Challenges of Abundance

The complications of abundance are not limited to health issues: other difficulties may also ensue. Acquisition of abundant food entails specific challenges for members of delayed-return societies. A good harvest or a large kill cannot simply be appreciated at its moment through gluttonous consumption and then left behind (or at least this cannot always happen): in a delayed-return economy, abundance must be extended through time if it is to support its producers. Such extension entails both logistical and social challenges.

Imagine, for example, that a farming household has reaped an abundant harvest—enough to feed its members amply through the year and perhaps longer. This harvest cannot simply be left in a heap and accessed at will; it must be stored in such a way that the crop (e.g., wheat, chickpeas, millet, rice) remains edible and that at least some of it remains viable for future planting. Keeping even relatively easily storable goods such as grains and pulses edible across months requires space, time, and technical knowledge—and the complexity and challenge of the project increases with the intended duration of storage. Delayed-return societies in tropical regions, or those that rely on relatively perishable foods such as fish, face even greater challenges.

Practical challenges aside, there are potential social concerns for those who have reaped an abundant harvest. These may include not simply envy from the less fortunate but also potentially serious disapprobation for those who keep their wealth to themselves (e.g., Woodburn 1982:440–42, 447). The social costs of (temporary) “wealth” are well documented in many immediate-return foraging societies: for example, among the Ju/’hoansi, successful returning hunters face widespread derision and joking, which are intended to limit any arrogance they may feel as a result of their accomplishments; hunters also risk accusations of impropriety or stinginess if they do not distribute the meat to everyone’s satisfaction (Lee 1993:55–56). Similar requirements may also exist in small-scale delayed-return societies: the eighteenth-century missionary Loskiel (2015:68) asserted that some Delaware “are so lazy that they will not plant at all, knowing that the more industrious cannot refuse to divide their store with them.” In the present-day Andes, barter between families is obligatory, and a pastoral Awatimarka family must always supply a crop-farming partner family with meat, cheese, and other pastoral products, even if the farmers have had a poor harvest and have nothing to provide in return (Kuznar 1995:49). Even our emphatically non-egalitarian society disapproves of those who retain all of their wealth for themselves, as demonstrated by national media articles such as “Trump: The Least Charitable Billionaire” (thesmokinggun.com 2011), “The Mystery of Steve Jobs’s Public Giving” (Sorkin 2011), and “Biden Gave an Average of $369 to Charity a Year” (Kelley 2008).

Far stronger sanctions may exist in societies with greater expectations of unity. It may, in such cultures, be socially risky to construct an atypically large storeroom or to leave food stores visible. In societies with pretenses to egalitarianism, therefore, people may prefer to conceal their food stores—defending not only against theft but also against envy and social condemnation. Thus, for example, Hansen (1974:13–14, cited in Peterson 1993) quotes a Pintupi man as saying, “After preparing [wild tobacco], let us hide it in the shelter, so the women won’t grab it from us. Let us carry it in our pockets. If you keep it where people can see it, they ask you for it, and finish it all up.” Loskiel (2015:68) reported that the Delaware “commonly keep the situation of [their storage pits] very secret, knowing that if they are found out, they must supply the wants of every needy neighbor.” In Madagascar, Mikea foragers returning from the bush “immediately cache their goods within their house, then appear in public space as if they had been there all day” (Tucker 2004:47). Peterson (1993:864) adds that potential receivers may also hide their possessions so that they seem needy and can ask others for more, creating a complex two-sided dance of concealment and disbursement.

An alternative to physical storage of abundance is social storage (sensu Halstead 1989; Halstead and O’Shea 1982; O’Shea 1981): sharing your abundant food with others in the expectation that its recipients will repay you, either with food when you need it or with other goods or social benefits. Food can be shared out across a production group such as an extended family or neighborhood (assuming variability in production between group members), or it may be shared with broader social groups. In either situation, a household’s distribution of its surplus may alleviate obvious economic distinctions and reinforce social bonds between individuals and groups; it may also function as the household’s insurance against future food shortages (reciprocity) and/or as a political investment. Egalitarianism is not a standard characteristic of agriculturalists, but in many—arguably most—foraging societies, rough egalitarianism and sharing are commonly seen as key social values. However, there are several widely cited examples of hunting-and-gathering groups not adhering to egalitarian social norms, notably the hunter-gatherer-fisher groups of the Northwest and California Pacific Coasts (see Arnold 1996 for a broader discussion of complex foragers).

