without having developed agriculture first. It is societies like the one known as Poverty Point that prompted some scholars to review the old evolutionary model. This complex is a very big site located in northeastern Louisiana, which contains a number of mounds and embankments. The historical period and culture that bear its name cover the years 3,730 to 3,350 BP and it extends over a large area of the Lower Mississippi Valley from a point near the conjunction of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The artifacts that characterize this culture are made of rocks not available locally, which means their makers must have had to import them. Trade, then, must have been very important for the people who built the earthworks.
The series of questions that places like Poverty Point posed were very difficult to understand for people working on the old paradigm. Those questions include, according to Jon Gibson:
How did the conditions for large-scale construction appear at Poverty Point while everyone else in America north of Mexico was still following a simpler way of life? Was Poverty Point one of the first communities to rise above its contemporaries to start the long journey toward becoming a truly complex society? If Poverty Point did represent the awakening of complex society in the United States, how and why did it develop? Was it created by immigrants bearing maize and a new religion from somewhere in Mexico? Was it developed by local peoples who had been stimulated by ideas from Mexico? Did it arise by itself without any foreign influences? Did it come about without agriculture? Could hunting and gathering have sustained the society and its impressive works?(1999: 1–2)
The responses to those questions, implicit or explicit, show us an academic community that believed, 40–50 years ago, that such a large site like Poverty Point must have been the abode of a large, permanently settled, and therefore complex society. As I mentioned earlier, the prevailing idea at that time was that complex societies developed thanks to agriculture. However, no plant remains have ever been found at the site. The prejudice in favor of agriculture as a trigger of social complexity is such that even Gibson is very cautious when he talks about the food production and consumption at the site:
It was impossible to tell if Poverty Point people had farmed, or if they had made a living some other way, such as by intensively gathering native wild plants or by hunting and gathering along the especially bountiful narrow environmental seams where uplands joined the Mississippi floodplain. We still do not have much information about foods eaten by Poverty Point peoples, but we have enough to be sure about one thing. Poverty Point peoples were not corn farmers. They were hunter-gatherers. We are only beginning to find out what they ate. We have more information about meat than plants, because bones are more resistant to decay through time and are more easily recovered by standard excavation methods.(1999: 12–13)
This attitude is understandable for at least two reasons: first, because Gibson himself had the same prejudices archaeologists had, in general, vis-à-vis so-called “primitive” societies and cultural complexity, and second, because it is always extremely difficult to go against commonly accepted knowledge – that is, it was hard to go against the dominant paradigm in the discipline. If we look at the questions posed by Gibson himself, we will see, between the lines, some of the anxieties that haunt archaeologists even today. One of them is the relationship of agriculture to social complexity, as we have already seen. Yet an even more important one is present throughout the whole series of questions: the one that has complexity itself, as a concept, at its center. That is, I believe, one of the more serious problems faced today by those of us concerned with the past of Indigenous peoples.
If one looks at the questions carefully, there is a constant tension between the pair of concepts “simple/complex,” which is always resolved, at least value-wise, in favor of the latter. In this context (that of the disciplines produced by Western knowledge apparatuses and institutions) complex is better or more desirable than simple. Complex, according to the above-mentioned questions, are those communities that “rise above” (to quote Gibson literally) their contemporaries. Now we see another dichotomy enter the scene: above/below. “Complex” and “above” go together, while their opposites are “simple” and “below.” The axiology these oppositions propose is based on a series of Western concepts and prejudices that philosopher Jacques Derrida