01 Patterson 2005 Craft Specialization

01 057570 Patterson (to_d)
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Journal of Social Archaeology
ARTICLE
Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)

ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 5(3): 307337 DOI: 10.1177/1469605305057570
Craft specialization, the reorganization of

production relations and state formation
THOMAS C. PATTERSON
Department of Anthropology, University of California
ABSTRACT
Since the late 1970s, archaeologists have been concerned with the
origins and development of craft specialization in early civilizations.
More recently, some have examined the organization of production,
the identities of artisans, the use and consumption of the goods they
produced, and the cultural and social meanings of those objects. Much
of this literature is rooted in the conceptual framework of societal
evolutionism, which was formulated by eighteenth-century theorists,
who were attempting to account for the rise of capitalist agriculture
rather than the development of precapitalist forms of craft production. This article examines the premises of the conceptual framework
as well as the political-economic and ideological context in which
societal evolutionism was formulated. It suggests that a theoretical
framework derived from Marxs writings after 1857 provides insights
into the organization of craft production and an alternative explanation of the role specialization played in the rise of civilization.
KEY WORDS
classical political economy craft specialization liberal social theory
Marxism production relations proto-industrialization societal
evolution state formation
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Journal of Social Archaeology 5(3)
INTRODUCTION
What roles did craft production and specialization play in the origins of
civilization? How were they related to the concomitant processes of social
differentiation, the increasing division of labor, the formation of village
communities and expanded exchange relations typically associated with this
transformation? These questions have long vexed archaeologists. Between
the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s, V. Gordon Childe (1936/1983, 1958:
16273) theorist of socioeconomic development and life-long socialist
was the first archaeologist to attempt a sustained, socioeconomic analysis
of the rise of civilization (Wailes, 1996). Childes thesis of uneven and
combined development was historically contingent and composed of three
elements: (1) agriculture facilitated surplus production over subsistence
needs and underwrote both technical and social divisions of labor; (2) the
ruling classes in the Mesopotamian lowlands used part of this surplus to
support full-time craft specialists, notably metalsmiths who relied on ores
obtained from the periphery; and (3) since the initial costs on the periphery were underwritten by the lowland elites, development occurred on the
margins of civilization without significant local investment, where supply
was met by independent smiths-cum-traders hawking their wares from
petty chief to petty chief, and innovation was unfettered by bureaucratic
control (Wailes, 1996: 9). It is also noteworthy that Childe (1950/2004)
discussed the development of craft specialization in the context of the
Urban Revolution (the formation of precapitalist states) and posited a
succession of artisans from those attached to the ruling classes to independent, itinerant smiths.
In developing his thesis about the emergence of craft specialization,
Childe, the Marxist, engaged the societal evolutionism of liberal theorists
from Adam Smith through Herbert Spencer to mile Durkheim and incorporated their arguments into his own (Patterson, 2003: 3362). From this
perspective, Childe viewed the rise of full-time craft specialists as part of
increasing social structural differentiation, the emerging interdependency
of food-producers and artisans and the growth of market exchange. The
differentiation of production tasks marked the simultaneous withering
away of the self-sufficiency characteristic of neolithic (agro-pastoral)
communities that produced a surplus and the formation of a new kind of
society characterized by a division of labor and the production of goods for
exchange. The division of labor in the emerging society had three dimensions: (1) the distinctions that prevailed among those individuals who
produced different goods for exchange; (2) the separation of direct producers from those who appropriated their goods and labor power
arguably the distinction between manual and mental labor; and (3) the
simultaneous separation of itinerant artisans from their natal communities
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Craft specialization
and formation of a domestic or household mode of production that

reflected their mode of subsistence. Thus, craft specialization was linked
with production for exchange and with the activities of individuals and
potentially, by extension, their families or households who were removed
at least spatially from the communities to which they belonged. The motor
driving this emerging division of labor and ultimately the rise of urban
society was a technical one, the development of the productive forces (i.e.
the Neolithic Revolution).
From the late 1970s onward as Cathy Costin (1991, 1998, 2001) and John
Clark (1995) have shown a number of archaeologists following Childes
lead have clarified the issues, debated, and refined the notion of craft specialization. These are some of the more informative and insightful conversations
that have occurred in archaeology in the last 30 years constructively critical
yet polite and respectful in tone. Some highlights include the distinction that
Robert Evans (1978) drew between part-time and full-time craft production;
the distinction that Tim Earle (1981) and Elizabeth Brumfiel and Earle
(1987) made between independent artisans and those attached to patrons;
Joan Gero and Cristina Scattolins (2002: 169) observation that the opposition posited between domestic and specialized production not only makes
it impossible to compare the two but also relegates household divisions of
labor to ongoing background work that varies only in uninteresting ways;
and Edward Harriss (2002: 86) question of whether specialized production
was intended for local consumption or export. In the last decade or so, attention has shifted away from the origins and historical development of craft
specialization toward a series of closely related issues: the organization of
production in particular socioeconomic, political and cultural settings; the
social and cultural identities of artisans; the use or consumption of the goods
they produced; and even the cultural meanings attached to those goods.
These have added significantly to our understanding of craft production and
its place in ancient political economies (e.g. Costin, 2004; Schortman and
Urban, 2004; Stein, 1998, Stein and Blackman, 1993).
What has made the conversations so productive is that the participants
have not limited their discussions solely to archaeological data nor claimed,
for the most part, that archaeological evidence is superior to that derived
from historical or comparative ethnographic accounts. Instead, they have
examined the interconnections of data and the practice of archaeology. The
participants have related both data and methods to their conceptual
categories, and they have examined the conceptual categories themselves.
Nonetheless, nagging questions about the historical development of craft
specialization still remain, especially with regard to the dynamics that
occurred during the transitional phase separating pre-state, neolithic
villages from the various forms of early state-based societies. For example,
where and in what contexts did Childes wandering smiths acquire their
knowledge of metallurgy and practical skills in the first place?
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There are several reasons for the persistence of questions about the rise
of craft specialization. The absence of evidence that would confirm or invalidate claims is certainly one reason; however, it is useful to keep in mind that
Childe formulated his thesis nearly six decades ago when fewer data were
available. A more important reason, in my view, is that the language of
societal or cultural evolutionism makes it difficult to examine problems of
historical development that are of interest to archaeologists. This results
from a set of built-in assumptions about exchange, community, the ruralurban divide, distinctions between manual and mental labor, and even
specialization itself. The assumptions are a product of the foundational social
theories we use and of the sociopolitical and ideological contexts in which
they were developed. In the pages that follow, I want to examine this web
of often implicit assumptions that underpin the conceptual categories we use
to explain craft specialization and what theorists, both eighteenth-century
and modern, have said about the organization of production during the early
stages of capitalism, when social life and production were still largely rural
in Western Europe (a region where sociohistorical and economic development is probably better documented than any of the places or periods typically discussed by archaeologists). I would then like to consider how and in
what ways Karl Marx broke with the foundational theories of the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, I would to offer one possible construction, based on
what Marx wrote after 1857, regarding the interconnections of craft specialization, changing property relations, and the rise of states, including the
precapitalist tributary states of interest to archaeologists.
SOCIETAL EVOLUTIONISM: ITS POLITICAL-ECONOMIC

