Giving the worst part

When I think of trade, I usually have this image of two persons exchanging objects of a certain value. For example, in prehistory, one could probably exchange pieces of good raw material from their region for another material, or a piece of meat… Even if I am not aware of the exact nature of the objects exchanged in the past, my impression is that they were valuable.

But what if the objects traded were actually the less valuable ones? In her paper Cultural Difference and the Density of Objects, Weiner (1994) introduces the notion of keeping-while-giving, where individuals keep their valued possessions, but give mundane objects in order to keep the trade going. She compares different forms of this behavior seen in some indigenous groups of New Guinea in order to better understand its implications.

One of the illustrations of keeping-while-giving is given by the shell exchange in the kula, a political and power system found in the region. In this system, the biggest shells are seen as valuable and “dense”; in a sense, they give status to its owner. In the kula, however, people exchange shells at special occasion in order, I guess, to maintain social bonds and to give a certain impression of equality. The exchange of shells gives everyone the impression that they could, at some point, own one of those ranking ones. In reality, the odds of getting their hands on one are very slim as the owner will usually exchange its ordinary shells instead. In other words, if the trade is few by the desire of getting one “dense” shell, it is actually done with mostly ordinary shells…

A similar situation is found in the Samoa, an archipelago of New Guinea. In there, the exchanged objects are hand-made mats. They are usually exchanged and given on special occasions and it is usually the new ones, the ones without ranking, that are exchanged more often. In the Samoa, a mat can pass from one generation to the next without living the house if it is deemed very valuable. The mats acquire more status as they get “older”, but they also give their status to their owners, in a mutual giving pattern. To add to this situation, the status of the object is also linked to the status of its previous owners, situation that the author compares with New York art dealers who will try to sell their art to important figures…

I thought this paper was relevant because it made me realize something I already knew but had forgotten; that we should not be blinded by our own cultural custom when trying to interpret the archaeological record, or even simply trying to understand other contemporaneous cultures.

At the beginning of her paper, Weiner says that when she first saw women exchanging banana leaf bundles, in the Trobiands, she did not understand what was the purpose of this behavior; according to her judgment, leaf bundles did not have any aesthetic or even use values. It is only after studying the shells of the kula and the mats of the Samoa that she understood that it is not always the valuable objects that are exchanged. Ordinary objects sometimes have as much, if not more, importance as valued ones in social interactions.

What I take from this paper is that, due to the variability in behavior, we always need to question our interpretation. An exotic object found in the archaeological record does not always mean that it was considered as valuable. Nowadays, people dream of novelty; getting a new car is usually more synonymous of success than driving a rusted 1990 one… However, we should not forget that some people attach more importance to the history of an object than to its characteristics. A good analogy would be the value given to very antique, but well-preserved, cars, or even better, Christian relics… They are old and could seem insignificant to an ignorant eye, but their history make them more “dense”, more valuable than anything else.

We need to be careful in assessing value to artifacts, as much as we need to be careful in overlooking those that seem, to us, unimportant.

Reference:

Weiner, A. B. 1994. Cultural Difference and the Density of Objects. American Ethnologist 21(2): 391-403

The importance of ornaments

In this paper, Leavesley (2007) uses the find of a single perforated shark tooth in an assemblage dated between 39,500 and 28,000 BP (uncalibrated) to conclude that humans’ symbolic behavior might have been present before modern humans’ dispersal from Africa. In other words, this article uses a very specific site and situation to bring some fuel to the broad debate of modern behavior’s origins.

Shark tooth pendant from Buang Mebarak (Leavesley 2007: 312, Fig. 2).

The discovery in itself is interesting. The tooth comes from a tiger shark probably as long as 4m, and was perforated using a drilling technique alternating from side to side. With or without perforation, this artifact and the few other non-perforated shark teeth found in the site (5 in total) suggest the presence of fishing in this region. Leavesley uses ethnographies to evaluate the fishing techniques of tiger sharks in New Guinea and concludes that this would have been a dangerous activity that would have necessitated the use of boats and cooperation of fishermen. The technique seems simple and quite effective, but its description gives me the impression that Leavesley assumes it was used 30,000 years ago. He states that this fishing technique was recorded as early as AD 1643, as if this proves its use in prehistory. I think it is obvious that a lack of change in 300 years does not necessarily imply stability over 30,000 years. Here we come back to the hard-to-put-in-practice fact that hunter-gatherers-fishers are not mirrors of the past societies. It is unfortunate that it is used like that in Leavesley’s paper, mostly because the techniques used by Pleistocene fishers of New Guinea do not have any impact on the broad question of ornaments making and symbolic thought. As far as we know, those particular shark teeth could have been gathered from a dead shark, it would not make its perforation less important.

The age of the tooth, if secured, is roughly contemporaneous with an assemblage in Sahul, Australia that yielded a few (22) perforated shell beads. Those two sites put together, one can say that ornaments were made and used as early as 30,000 years ago in Australasia. Leavesley uses this to fuel the debate of modern behavior’ appearance by saying that the presence of ornaments in those two sites suggests its happening before the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa. I think that this is a far-fetched argument. It looks like Leavesley is trying to use a well-known debate to publicize his own discovery. This makes me wonder: do archaeologists always need to relate their research to broad subjects in order to gain some visibility? It seems to me that the discovery of early ornaments is interesting in itself and should be studied deeply in its own context before being related to a larger debate, but this might be the naïvety of the beginner, I guess.

Edit: JRS added a picture of the pendant (Feb. 26, 2009).

Reference:

Leavesley, Matthew G. 2007. A shark tooth ornament from Pleistocene Sahul, Antiquity 81:308-315