Like others before us, we suspect that early agricultural villages are likely to have retained elements of an egalitarian and community-oriented ethos—an ideology wherein high values were placed on social equality and on group unity. This ethos would only partially have been a relict of an ancient hunter-gatherer egalitarian imperative, however. Early farmers would have had several additional and ongoing incentives to guard social comity by minimizing social disparities. One classic and powerful motive for maintaining communal goodwill derives from the fact that small-scale, non-industrial agropastoral production is inherently risky: the amount of food available to each household is going to vary from one year to the next, to the point that “a substantial degree of domestic economic failure is characteristic of [a] primitive economy ([Sahlins] 1974:69)” (cited in Halstead 1989:70). Sahlins elaborates that in such situations, the basal economic unit may be the individual household, but these households can enjoy only short-term self-sufficiency (Halstead 1989:73; Hegmon 1991). It is the community that ensures their survival, as households in crisis are supplied by their currently successful neighbors, certain that the tables will be turned in the future (Halstead 1989:73–74; Hegmon 1991). This reality also means that some degree of surplus production should be normative among agriculturalists: production above standard household subsistence requirements is not necessarily excess production but serves as an essential buffer against annual variability (Halstead 1989; Oka and Kuijt 2014b).

Risk reduction would not have been early farmers’ sole rationale for getting along with their neighbors. Crop monitoring is best done by many sets of eyes, and crop-farming neighbors would have been “in it together” when it came to maintaining viable seed stock and local crop landraces. In general, since both crop farming and pastoralism can benefit from at least periodic involvement of groups rather than solely that of scattered individuals, early agriculturalists would have had multiple reasons to emphasize social unity rather than fragmentation. At the same time, individual households—farming different plots of land, raising different numbers of children, experiencing different states of health—are likely to have produced different amounts of food in different years. In such a scenario, we hypothesize that private abundance—specifically large amounts of food produced by a single household—would have been socially fraught.

We propose (following ethnographic suggestions) that early farmers may therefore have employed the following strategies to cope with the challenges of differential abundance.

Table 8.1 shows these strategies’ predicted material correlates.

We now use the Anatolian Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük as a case study to test our expectation that private abundance would have presented early farming households with significant social challenges.

Çatalhöyük: A Case Study

Neolithic Çatalhöyük sits in the Konya Plain of central Anatolia. Famous for its extraordinary size (13.5 hectares at its greatest extent, with a population that would have numbered in the thousands of people), remarkable artistic wealth, and densely agglomerated architecture (Hodder 2006; Mellaart 1967), the site also provides rich artifactual, architectural, and ecofactual evidence (e.g., Hodder 2005a, 2005b, 2007, 2013a, 2013b) with which to assess the effects of abundance on an early agricultural population.

Predicted Coping Strategy #1: Concealment

We begin with evidence for the concealment of abundance. At Çatalhöyük, food storage facilities as well as processing equipment are typically found in the side rooms of structures. Bins, which were used for food storage, were primarily located in side rooms well out of visitors’ immediate sight lines (Bogaard et al. 2009; figure 8.1). Main room bins have been found in three buildings, but in all three cases those bins—which are situated near or en route to side rooms—were added late in the buildings’ use-lives and are plausibly interpreted as “overspill” facilities (Demirergi et al. 2014).

Figure 8.1. Side room versus main room bins in fully excavated buildings at Çatalhöyük. Modified from Demirergi et al. 2014:figure 7.5.

In burned Building 52 (figure 8.2), the distribution of edible ecofact concentrations suggests that bags of food were likewise kept in the side room (Twiss et al. 2008, 2009). Elsewhere at the site, botanical clusters, phytolith traces, and plaster impressions testify to broad use of perishable storage containers; these are found both inside and outside of bins but commonly appear in side rooms (Atalay and Hastorf 2006; Bogaard et al. 2009). Such storage is portable, and we cannot know where else food bags or baskets might also have been kept or where they may have been taken for consumption.

Figure 8.2. Primary deposits of (a) botanical and (b) faunal remains inside burned Building 52 (Bogaard et al. 2010:figure 2).