AND IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS
Societal evolutionism arose in the same contexts that facilitated the
development of liberalism and classical political economy. The ideas and
sentiments of liberalism and mercantilism have been intimately linked since
the seventeenth century. These include laissez-faire (the danger of state
intervention), individualism (the needs of the individual constitute the basic
unit of economic policy), utilitarianism (Jeremy Benthams the greatest
happiness of the greatest number), the centrality of commerce or exchange
(as the primary building block of community and as a means of obtaining
wealth and power), and notions about greedy individuals competing for
scarce resources as well as economic rationality (Heckscher, 1955: 469). The
ideas and sentiments have in turn had a profound shaping effect on both
the conceptual frameworks and languages of economic analysis that Adam
Smith, the French Physiocrats and others developed in the eighteenth
century (e.g. Magnusson, 1994; Meek, 1962). Smith (1776/1976, vol. 1:
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1718), for example, argued that modern society began with the advent of
production for exchange in the market and provided three reasons why
people engage in market exchange: interdependence increases productivity; exchange is a natural human propensity; and greed has become a central
feature of human nature in commercial society (Gudeman, 2001: 82). This
web of assumptions also influenced the naturalistic, evolutionary perspective on human history that various French and Scottish Enlightenment
writers, including Smith, formulated from the middle to the end of the
eighteenth century (Meek, 1976; Patterson, 1997; Trigger, 1998: 3041).1 This
discourse was not limited to participants from a single national state or
continent. In slightly different words, the conceptual elements as well as the
rhetorical styles of liberalism, political economy and evolutionism have
been intertwined for more than two centuries. Today, these interconnections are too often unacknowledged or summarily dismissed as trivial,
unimportant, or of antiquarian interest. However, they are important
precisely because they affect the way we think about evidence, draw inferences and present arguments.
The political-economic context in which liberalism, classical political
economy, and societal evolutionism were formulated occurred several
centuries after the dissolution of feudalism in Western Europe.2 In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Americas3 were increasingly
enmeshed in commercial relations, the merchant associations from the
sovereign states of Western Europe argued with increasing vigor that they
should not be encumbered with the taxes and tariffs imposed by feudal
lords. In their view, commerce and the expansion of the market should be
unencumbered since it was the source of wealth and power. Here, the sentiments of the trading companies often coincided with those of would-be
absolutist monarchs who wished to appropriate the revenues obtained by
the nobility in order to use them for their own purposes, most notably to
strengthen their own positions internally and with respect to the monarchs
of other national states. The policies advocated and supported by both the
merchants and monarchs promoted manufactured exports, low wages,
cheap raw material imports and favorable balances of trade (surpluses) that
would yield a net inflow of gold or silver. This was the ideological and
conceptual language of mercantilism. It is important to note that commodity production and wage labor, two defining elements of the capitalist mode
of production, were already realities in the largely rural societies of Western
Europe.
Other worldviews, besides that of the merchants, were voiced from the
1690s onward.4 The most notable, for our purpose here, was that of an
emerging class of agrarian capitalists farmers and husbandmen who
produced foodstuffs and raw materials, such as wool or hides, for local,
regional and national markets. They emphasized the importance of agriculture for restructuring and developing the national economy. Their
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perspectives were championed by John Locke, the French Physiocrats and

