Selective complexity and adaptive mortuary behavior - PNAS

Aug 24, 2012 - Trends in human history are in- creased cultural ... the built environment, and mortuary ex- pression. ... built up across the coastal landscape,.
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Tom D. Dillehay Department of Anthropology and Center for Latin American Studies, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235

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rends in human history are increased cultural complexity and social differentiation and marked beginnings, endings, reversals, and turns and twists at different scales (1). Within these trends, the creation of social groups and communities is an active process that involves cultural pluralism, ideology, negotiated identity, economy, the built environment, and mortuary expression. In most societies, death implies passage from a visible, living state to an invisible, buried one. This is not the case with the ancient Chinchorro society of the coastal Atacama Desert of north Chile and south Peru. In PNAS, the observations reported by Marquet et al. (2) on the mortuary practices of this society allow us to better understand the cultural processes and environmental conditions that connected human history, cognition, and ideology to reproduce small-scale maritime communities through repeated encounters with the artificially mummified cadavers of the dead. Organic matter such as the human body is naturally well preserved in the extremely arid environment of the desert. As presented by the authors (2), mummified remains were deliberately placed in shallow, visible graves with few offerings, and continuously removed and manipulated for interaction with the living. The Chinchorro society practiced two types of mummification: natural and artificial. Natural preservation involved burial in the ground, where the body was desiccated and preserved. Cadavers were artificially mummified and evidently socially distinguished by painting them red and black, coating them with mud, or bandaging and cording them with plant material. For practical purposes, natural desiccation was sufficed to preserve bodies: artificial treatment was preservation overkill. Marquet et al. (2) argue that the artificial treatment appeared in times of increased marine resources and fresh groundwater between approximately 7,500 and 4,500 y ago. This abundance led to a growth in the human population and thus the increase in the dead, as well as the appearance of new technologies, including mummification and tools for resource procurement. Throughout this period, visible burial sites built up across the coastal landscape, which led to more interactions between the living the dead. These increased encounters formed part of the cognitive map of people’s daily lives and played a central role in the making of the Chinchorro www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1212756109

Fig. 1. A basket fragment made of reeds and dyed in blue from the Huaca Prieta site on the north coast of Peru. The fragment represents a sophisticated basketry technology that coastal foragers and cultivators developed in the region between 7,500 and 4,500 y ago.

culture and the emergence of social complexity. One of the most studied topics in archaeology is the meaning of mortuary patterns. We know that burial remains are not incidental residues, but represent the direct and intentional consummation of conscious behavior. Many researchers have assumed that the social structure of a society is directly reflected by burial practices (3). That is, an individual’s treatment at biological death can be predictably related to the social identity that the individual had in life. An alternative view sees mortuary patterns related to ideology, symbolism, ritual, and history rather than just social organization (4). Not known by Marquet et al. (2) is the social, ideological, and symbolic meaning of the Chinchorro mummies. However, the authors are able to make the important distinction between biological death and social death (5, 6). The former is when the physical body ceases to function. The latter implies that the deceased stays alive as long as (s)he continues to interact socially and visibly with the living in societal events. In this regard, the biologically dead become socially active participants. The value of this unique mortuary approach is that it challenges our ideas about the nature of the relationship between the living and the dead and the physical manipulation of cadavers as shown by the

complex preservation techniques of bodily decomposition, artificial reconstruction, and coating or sealing (7). As Arriaza (ref. 8, p. 30) has expressed: “Chinchorro mummification practices can be interpreted as a system to achieve continuity with life, rather than regeneration of life. . . In other words, in Chinchorro ideology, the dead became an extension of the living. . . That is, artificial mummification provided a resting place for the soul and therefore the mummies were considered living entities.” Further, painting and sealing the bodies suggest that the dead were given an identity and an aesthetic life-like quality. Although the ideological meaning of these practices is not clear, mummies seem to have been instrumental as socializing tools for the self-awareness and cognitive development of the living. As discussed by Marquet et al. (2), studies reveal that religious thoughts often derive from people’s cognitive capacities when they encounter certain phenomena such as dead bodies (9), which are objects of great attraction and curiosity in most societies. Does the information provided by Marquet et al. (2) tell us anything about

Author contributions: T.D.D. wrote the paper. The author declares no conflict of interest. See companion article 10.1073/pnas.1116724109. E-mail: [email protected].

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Selective complexity and adaptive mortuary behavior

how these early communities were formed? Evidence presented by the authors indicates that small Chinchorro settlements spread at low densities across the coast, mainly using burials with symbolic values to attach themselves to the landscape to form larger, more extended groups of the living and the dead. These settlements formed during repeated construction phases and burial rituals, which would have imbued them with social memory of, and connectivity to, the past and future. The accustomed daily life of these small communities must have been drastically undermined or shattered by the death of a kinsman. It is precisely in these critical circumstances when people’s routines are more important (10). The visible presence and active role of mummies in communities must have represented an attempt to keep the daily routines of the dead alive, which, in turn, must have been linked to the making of the living self. As extensions of the living, the dead thus constituted an important component of the living settlements as they spread and reproduced their identity within a wider coastal setting. Not known is why the capacity to build and maintain communities that were larger than the circle of the living was such an important part of the Chinchorro ideology. Moreover, it is clear that the Chinchorro living were not ontologically detached from the dead any more than they were from their own body parts. Both the living and the dead were constituted as persons through the manifold relations they kept and built with each other to which they were intrinsically and intimately tied. This relationship was only activated by human agency in performing it and bringing it out, including the living keeping the dead as active members, even after biological death. For this reason, the conscious projection or communication of the living self through the overpreserved and decorated dead can only be a surface symptom of a deeper, preexisting, and mostly unconscious ontological relation, in which the living and the dead were one and the same. It thus seems that the well being of the self needed an elab-

