Bioarchaeological perspectives on societal "collapse"

On November 30th, 2016 (yes, I'm that far behind on my posts...), UNCG's Student Anthropological Society and University Archaeological Association sponsored a talk by Appalachian State University's Gwen Robbins Schug, a bioarchaeologist who, among other things, explores social change in first and second millennium BC South Asia.

The idea of societal collapse, and how past societies either fail or succeed has, thanks to popular works from scholars like Jared Diamond, entered the mainstream media in recent years. Gwen argued that these works (which are often written not by anthropologists who study human-environment interactions but by non-specialists) perpetuate misconceptions or even outright myths about the "collapse" of societies. One of the most pervasive is that the process of societal disintegration invariably results in competition and violence. Gwen also questioned the use of the word "collapse." If, by invoking this term, we mean the total collapse of a political structure, then history and archaeology tell us that true "collapses" are actually not that common at all. What is needed, Gwen went on to argue, is a shift from the idea of violent collapses to human resilience in the face of major socio-ecological change. What happens, in other words, to those people who remain, and how do they do it?

Gwen used her work with human skeletal material that dates to just after the "collapse" of the famous Indus Valley Civilization as an example of this approach. Just before 1000 BC, or about 1,000 years after the Indus "collapse," skeletons in the area showed statures (a proxy of overall health) comparable to historical populations with access to sophisticated health care. She then showed that while there were exoduses from major settlements after 1000 BC during times of environmental degradation, many people also remained. Life expectancy plummeted, skeletons showed signed of stunted growth, wasting, and more porous bones, and economies shifted from agriculture to hunting and gathering−but people survived.

The most interesting aspect of her presentation revolved around leprosy in the ancient city of Harappa. During the Early Urban period, the burials of people with leprosy differed little or not at all from the burials of unaffected individuals. However, during the later, Post-Urban period, people with leprosy were buried without their feet. Gwen suggested that those suffering from the disease during the Early Urban period were not seen as social outcasts, while during the Post-Urban period a process of "othering" emerged as people with the disease were recognized as different but, perhaps, not yet treated as unclean social outcasts. Much of these ideas are laid out more fully in a volume that Gwen recently co-edited.  

I also learned that night that Gwen was promoted to Full Professor. Well done and well deserved!

Osteology in the Carolinas 2

Here's another post from my backlog. In February of 2014, I attended the first Osteology in the Carolinas meeting. This year's event was held on February 7, 2015, hosted by UNCG, and organized by our own Bob Anemone. Twelve papers were given, and there were around 20-30 attendees, some from as far away as Virginia and South Carolina. Another set of really interesting papers, one of which was given by a UNCG anthropology undergraduate, Alexa Uberseder (great job, Alexa!) on our work at Olduvai Gorge this past summer. Some snippets from my notes:

• Gwen Robbins Schug (Appalachian State) focused on re-imagining the idea of social collapse, a theme made very famous by Jared Diamond's 2005 book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." In that book, he cites examples of past societies that apparently outstripped their resources and thus collapsed. Gwen made the point that "collapse" may not be the best word, as a detailed examination of the archaeological record indicates that when societies undergo dramatic changes, significant reorganization usually occurs, but the cultural framework remains intact. In fact, what often happens, as her work among South Asian prehistoric sites demonstrates, is that people decide to either remain in cities or move to more rural settings. The latter typically results in a signature that can be misunderstood as a total collapse of society.  
• Megan Perry (East Carolina), who spoke at least year's meeting, and one of her graduate students, Kathryn Parker, both gave talks on attempts to identify the origin of people living in Byzantine and early Islamic times in the Middle East. By assessing the isotopic signatures in food items or geological formations on the landscape, it is possible to determine where people did most of their eating and to track trade routes.
• David Hines (University of Florida and Regime Crimes Liaison Office Mass Graves Investigation Team) summarized some recent work on extracting DNA from skeletons in mass graves in associated with ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Interestingly, they found that some bones are better for producing DNA profiles than others (as it turns out, the pelvis and femur work best).
• The last talk for which I took detailed notes was by Ashley Gosselin-Ildari (Duke University), who spoke about the use of clickers in large, introductory biological anthropology courses to encourage active learning. This was interesting, and timely, since I started using an on-line Student Response System (SRS) called Socrative to achieve the same goal. I am looking forward to hearing the student reaction at the end of the semester.