Adam Smith, among others who argued with different emphases that agriculture and husbandry were a source of wealth. The circumstances in which
their perspectives were voiced varied according to place and time. For
example, when John Locke wrote in the 1690s, landlords controlled 7075
percent of all cultivable land in England, and the landlord/tenant/laborer
structure that facilitated investment in and the development of rural capitalism was already in place (Brenner, 1976/1985: 489; Tribe, 1981: 35100;
Wood, 1984: 3171). By contrast, throughout the eighteenth century, 75
percent of the French population was composed of peasants who held
4550 percent of [the] cultivable land, often in the form of scattered open
fields (McNally, 1993: 11; Brenner, 1976/1985: 61). Neverthless, many of the
French peasants were impoverished tenants burdened with high rents, low
productivity, low prices on foodstuffs and restrictions on the export of agricultural products; they struggled to be self-sufficient in this still largely rural
society (Jones, 1988: 130; Nikin, 1975: 84). In the 1760s, the French Physiocrats argued that the development of large-scale capitalist agriculture,
which was quite limited at the time, was both part of the natural economic
order (a process guided by natural law) and a means for catching up with
England;5 they also believed that mercantilist policies, which favored
commerce and manufacturing, distorted or corrupted the unfolding of the
natural economic order (Meek, 1962). Adam Smith, the Scottish moral
philosopher whose Wealth of Nations (1776) would later become a foundational text of classical political economy, wrote at a time (the thirdquarter of the eighteenth century) when a majority of the inhabitants of
Scotland, especially in the highlands and the islands, still preferred hunting,
fishing, littoral harvesting and subsistence agriculture to wage labor
(Whatley, 1997: 917). Like Locke and the Physiocrats, Smith considered
agriculture to be the most productive economic sector, whose development
was essential to balanced economic growth (McNally, 1988: 210). He was
also critical of the merchants and manufacturers whose interests he saw as
frequently opposed to those of the public; he argued that, because of their
connection with agriculture, the agrarian capitalists, unlike the merchants
and manufacturers, had a real interest in their country of residence and no
particular reason to obstruct the natural course of economic development
(McNally, 1988: 20910, 2205, 263).
For our purposes, four points are noteworthy. First, the Physiocrats, Smith,
and other advocates for agrarian capitalism were among the earliest and
most influential social theorists to deploy societal evolutionist arguments;
they maintained that human society had progressed through a steadily
unfolding sequence of stages, each of which was based on a different mode
of subsistence: food-gathering and hunting; pastoralism, agriculture and
commerce (Meek, 1976). As Neal Wood (1984: 51) observed, the motors
driving this natural progression variously involved [a] small primitive
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population, movable property, landed property, use production, population

increase and concentration, barter and money, property differentials, dependent labor, exchange production, social conflict, and the eventual emergence
of the state. Second, both the evolutionist scaffolding of human history
proposed by the early theorists of agrarian capitalism and the language of
their rhetorical arguments about development influenced contemporary
writers, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and James Steuart, who did not necessarily share either their worldview or their political allegiances. Third, the
theorists of agrarian capitalism already assumed that merchants were a force
of progress who extended commerce, and that the market:
. . . intensified competition between the hitherto protected crafts of the
different towns [and] . . . ultimately forced the break-up of the complex,
unified crafts into the component parts. The rise of manufacture on the ruins
of the crafts thus brought about a new form of specialization, constituted by
separated units carrying out simplified detail production and a new mode of
co-operation based on the manufactory in which merchants controlled the
semi-skilled labour processes. (Brenner, 1989: 278)
Fourth, the evolutionist/developmentalist discourse came into being at a

time when national societies of Western Europe were still largely rural but
when the rural communities that constituted them and the precapitalist
property relations that maintained those communities had largely been
dissolved. Communities of producers and exploiters whose members
formerly had direct access to the means of production and produced for
subsistence were replaced by economically autonomous landlords, tenants
and wage workers who produced commodities for exchange and secured
portions if not all of their subsistence needs in the market; in a phrase,
community-level property relations and production were replaced by ones
that operated at the level of households or domestic units.
Evolutionist arguments about the interconnections of surplus food
production, specialization and exchange have had profound effects in
archaeology and anthropology. One legacy is that they were the centerpiece
of Childes (1936/1983: 116) thesis that agriculture facilitated the production of surpluses which were used to underwrite the activities of craft
specialists who did not engage in food production. They were accepted
implicitly by writers who are usually portrayed as avowedly anti-evolutionists, e.g. Franz Boas (1920/1940: 285) who wrote that a surplus of food
supply is liable to bring about an increase of population and an increase of
leisure, which gives opportunity for occupations that are not absolutely
necessary for the needs of everyday life (quoted by Clark, 1995: 289).
A second legacy of the evolutionist arguments has been the creation and
reification of a set of beliefs concerning the significance of the dichotomy
between city dwellers and their neighbors in the surrounding countryside.
However, as we have seen, the chasm separating town and countryside,
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which has played so prominently in archaeological theories, was less clear

or pronounced for eighteenth-century writers, like Smith, than it is for those
of us writing in the twenty-first century. Intense processes of urbanization
occurred after the end of the Second World War, and half to two-thirds or
more of the total populations of countries, like the USA or Peru that were
predominantly rural not so long ago, now reside in towns or cities. These
processes have not only obscured or obliterated conditions that prevailed
as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, but also diminished our understanding and
even our ability to appreciate them and their significance.
A third legacy of the linkages between mercantilism, liberalism and
evolutionism (both in and beyond the academy) is the positive valuation
placed on the urban way of life. Esteem is typically granted to commerce,
industry and city life, while agriculture, animal husbandry and the culture
of rural laborers is denigrated or held in disdain. Another aspect of this
legacy is that rural industry was simultaneously more highly regarded than
agriculture and held in less esteem than urban industry. This resonates with
positive valuation placed on mental rather than physical or manual labor.
Phrased differently, towns and cities have been seen as centers of innovation whose new ideas and goods are subsequently adopted by their rural
neighbors (Redfield, 1942/1962). Empirically, much of the manufacturing
that occurred in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe seems to
have taken place in the countryside. This requires us to consider, at least
for a moment, the organization of rural production and industries and their
relations to the town-country divide that was forming at the time.
PRODUCTION RELATIONS AND THE TOWN-COUNTRY