orate burial technology in the more material sense of the term, a burial routine through which the living and the dead mutually constituted each other. Curiously, no other trait of the material culture of the Chinchorro society was as complex as artificial mummification. Chinchorro houses, most technologies, and subsistence practices did not stand out. This uneven development of the material culture occurs in several areas of the Andes from ∼7,500 to 4,500 y ago (Fig. 1) (11). Whereas some areas boomed socially and culturally during most of this period, others never developed beyond a mixed hunter–gatherer lifeway. Whereas some created elaborate burial patterns, others sophisticated technologies, and others food production, other aspects were unelaborated. In other words, it was selective complexity whereby no single society of this period equally developed all social, economic, religious, and ideological parts. There are probably several reasons for this selectivity that relate to a multitude of shifting environmental, cognitive, and cultural factors that require further study. Another key aspect to understanding the Chinchorro society is sedentism or restricted mobility, whereby people live year-round in the same place. Permanency would have been particularly important to Chinchorro communities that were strongly attached to the immobile burial places of the dead. Sedentism is significant because archaeologists presume it not only represents the culmination of a long cultural process of hunters–gatherers settling down in certain environments, but also triggered some groups toward the rise of civilization, as it did with the Chinchorro society. Settling down brings substantial changes to spatially concentrated populations. In addition to increased site size, sedentary sites were new physical configurations, such as the juxtaposition of the living and the dead, or the material identifiers of incipient social differentiation. Based on ethnographic studies (12), we know that a sedentary lifestyle required fundamental transformations in human relations as kin-based social networks became more formalized and supplemented

by other types of social relations, and the way in which the perception of improved opportunities under these conditions must have drawn individuals and households closer together. Studies also indicate that some complex hunters– gatherers actively reproduced and transformed their own histories through daily and commemorative acts at special places across the landscape (1), as the Chinchorro society did with its mummy burials. Such places probably served their communities for many generations as the burial places of founding ancestors, as communal ossuaries, and as a continuing focus for ritual beyond the household or family level. These notions identify the complex hunter–gatherer behaviors of the Chinchorro society as not simply responses to the natural environment but also as strategic choices among a variety of feasible options in which intercommunity relations were critical variables. Above all else, Marquet et al. (2) present a convincing case of the correspondence between climatic causality and human innovation. One of the more interesting findings of this study refers to how shifting environmental conditions may, through their effects on population size, have influenced the emergence and loss of cultural innovation. After lasting for nearly 3,000 y, artificial mummification disappeared approximately 4,500 y ago when climatic conditions became drier and resources once again became limited. The authors attribute the “collapse” of this technology to climate shift and to stochastic drift or “imperfect inference,” the latter referring to a reduced human population pool for learning and thus increased errors in imitating and perpetuating mummification. However, it also is likely that this technology was transformed with meaning to other presently unknown symbolic forms. Despite its few limitations, as discussed by Marquet et al. (2), their work presents an important insight into understanding the commitment of a past society to keeping not just the memory but the spirit and self of the dead alive for the sake of future generations.

1. Rowley-Conwy P (2001) Time, change and the archaeology of hunter–gatherers: How original is the ‘Original Affluent Society’? Hunter-Gatherers: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, eds Panter-Brick C, Layton RH, Rowley-Conwy P (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK), pp 39–72. 2. Marquet PA, et al. (2012) Emergence of social complexity among coastal hunter-gatherers in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 10.1073/pnas.1116724109. 3. Binford LR (1971) Mortuary practices, their study and their potential. Approaches to the Social Dimensions of Mortuary Studies. Society for American Archaeology Memoirs, ed Brown JA (Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC), Vol 25, pp 6–29.

4. Hodder I (1988) Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology (Cambridge Univ Press, Cambridge, UK). 5. Huntington R, Metcalf P (1979) Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge Univ Press, Cambridge, UK). 6. Dillehay TD (1995) Mounds of social death: Mapuche mortuary practice. Tombs for the Living: Andean Mortuary Practice, ed Dillehay T (Harvard Univ Press, Cambridge, MA), pp 281–313. 7. Arriaza BT, Doubrava M, Standen VG, Haas H (2005) Differential mortuary treatment among the Andean Chinchorro fishers: Social inequalities or in situ cultural evolution. Curr Anthropol 46:662–671.

8. Arriaza BT (1995) Beyond Death: The Chinchorro Mummies of Ancient Chile (Smithsonian Inst Press, Washington, DC). 9. Boyer P (2001) Religion Explained: Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (Basic, New York). 10. Giddens A (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Univ California Press, Berkeley). 11. Dillehay TD, ed (2011) From Foraging to Farming in the Andes: New Perspectives on Food Production and Social Organization (Cambridge Univ Press, Cambridge, UK). 12. Lee RB, Daly R (1999) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers (Cambridge Univ Press, Cambridge, UK).

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