Overall, another enjoyable get-together...

Ashby Dialogue, Part 2

So, this past Monday (February 24), we had our second Ashby meeting. This session's theme was Human Adaptation to Sedentism and Urbanism. Gwen Robbins Schug and I moderated the session, although Gwen did most of the heavy lifting. We had a great student turnout this time as well.

As an organizing theme for the session, we used Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel (henceforth GGS), which attempts to explain why Europe and her descendants came to dominate today's world. We watched PBS's video adaptation of the book, and Gwen assigned several articles that critiqued Diamond's arguments there and in his other popular book, Collapse. The latter explores the effects of anthropogenic environmental degradation and how this has led to the fall of past societies. One of Diamond's major goals with GGS was to discredit the idea that Western domination was the result of racial superiority. He argued that societies were forced to deal with the hand that geography dealt them and some areas were more conducive to the development of "complex" societies than others based on factors such as the length of the growing season and the presence of domesticateable plants and animals, most importantly draft animals, wheat, and barley. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Diamond has been heavily criticized for what many perceive to be an environmentally deterministic perspective (you can see one of his rebuttals to that charge here).

So, using this as a backdrop, several prominent points arose in our discussions, thanks mainly to Gwen's guidance:

• The first, and probably one of the most infuriating to anthropologists, is that in both GGS and Collapse, Diamond appears woefully out-of-date on his characterization of human societies. His use of terms like "band," "chiefdom," "state," and even the concept of "complexity" are based on decades-old anthropological paradigms. While useful for organizing variation, in practice they unrealistically pigeonhole the vast amount of diversity out there. I wonder how Diamond's definition of "complexity" would change if he were not a Western researcher?
• Collapse also fails to cite the latest archaeological research, which is, after all, the best record we have for the development of past societies. The best example of this comes from his discussion of Easter Island (known to those that live there as Rapa Nui). In Diamond's scenario, reckless Polynesians chopped down thousands of trees in order to transport those iconic stone statues (known as mo'ai). While this story certainly raises the issue of how fragile ecosystems truly are and how destructive humans can be, the archaeology tells a very different version. Gwen had us read a fascinating article by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo that demonstrates (1) deforestation was largely the result of introduced rats that ate palm nuts and thus prevented forest regeneration and (2) the huge statues were not moved on tree rollers anyway (they were probably dragged, upright, with ropes).
• Diamond's books are attractive because they provide unicausal explanations for very complex phenomena. In GGS, for example, it was all about agriculture: the raising of crops (wheat and barley) created food surpluses, which encouraged the domestication of draft animals, which led to social stratification and, ultimately, to the "complex" state-level societies that came to dominate the world today. However, these sorts of explanations, even when they work for a particular time and place, rarely apply to ALL times and ALL places. The native peoples of North America's Pacific Northwest, for example, developed very complex societies based largely on a fishing, not a farming, economy. 
• This whole issue of societal "collapse" is also problematic. Several people brought up the fact that societies rarely, if ever, fully collapse but, rather, undergo a long decline where people typically move away from the population centers into the hinterlands. 
• We also agreed that, while Diamond's arguments have their flaws, he is doing what many an anthropologist has failed to do: bring these "big picture" issues to a popular audience.  

References:

Diamond, J (1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton, New York.

Diamond, J (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Penguin Books, London.

Hunt, TL, Lipo, CP (2010). Ecological catastrophe, collapse, and the myth of "ecocide" on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). In (McAnany, PA, Yoffee, N, Eds) Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, pp. 21-44.  