DIVIDE
It is worth reiterating that the theorists of agrarian capitalism wrote at a
time (1) when land constituted the principal base of economic productivity (Fox-Genovese, 1976: 219) and (2) when the operation of the market
was widening from more or less separate and isolated corners of the
economy, or in individual spheres of activity like international trade . . . [to]
the whole area of the economy and the whole range of economic activities
(Meek, 1962: 371). Their explanations typically involved the production of
commodities, i.e. items that were produced for exchange in the market
rather than for use or consumption by the individuals who produced them.
The commodities derived from agriculture and husbandry were foodstuffs
and secondary products, like hides or wool, that could be either consumed
by the individuals who purchased them or further transformed into other
commodities, like shoes or fabrics. Two issues are important. First, was the
purpose of exchange to make a profit (i.e. merchant capital)? Second, who
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controlled production? In medieval Europe, merchants were mainly

concerned with controlling access to markets and to the items that were
produced rather than influencing how production units (households, workshops, or even whole communities) were organized or how workers actually
produced the goods (Hilton, 1992: 18).
In a discussion of the historical development of the division of labor in
agriculture, Smith (1776/1976, vol. 1: 79) noted the existence of a paradox.
On the one hand, he suggested that the separation of the different branches
of labor in subsistence agriculture and stock-raising was much less developed
or clear cut than it was in industry; in his words, the nature of [subsistence]
agriculture, indeed, does not admit of so many subdivisions of labour, nor so
complete a separation of one business from another, as manufactures
(Smith, 1776/1976, vol. 1: 9). He concluded that the lack of specialization
prevented agriculture and stock-raising from developing as rapidly as
industry. On the other hand, he remarked that in every improved society,
the farmer is generally nothing but a farmer; the manufacturer, nothing but
a manufacturer (Smith, 1776/1976, vol. 1: 9, emphasis added). In this
improved (developed) society, the division of labor is sharply defined. In this
developmental stage, the activities of the farmer and the manufacturer were
clearly demarcated, and the two types of specialists were inextricably linked
to one another by exchange. In historical-developmental terms, Smith was
arguing that farming became a more specialized activity than it had been
previously after or in conjunction with the emergence of a division of labor
and exchange (i.e. commodity production). The picture of subsistence
farming that emerges from Smiths discussion of the division of labor is one
marked by seasonality. The high demand for agricultural labor at harvest
times alternated with periods when the demand for labor was lower and
when other material needs could be produced by members of the household
and be used or shared with kinfolk and neighbors. Thus, the households
engaged in subsistence agriculture did not limit themselves exclusively to
agricultural production, because their members also produced handicrafts
and the other necessities of everyday life (Duby, 1968: 1535).6 Each individual engage[d] in a variety of tasks, and [there was] no significant disparity between mental and physical labor (Diamond, 2004: 23).
In the late 1970s, Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jrgen Schlumbohm
(1977/1981) took a related but slightly different tack in Industrialization
before Industrialization. They attempted to theorize the rural roots of industrial production during the transformation from feudalism to capitalism in
Western and Central Europe. Earlier, Smith (1776/1976, vol. 1: 42931) had
remarked that European export industries developed in two distinct ways:
as the offspring of foreign commerce, when merchants imitated foreign
crafts using imported raw materials, like mulberry trees and silkworms, and
as the offspring of agriculture, when household manufactures based on
locally available raw materials were refined. The implication of Smiths
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remarks, from the perspective of Kriedte and his associates, was that at least
some of the early industry in Europe, besides mining and iron work, took
place in the countryside rather than in urban areas as well as contexts where
feudal social relations were in decline and capitalist ones had not yet crystallized. They referred to this phase as proto-industrialization. In their
view, rural industries developed in those parts of the countryside where
there was already a socially differentiated peasantry; where at least some
peasant families could not support themselves on the amount and quality
of land available to them even if they could intensify production; where
there was an elastic labor supply (seasonal unemployment); and where the
powers of local lords or village communities had weakened to the point
where earlier forms of socioeconomic cohesion and homogeneity could not
be maintained. The new social relations driving socioeconomic development in these rural regions were capitalist ones based on commodity
production, market exchange and wage labor; they were not based on the
laws of the family economy [which had] functioned as the engine of protoindustrial growth (Kriedte et al., 1977/1981: 136).7
Kriedte and his associates pointed out that proto-industrialization in
rural areas had a number of consequences. It promoted the development
of skilled artisans. In those industries where the putting-out system
prevailed, notably textiles, merchants came to be more closely connected
with production than their predecessors had been.8 It underwrote the
formation of symbiotic relations between agriculture and industry and the
creation of networks of local, regional and national markets. It also
witnessed the emergence of a group of individuals: merchants, middlemen
and artisans, who, with an infusion of capital, would become agents of industrialization. At the same time, proto-industrialization, which they saw as
geared to quantitative changes in production rather than qualitative
changes in the mode of production, generated a series of contradictions that
became particularly evident during harvest seasons when high demands for
labor outside the factory conflicted with production schedules and priorities of the factory. There were other difficulties as well, particularly with a
putting-out system, in which merchants or middlemen provided raw
materials, like cotton, to households for spinning or weaving. It was difficult to supervise the work, to control the quality of the thread, to prevent
pilferage of the raw materials, or to coordinate the activities of the spinners
with the needs of the weavers. These and other contradictions, notably the
one between the growth dynamics of the family economy and the overall
system forged by proto-industrialization, were resolved, at least temporarily, through mechanization and the centralization of production in factories
located increasingly in towns and cities (Kriedte et al., 1977/1981: 13642).
This unleashed a new set of contradictions.
In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, protoindustrialization and early industrialization witnessed growing concerns
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about work and factory discipline that involved increased supervision, regularization of work schedules and standardization of the workday
(Thompson, 1967/1991). From the owners perspective, it was important to
increase his control over his employees schedules, activities, intelligence
and skills in ways that increased the efficiency of production.9 From the
workers perspective, it was essential to maintain their own schedules in
order to deal with subsistence and the production of use values outside the
factory. Time and work discipline increasingly became arenas of conflict
between factory owners and workers. The struggles that ensued involved
both arson and the increasing use of brick and stone in factory construction (Russell Handsman, 1990, personal communication). In New England,
it also involved new forms of discourse. In the early nineteenth century,
factory owners used the rhetoric of republicanism to emphasize their shared
community of interests with their employees. A few decades later, the same
owners dropped this pretense and began to employ arguments and rhetorical forms based on liberalism, which emphasized supply and demand,
contracts and obligations to stockholders (Siskind, 1991; Wilentz, 1984).
MARXS ALTERNATIVES
Karl Marx launched his critique of classical political economy in the early
1840s (Oakley, 19845). He drew inspiration from a number of writers,
notably Adam Smith and the Physiocrats; however, he also acknowledged
important intellectual debts to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg W.F. Hegel
and the French socialists. He simultaneously built on their writings,
critiqued them and ultimately elaborated an original synthesis that incorporated and combined elements of their views with his own (Patterson,
2003: 732). While there were important continuities in Marxs writings,
there were also points where he did not choose between alternative explanations as well as where he simply changed his mind. During the process,
as historian Robert Brenner (1989: 272) observed, Marx developed two ultimately incompatible theories of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. His observation clarifies a lot. For our purposes, it is noteworthy,
because the role of craft specialization and production is conceptualized
differently in the two theories. More broadly, the existence of the two
theories accounts has fueled a debate about whether or not Marx was a
societal evolutionist, the answer to which depends, of course, on which
theory contemporary authors prefer to emphasize and on which one they
choose to downplay or ignore altogether.
Marxs earlier, societal evolutionary account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism appeared in works that were written in the 1840s, notably
The Poverty of Philosophy, The German Ideology and The Communist
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Manifesto, the latter two written with Frederick Engels (Marx, 1847/1963;
Marx and Engels, 18445/1974, 1848/1998). In this theory of transition, Marx
saw the structural differentiation of roles within the labor process cooperation within the production unit and the increasing distinction between
mental and manual labor as the motor driving the evolution of class and
property relations. This motor was set in motion by the growth of trade and
competition. As Brenner (1989: 282) noted, this theory depends heavily on
Adam Smiths theory of history. He writes that
The central explanatory notion at the core of this theory is the
self-developing division of labour. The division of labour directly expresses
the level of development of the productive forces; it evolves in response to
the expanding market; and it determines, in turn, the social relations of class
and property. The theorys basic image of transition from feudal to
capitalism encompasses the maturation of the development of bourgeois
society, nourished by constantly-growing world trade, within the womb of the
old feudal society. (Brenner, 1989: 272)
Marxs later theory of the transition from feudalism to capitalism appeared