Food-processing traces commonly appear in main rooms but are present in side rooms as well. Intriguingly, plant-processing facilities and debris were discovered in the side rooms of the three buildings, which had atypically high proportions of side room space: whereas side rooms usually constitute 20 percent to 30 percent of a building’s floor area, in these three they totaled up to 50 percent of floor area. This may indicate that when possible, Çatalhöyük’s residents preferred private processing as well as storage of their food; direct evidence of such side room processing (de-husking) was recovered in Building 77 (Bogaard et al. 2014; Demirergi et al. 2014). In general, the data are consistent with the hypothesis that the farmers of Çatalhöyük largely concealed their domestic food resources and associated food-production activities from their neighbors.

Predicted Coping Strategy #2: Dispersal of Food Outside the Individual Household

At Çatalhöyük, food appears to have been consumed primarily at the level of the household. The scale of storage facilities—measured as bin volumes and as side room floor space—is reasonably analogous to the food “pantry” storage component of recent communities in the surrounding Konya Plain (these communities maintain additional “surplus” and fodder storage space; Bogaard et al. 2009:figure 10b). This is sufficient to feed roughly six house occupants for one-and-a-half to two years or for one year while maintaining a small surplus in case of need (Bogaard et al. 2009). As the houses are built immediately against one another, there is limited room for them to expand if over time the fields or the family should prove unusually productive: storage capacities would have been largely set at the time of construction. No large-scale or outdoor storage facilities or locations have been identified. The scale of built storage is thus consistent with production of a “normal surplus” (Halstead 1989) only; accumulation of food above and beyond domestic subsistence needs (“excess,” in the sense of Oka and Kuijt 2014b) does not appear to have been a planned-for eventuality.

Cooking and serving pots are small, suggesting primarily or entirely household-level use: no vessels suggest large-scale food distribution (Demirergi et al. 2014; Yalman, Özbudak, and Gültekin 2013). Macrobotanical, phytolithic, and ground-stone evidence points to glume wheat being stored as spikelets, then de-husked and ground for cooking as needed (Bogaard et al. 2013; Demirergi et al. 2014). The distribution of husk waste indicates that de-husking habitually occurred indoors (in both main and side rooms) and at a scale suggesting preparation for a co-residential household-sized group. Meanwhile, all fixed grinding facilities are located indoors, and portable grinding tools are mostly found in side rooms (Wright, Tsoraki, and Siddall 2013). We cannot know if the portable tools were used or only stored in these most private of spaces: Wright (2014:15) describes the site’s small planoconvex querns as “highly portable items, easily removed from bins for use anywhere. They constitute a small-scale mobile processing system, under household control, involving carefully stored private property.” Nonetheless, the evidence clearly points to more interest in food concealment than in food distribution. Not all cooking was done indoors: there are small fire spots and small grinding stones in Building 65’s enclosed “yard,” but this is still a relatively private space. In general, we have strong evidence for food being stored, prepared, and consumed primarily at the level of the individual household or co-residential unit.

Yet evidence for dispersal of food across households does exist. Notably, there are large outdoor fire installations in “yards” in Çatalhöyük’s Level South P (Bogaard et al. 2014; Demirergi et al. 2014; Regan and Taylor 2014). Ashy deposits from these large outdoor hearths and ovens contain plant food preparation/processing residues, indicating that they were in fact used for cooking at least some of the time (Bogaard et al. 2013, 2014), and their sheer scale and positioning strongly suggest the involvement of relatively large groups. Located at the edge of one of the largest unenclosed areas yet found at Çatalhöyük, these fire installations were surely in visible use by multiple houses.

Additional and much more widespread evidence comes from numerous clusters of bones that we infer were deposited in individual events: that is, we interpret them as piles of leftovers from single meals. G. Arzu Demirergi (in Demirergi et al. 2014) has evaluated the amount of meat represented by these bone clusters to estimate the number of people plausibly involved in (some) meat-sharing events. Using bone weight as a proxy for meat weight and averaging multiple authors’ suggested dry-bone-to-meat-weight conversion factors, Demirergi calculates that the largest cluster would represent more than 40 kg of usable meat (40,990 g) and the smallest cluster only a quarter-kilo of meat (275 g). The average cluster deposit represents more than 6.5 kg of usable meat (6,660 g). Demirergi stresses the sheer variety of scale that characterizes the consumption events, modeling sharing events from as few as 2 to perhaps as many 1,000 people. The average cluster represents meat for between 13 and 222 people, or perhaps roughly between 2 and 44 co-residential families (Demirergi et al.)—clearly, supra-household food sharing.