Osteology in the Carolinas

I attended the first meeting of the Osteology in the Carolinas Interest Group (OCIG) this past Saturday (2/8). The event was organized by Gwen Robbins Schug (Appalachian State) and Dale Hutchinson (UNC-Chapel Hill) and was held at UNC-Chapel Hill. The purpose of the group is to be "a gathering focused on the analysis and interpretation of human skeletal remains from contexts pertinent to bioarchaeology, forensic anthropology, and paleoanthropology." In his introductory remarks (after showing off a hilarious t-shirt ode to syphilis), Dale noted that most researchers with these interests often fall between traditional disciplinary boundaries, so the group was meant to fill that gap.

Thirteen papers were given, and I would say that there were between 20-30 attendees. I was only able to stay for part of the morning session, but those papers that I did see were very interesting. Some snippets from my notes of the meeting:

• Chin-hsin Liu (Appalachian State) presented on the bioarchaeology of Bronze and Iron Age burials from Thailand. It was nice to hear from an area and time period about which I know almost nothing. Chin-hsin did say that many of the skeletons could not be analyzed in detail since they are left exposed by the state for tourism. Isotopic data indicate that populations tended to eat more-or-less the same diets even as they experienced a number of techno-sociological changes from the Bronze to Iron Ages.
• Sara Juengst, a PhD student from UNC-Chapel Hill, spoke about her research in the Titicaca Basin of Bolivia. She discussed how strontium isotope data can be used to identify the geographic area where individuals grew up and lived. Using this data, she found that a couple of the analyzed burials contain "non-local" individuals that were, perhaps, she suggested, pilgrims from other regions.
• Chuck Hilton, our colleague at UNCG, gave a really interesting talk on his research with human remains from Alaska. Essentially, he is interested in tracking skeletal changes associated with the shift from caribou- to whaling-based subsistence economies among Alaskan foraging populations a couple thousand years ago at a site called Point Hope. Chuck noted that data on the skeletal health of forager populations tends to be limited, as they are highly mobile and do not typically produce large cemeteries. Luckily, there are around 400 skeletons from this site, and Chuck found, intriguingly, that the folks practicing whaling were much less healthy than the earlier, caribou-hunting, people. Tuberculosis was especially prevalent in the former population (Chuck suggested that this could be linked either to increased marine mammal consumption or contact with infected NE Asian populations). The question becomes, of course, if whaling had such negative repercussions for health, why practice it? I was wondering if this isn't an example of costly signaling−whaling is, after all, a dangerous and, as Chuck put it, "boom or bust" proposition, so perhaps the individuals that engaged in it gained added prestige (and, thus, mating opportunities). I'll have to get his take on this.
• Megan Perry (East Carolina) talked about her team's work at the very famous site of Petra (you may recognize the picture below from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade−this is the city's treasury building). Orthodox thinking tells us that as a large, cosmopolitan urban center, Petra would have been ridden with diseases. However, preliminary analyses of the human remains suggests a surprisingly healthy population, and Perry and her team plan on testing this hypothesis further. 

  

  The treasury building at the ancient Nabataean city of Petra (courtesy of UNESCO).

• The last talk that I was able to hear was from Dan Temple (UNC-Wilimington). He was looking at human life history trade-offs with a collection of Jomon skeletal remains. Some background: bodies only have so much energy to delegate to various tasks like growth, maintenance, and reproduction, and life history theory is interested in understanding how the body uses these limited resources. Almost all individuals undergo some sort of stress early in development (low birth weight, disease, etc.), and human physiology is plastic enough to devote extra energy to combat these. The question is how does this impact the rest of an individual's life? Temple tested two models: (1) that these early stressors actually better prepare individuals for other setbacks later on; and (2) that the extra energy used early on in development actually makes those individuals more susceptible to later insults (a "borrow now, pay later" sort of idea). Using linear enamel hypoplasias, which are imperfections in the formation of tooth enamel that reflect episodes of stress, Temple found that those individuals affected by hypoplasia earlier on in their lives had more pathological conditions later on and lower life expectancy. This supports the "borrow now, pay later" hypothesis.

There were a number of other talks that I'm sorry I missed, including our department head, Bob Anemone, who talked about his predictive geospatial modeling, Steve Churchill (Duke), who discussed new hominin discoveries in South Africa, and Mark Teaford (High Point University), who talked about the latest in dental microwear. Looking forward to attending this get-together in the future.