in works written after 1857, especially the Grundrisse, Capital, The Ethnological Notebooks and the drafts of correspondence with Vera Zasulich
(Marx, 18578/1973, 18637/1977, 18802/1974, 1881/1983). Here, he
provided an alternative to the societal evolutionism of the Enlightenment
theorists of agrarian capitalism as well as of his own earlier work. He
focused on the historicity of the individual and of social relations rather
than the unfolding of some potential inherent in groups or in a human
nature that could reduce largely or exclusively to its biological or psychological dimensions. This involved a shift away from a natural law to a
dialectical and historical conception of human nature. Thus, the distinctive
features of humankind creative intelligence realized through and manifested in labor, sociality, language, culture, the production of use-values
(items that satisfy human needs) and the creation of new needs were
neither timeless nor persistent but rather were constituted, reproduced and
transformed in particular sociohistorical contexts. In his view, human individuals were social beings and human sociality was simultaneously
communal in character as well as socially and historically determined.
Moreover, the division of labor and the production of use-values were
enduring features of human society from its inception rather than ones that
emerged at a particular stage in its development as Smith and others had
suggested.
Marx (18578/1973: 83100) began his analysis of how societies produced
the material conditions for their own reproduction not with exchange,
supply and demand, or the allocation of scarce resources (the starting points
for classical political economists), but rather with production itself. He was
quite emphatic about this point and wrote that:
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. . . production, distribution, exchange, and consumption are [not] identical,

but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity.
Production . . . predominates not only over itself . . . but over the other
moments as well. The process always returns production to begin anew. That
exchange and consumption cannot be predominant is self-evident. Likewise,
distribution as distribution of products [cannot predominate]; while as
distribution of the agents of production[,] it is itself a moment of production.
A definite production thus determines a definite consumption, distribution
and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments.
Admittedly, in its one-sided form, production is itself determined by the
other moments. (Marx, 18578/1973: 99, original italics)
The centerpiece of his later formulation of the transition was the concept
of the mode of production, which Marx conceived
. . . as a system of social-property relations which make possible, and thereby
structure, societal reproduction in particular, the maintenance of societys
individual families and constituent social classes. The model of the transition
from feudalism to capitalism arising on the basis of this mode of production
idea starts from conflictual reproduction, on the one hand, of a class of
peasant producers who possess (have direct, non-market access to) their
means of subsistence, and, on the other hand, of a class of lordly rulers and
exploiters, who reproduce themselves by means of extracting surplus from
the peasant producers through extra-economic compulsion. (Brenner, 1989:
272, original italics)
In the late 1850s, Marx (18578/1973: 471514, 1859/1970: 21) mentioned or

briefly discussed seven modes of production: primitive communism,
ancient, Asiatic, Germanic, Slavonic, feudal and capitalist. While he never
discussed the transition from feudalism to capitalism in detail, let alone the
transitions from one non- or precapitalist mode of production to another,
it is clear, as historian Eric Hobsbawm (1964: 36) noted, that the succession
of modes of production listed in Marxs preface to A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy was neither a chronological succession nor a
statement about the evolution of one mode of production into another but
rather a commentary on steps away from the original kinship-based
community that is, steps in the historical development of private
property.10 These historical developments proceeded along three or four
pathways that led in different directions, and each mode of production
presumably had its own characteristic laws of motion. Thus, Marx argued
that not all historically specific societies formed in the same way or passed
through the same succession of modes of production. Furthermore, he
viewed the different modes of production described in the Grundrisse as
differentially or variably resistant to change. In sum, there was no underlying teleological principle that necessarily drove sociohistorical development in a particular direction, as Smith and others implied.
In the first chapter of Capital, Marx (18637/1977: 12577) argued that
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the development of the capitalist mode of production could be grasped by

