Paper short abstract:

The paper addresses social organization at Çukuriçi Höyük, an Early Bronze Age site in western Anatolia from anthropological perspectives. It showcases how material evidence of sharing and competition between households allows us to infer egalitarian, hierarchical, and/or heterarchical relations.

Paper long abstract:

Inferring egalitarian relations for societies for which we do not have a record of whether egalitarianism as a notion existed, remains challenging. In the absence of a writing system, state, and legislation, through which (in)equality may be imposed top-down, the Early Bronze Age archaeological record from western Anatolia offers us an insight into a place at the boundaries of the Early States. By comparing archaeological evidence from different socio-spatial units – such as households – to each other, social relations can be inferred. Such a bottom-up perspective allows us to examine the local, people-centered motivations for a specific organization of their social worlds. At the same time, linking the insights of relations between households to a top-down approach allows us to examine a particular social structure or social order against the archaeological data. Have dwellers at the settlement of Çukuriçi Höyük (beginning of 3rd millennium BC) organized themselves in more-or-less egalitarian, hierarchical, or heterarchical terms? How egalitarian can a sedentary, metal-producing society be? What local practices, directed against the emergence of states, can be inferred from Çukuriçi? These questions will be addressed through the method of household archaeology combined with historical anthropology and anthropological comparison. While being unable to access indigenous imagination and nightmares, the evidence of the Near Eastern weight system in western Anatolia attests to the embeddedness of Çukuriçi in the large-scale network of the Near Eastern Early States. Nevertheless, dwellers at Çukuriçi continued sharing metalworking knowledge and hunting trophies rather than hoarding goods and information within a particular household.