The food at such meals could have been provided in a potluck fashion, with every attending household contributing a theoretically equal portion of food to the communal table (cf. Varien, Potter, and Naranjo, this volume). Such a practice would have been socially integrative, and the gracious ignoring of any inequities in contributions could have papered over smallish distinctions in household economies in a form of concealed food distribution. Alternatively, some household(s) could have hosted the event, providing the majority or all of the food. In such cases, host houses may have commemorated their generosity, displaying souvenirs of their moments of triumph or power (Twiss 2008).

At Çatalhöyük, remains of both wild and domestic cattle—symbolically prominent food animals—were displayed conspicuously in some houses. A single adult aurochs would have provided on the order of 300 kg of usable meat, and evidence for meat storage at Çatalhöyük is very limited, so supra-household distribution of meat almost certainly occurred after every aurochs hunt or cattle slaughter. Such slaughters surely occurred with some regularity, as cattle bones constitute 23 percent (NISP) of the faunal assemblage at the site (Russell et al. 2013:table 11.1). Displays such as an aurochs cranium in a centrally placed main room niche next to a bench studded with multiple aurochs horns (Building 52: Farid 2014; Twiss et al. 2008) or pairs of aurochs horns embedded in pillars directly opposite a house’s main entry (Building 77: House 2014) strongly suggest that these households participated in events where meat was distributed—perhaps communal eating events such as feasts or perhaps divisions of raw meat after a kill—and indicate that these events were socially important enough to have deserved commemoration in arguably the most visible locations in each house.

Thus, data exist to support our expectations that both food concealment and food dispersal were strategies in use at Neolithic Çatalhöyük. The data further suggest that those two strategies related predominantly to plants and animals, respectively. We speculate several reasons for this pattern, from the inherent differences in basal unit size of grains versus livestock to the differences in their display potential and durability. The plant versus animal contrast might also relate at least in part to Hegmon’s (1991:313–14) point that food sharing can itself be a risk in agricultural societies, as it depletes household reserves in potentially marginal situations. While the estimated proportions of plant versus animal foods in the Çatalhöyük diet will be refined through ongoing work on plant carbon and nitrogen isotope values, it is plausible that crops provided the bulk of site nutrition (cf. Pearson 2013). Habitually (but not necessarily entirely) securing those crops for domestic use might have constituted the best option for early agropastoralists, minimizing the risk of dispersing their most needed staples even as less calorically key but symbolically prominent animal foods were shared out to create and maintain social bonds that might be called upon in case of emergency (see Bogaard et al. 2009, 2010; Demirergi et al. 2014; Twiss 2012 for more discussion of plant versus animal uses and treatment at Çatalhöyük).

Diachronic Change?

While the patterns identified here are broadly valid throughout the site’s occupation, a few mid-sequence developments might signal subtle diachronic shifts in attitudes at Çatalhöyük toward abundance and concealment. Household-scale cooking pots increase midway through the occupation, coinciding with an increase in the proportion of meat cooked off the bone rather than on it (as reflected in changing patterns of cut marks on bones): these changes may indicate an increase in meat stewing vis-à-vis roasting. Roasting is often associated with feasting in ethnographic contexts (Wandsnider 1997): a decline in roasting in favor of small-scale stewing might reflect a proportional increase in private domestic meals over supra-household food sharing. The data for this are tenuous, however, and at present no evidence suggests clearly that Çatalhöyük’s occupants altered their strategies for handling abundance at any point in their centuries-long occupation of the site.

Conclusion

Archaeological data from the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia are consistent with our hypothesis that abundance would have been a socially complicated good in early agricultural society. We cannot reconstruct the proportions of food that were distributed across households, and it is theoretically possible that supra-household food sharing functioned at Çatalhöyük as it usually does in our society: as important social glue but not as a required element of community participation. However, it is clear that food was shared across households and that such sharing was commemorated by individual houses. It is equally clear that these houses also concealed their food stores from general sight.

Acknowledgments. We thank Monica Smith for the invitation to participate in her 2014 SAA session on surplus and for the enthusiasm, energy, and gracious efficiency with which she has assembled this volume. We thank Carola Borries and Catherine Markham for their help with the primatology literature.