understanding the significance of commodities, i.e. items produced by labor
for sale (exchange) in the market. Every commodity, in this view, has usevalue and exchange-value. The fact that a commodity has use-value means
that it satisfies the needs of those who purchase it. The fact that a commodity has exchange-value is a statement about its equivalence with other
commodities, e.g. a woven shirt is equal to two pairs of sandals, five pounds
of potatoes, or $10. For Marx, what created the exchange relations were not
the physical properties of the commodities themselves but rather the
historically specific social relations that underwrote this particular form of
circulation. In his view, the distinctive features of capitalist societies were
(1) that commodities were produced primarily to make profits through
market exchange rather than for immediate use, (2) that human labor
power the capacity to work was a commodity exchanged in the same
manner as other commodities, (3) that the means of production were
privately owned by capitalists who employed workers to produce commodities which would then be sold and (4) that increasingly all of the use-values
consumed by the members of the society were becoming commodities, e.g.
air is now sold for a profit.
Marx was aware that there were state-based societies in which commodity production was not well developed and market exchange had not penetrated into all corners of everyday life. What distinguished them from
capitalist societies and from one another were the forms of social property
relations and production as well as the specific forms in which goods or
labor power were appropriated from the direct producers by the members
of non-producing class(es), e.g. through extra-economic means such as
coercion, taxes, laws, or rent or the exploitation of various categories of
unfree labor and wageworkers (Marx, 18637/1977: 927). When the nonproducing classes and the state institutions that sustained them were able
to intervene directly in the organization of the subsistence economy and
reproduction of the community, they were often able to extract surplus
i.e. tribute regularly and to specify what goods will be produced and
services provided. In those instances where the local communities retained
greater control over their means of production and the labor power of their
members, the non-producing classes and state institutions were frequently
unable to specify consistently when or what products or services would be
extracted from the subject populations (Gailey and Patterson, 1988: 79).
Marx was also aware of the debates engendered by ethnographic
descriptions, if not the accounts themselves, regarding the existence of
communal societies that lacked social-class structures. He wrote briefly
about primitive communism at various points in his career (e.g. Marx,
18578/1973: 471514, 18802/1974, 1881/1983; Marx and Engels,
18445/1974: 4268). The most distinctive features of these societies were
typically (1) the collective ownership of the primary means of production;
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(2) everyone engaged in a variety of tasks, some involving physical labor

and others mental activity; and (3) the absence of exploitation where the
members of one group permanently appropriated the labor power or goods
produced by the members of other groups that occupied different places in
the total system of production. Eleanor Leacock (1982: 159) has argued that
the absence of exploitation, in the sense just described, results from the
unity of the production process and the direct participation of all adults in
the production, distribution, circulation, and consumption of the goods that
are produced. This meant that each individual was dependent on the group
as a whole rather than on its constituent households or domestic units. It
also meant that there were no structural differences between producers and
non-producers; such a distinction would exist only from the perspective of
a single labor process and would disappear when that process is viewed in
the context of other activities where the direct producer in one cycle
becomes a consumer in another.11
Historical and ethnographic accounts show that the interconnections of
production, distribution, exchange and consumption vary in significant ways
from one communal society to another (Testart, 1986, 1987). For instance,
among the San of the Kalahari, the right to distribute game belongs to the
individual who made the arrow that first struck the animal; among the
Pintubi and Tiwi of Australia, the elders of the community traditionally hold
that right; among the Eskimos of the Arctic, it belongs to the hunter who
first sighted the animal. Moreover, historical and ethnographic accounts
written from the eighteenth century to the present report that these kinorganized communities often had quite elaborate divisions of labor based
on age, gender, status, or life experience. Different individuals working
episodically or seasonally produced diverse arrays of goods, or use values,
for the members of the community and beyond. The activities performed
range from healing to woodcarving. In a phrase, these accounts indicate that
craft specialization and production do exist, to some extent, in primitive
communal societies, regardless of whether their subsistence economies are
rooted in agriculture, stock-raising, or some combination of foraging,
hunting and fishing.
Let us briefly consider some of the contrasts between Marxs later
alternative and the perspective formulated by the advocates of agrarian
capitalism. First, some degree of craft production and specialization based
on age, gender and experience already existed in primitive communal
societies where everyone had access to the means of production. Second,
the social property relations that existed in the precapitalist tributary states
(civilizations) studied by archaeologists allowed both the producers and the
exploiting classes direct access to the means of production; this freed both
from the need to produce for exchange. Third, there were societies in which
market exchange was not well developed. Fourth, while Marx worked out
the laws of motion that drove capitalist development, he only hinted at
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the laws of motion which underpinned the formation of societies manifesting the feudal, ancient, or Asiatic modes of production. The hints he
provided, however, suggest that the underlying dynamics differed from one
mode of production to another (e.g. Brenner, 1986). Fifth, it is clear from
the archaeological and historical record that production for exchange coexisted with subsistence production, which included non-food items, in
many but not all precapitalist states. This raises a number of questions. For
example, under what sociohistorically constituted and contingent circumstances did social property relations develop which facilitated the expansion of commodity production, the market and specialization? What were
those social property relations? How are they related to the development
of the divide between town and countryside, urban and rural? How and
under what circumstances were artisans removed from community-based
production? How and under what circumstances did households become
significant production units? Such questions focus attention not only on the
relations of production but also on the ways in which these relations were
reproduced or transformed.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ARCHAEOLOGISTS?

In some instances, archaeological and historical evidence rules out certain
theory-laden interpretations. For example, it is doubtful that aliens
constructed the Nazca Lines of coastal Peru as landing strips for their spaceships, or that the site of Tiwanaku on the shores of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia
was built 10,000 years ago. In other instances, the evidence can sustain two
or more theoretically-informed interpretations. For example, while Smith
and Marx relied on much of the same evidence to construct alternative
theories of the development of capitalism, they placed different emphases
on the data they used and connected them in different ways. While some
may view this as an interpretive dilemma, I am not arguing, as a radical relativist might, that one theory is as good as another, for I happen to believe
that some theories provide better answers or signposts for action than
others. I also believe that knowledge is created in dialogues that ultimately
involve close examinations and interrogations of the interconnections of
theory, practice and evidence.
For the theorists of capitalism discussed above, the transition from the
production and circulation of use-values to commodity production and
market exchange was still taking place; however, the social relations of
commodity production were already dominant and driving socioeconomic
development when they wrote. They were, in a sense, describing what the
economy would become in the future. Fortunately, we have archaeological
evidence as well as historical and ethnographic accounts from other parts
of the world that document processes of development. These data afford
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an opportunity to consider other circumstances in which transformation

and transition did or did not occur and new social property relations were
or were not forged. They allow us to go beyond statements that community
production was replaced initially by domestic production which was subsequently superseded sequentially by workshops and factories, that production shifted from rural to urban settings because of the unfolding of some
natural process, or that socioeconomic development has always been a
consequence of unequal exchange. These accounts also indicate that a
diversity of societal types and historical circumstances were involved in the
transformative or transitional phases of interest to archaeologists and
historians. Let us consider briefly two cases.
Case 1: Aztec Mexico

What follows derives from Frederic Hickss (1987) analysis of the early
steps toward a market-integrated economy in central Mexico during the
early fifteenth century. These steps took place when the Aztec state subordinated neighboring city-states in the region and appropriated both labor
and large landholdings from its new domains. In the process, they altered
existing social property relations, thereby creating new conditions for
change. As Hicks (1987: 912) points out, an economy integrated by market
exchange requires:
(1) a series of full-time specialists of many kinds, who do not produce food
staples; (2) a steady, reliable clientele for those specialists; (3) a steady,
reliable supply of basic food staples and other necessities fuel, clothing,
household utensils which will always be available on the market; and (4) a
market network to bring these elements together effectively and
continuously.
Before the conquest, the Valley of Mexico was dotted with city-states, each
with its own city, dependent hinterland, and market. Hicks (1987: 94) writes
that the markets were frequented by everyone from the polity; they were
places where commoners could acquire household items and exchange
surpluses [and] . . . places to which specialized long-distance merchants
brought luxury and other exotic goods.
Aztec state practices usually allowed local rulers to retain their positions
and to continue receiving tribute from their subjects. However, after each
conquest, the Aztec rulers also seized agricultural lands, most of which they
kept for themselves and some of which they distributed to favored nobles.
In all cases, the commoners were organized into communities (calpulli) to
work these lands and give service in the royal or noble households . . . To
facilitate the collection of tribute [including the harvests from these fields],
tribute collections centers were set up [but they] . . . were not necessarily
located in the head-towns that were the seats of the local rulers. (Hicks
1987: 95)
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These practices had three immediate effects. First, the nobility had no local
power bases, since their landholdings were scattered and worked by the
members of communities with diverse local origins and loyalties; as a result,
their well-being was dependent on that of the Aztec state. Second, the local
markets were broken up. Third, this underwrote the growing importance of
the market in the Aztec capital, which the ruler divided among his nobles
in the late fifteenth century; this provided the nobles with a tribute in kind
from the sellers on the market (Hicks 1987: 94, 96).
Skilled artisans smiths, woodcarvers, feather workers, painters, and lapidaries to name only a few were commoners who were brought by the
Aztec state from their natal communities to the capital in order to ply their
crafts full-time in the city. They were installed along with other practitioners
of their craft in wards (calpulli), which were also corporate landholding
groups. The state not only brought them by coercion to the city but also
determined whether they would produce items for the palace, the treasury,
or the market. Many (most) of the artisans were attached to the palace,
while others worked through the market. Their clientele consisted of petty
bureaucrats, ritual specialists, military professionals and merchants who
trafficked in raw materials and luxury goods, as well as other artisans. While
the artisan wards undoubtedly grew some of their food in garden plots, their
members likely acquired many subsistence items as well as raw materials
for their work through the market. Most of the food items found in the
market of the Aztec capital were probably grown on the large estates seized
earlier and made their way to the market as tribute to one or another noble
household. The estates were the economic base of a market system that
effectively by-passed the local rulers subordinated by the Aztecs and their
allies (Hicks, 1986: 53, 1987: 97101, 1999: 41316).
Case 2: The intersection of state and communal economies in

the Inca state
Market exchange was not well developed in the Inca state. Thus, Inca Peru
provides, for our purposes, a marked and significant contrast with Aztec
Mexico. Many Andean scholars were aware of the contrast by the 1960s, if
not earlier. The Andean case provides a counter example to often repeated
claims that the rise of craft specialization and the development of markets
are interconnected. In this instance, the rise of merchant capital along the
northern frontier of the empire was an aspect of Inca state formation.
Commerce in the frontier area was the prerogative of certain client states
in the empire, where merchants from those polities, notably Chincha,
bartered with a socially differentiated group of merchant Indians from
frontier societies during the early stages of their encapsulation and incorporation into the imperial state. The Chincha merchants acquired objects for
conspicuous consumption, e.g. emeralds, rather than subsistence. That these
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merchants sold emeralds to the local leaders of the local rulers of Inca
suggests that at least some of their transactions were not controlled directly
by either the Incas or the local rulers of Chincha (Patterson, 1987). In this
instance, merchant capital (buying cheap and selling dear) was instigated or
sustained by the imperial state. The merchants did not alter existing social
property relations (relations of production); the changes that occurred were
affected by the Inca state which would appropriate both land and labor from
communities that became enmeshed in its tributary relations.
The broad outlines of the social property relations the Inca state and its
rulers attempted to set in place are well known. The Inca state, its cult, and
the royal families appropriated lands and labor from local communities to
work them; the workers came from the local communities and were provisioned by the Incas while they fulfilled their labor obligations. The state
also removed some young girls (acllas) and men (yanas) from their communities of origin; both remained physically and structurally separated from
those communities for the remainder of their lives. A second category of
men (camayos) were full-time craft specialists, e.g. weavers of fine cloth and
silversmiths to name two, who produced goods for the state; some of them
resided and worked in their natal communities, while others did not. Both
their status and speciality seem to have been hereditary (e.g. Costin, 2004;
Ebert and Patterson, forthcoming; Murra, 1980).
The question is: How did the Inca policies and practices impinge on the
local communities they enveloped? In the Huarochir region of central
Peru, for example, everyday life continued as usual, even though some men
may have consumed more maize beer and meat outside their households
as they did in nearby Jauja (Hastorf, 1991: 1501). Agricultural lands that
were not appropriated by the Incas were owned by corporate bilateral
kindreds (ayllus), even though they were held by individual households,
which constituted an important unit of consumption but not the only one.
Pastures for llamas and alpacas were also shared by the members of the
ayllu and contested occasionally with the members of other ayllus. Laborintensive tasks, like the repair of irrigation systems or housebuilding, were
carried out by the community as a whole with the immediate beneficiaries
providing food and entertainment. Surplus foodstuffs and goods produced
by the various households constituting an ayllu were also pooled and
shared. The members of certain ayllus and households, which presumably
also belonged to an ayllu, were renowned as silversmiths, potters, or
dancers, who
. . . seem to have practiced their particular skills on a part-time or seasonal
basis after planting or harvesting, before the rainy season in the case of
potters, or when dancers were required for ceremonies or other occasions.
Their artisan activities were grafted onto food production; the goods they
produced or the services they performed benefited the entire community.
(Patterson, 1992: 99)
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It appears that local Andean communities retained significant control over

subsistence production and the production of use-values even during the
period of Inca rule. The state economy, which appropriated land and labor
power, was grafted onto those of the subject communities. The imperial
state did not alter social property relations within the communities; its
tribute demands were placed on the community rather than individual
households. The communities were not dissolved into a number of independent, autonomous households. In a phrase, the practices and policies of
the Incas did not lead to the formation of a peasantry; efforts to do so
during the Colonial Period were resisted strenuously, often with force.
Moreover, the fact that the local communities retained control of the
production, circulation, distribution and consumption of its goods meant
that merchants were unable to detach exchange from their production and
to create an autonomous circulation sphere, which is a necessary condition
for the emergence and continued viability of merchant capitalists. The selfsufficient economies of the local communities inhibited the development of
local mass markets for inexpensive goods.
DISCUSSION
State formation, which involves the simultaneous dissolution of kincommunal societies and the crystallization of class structures and state institutions, creates conditions in which social property relations and craft
production are typically reorganized. In these new circumstances, part of the
traditional work that underwrote the consumption and reproduction of kin
communities is now subsumed by the state. It is transformed into labor, the
products of which are drained off to support dominant classes and the state.
This reorganization involves labor processes, technical divisions of labor, the
spatial organization and even consumption. For instance, in Aztec Mexico,
the domestic production in communities that pursued intensive agriculture
was reorganized and a portion of the surplus foodstuffs was appropriated as
tribute by the state. The women in these tributary communities who had
previously cooked stews now prepared tortillas, which could be carried easily
to workplaces in the fields, and they also spent less time spinning and
weaving, even though the demand for clothing remained constant. Clothing
and other necessities they no longer produced were acquired in one of the
local or regional markets (Brumfiel, 1991). In the Andes, the Inca state
appropriated land and labor service which had differential effects on production and social reproduction in the various local communities under its rule;
it also restricted the use of certain goods and reorganized the consumption
of certain foodstuffs at the local level. In sum, the organization of work is
distorted and transformed in the process of state formation. This forces us
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to consider how state-based societies organized the production, distribution,

circulation and consumption of goods. It compels us to examine how the
organization of tributary communities in which the production of goods,
knowledge, and human beings took place was itself distorted and transformed and reproduced under new circumstances.
A related issue involves the origins of the kinds of goods or services
demanded by the state and its associated ruling classes and where structurally they intervene in the production relations to extract them. In the
case of Inca Peru, the state intervened in the distribution of land, labor
power, and the goods produced by subject communities; it required an
administrative organization of census takers and tax collectors to ensure
that tribute was received from communities spread over a vast landscape.
In Aztec Mexico, the state and its ruling class appropriated land, labor
power and established markets that were ultimately controlled by the
nobility. In this case, part of the tribute was acquired from commerce, which
required a slightly different kind of administration one that was
concerned with controlling trade routes and the markets where goods were
bartered or sold; as a result, the Aztec state which intervened at the moment
of production itself was also more concerned with the circulation of goods
than were the Incas (Thapar, 1981: 41011). Both cases stand in marked
contrast to early modern England and France, where merchants were
attempting to rest control of the markets from local lords.
The exchange activities of tributary states based on commerce and
merchant capital must be distinguished from the exchange relations that
exist among kin-organized communities, where surplus raw materials and
goods are transferred from one to another. These intercommunity exchange
relations are unintegrated and unintegrating, since they do not produce the
goods, conditions, or social relations that communally organized societies
need to sustain and reproduce themselves. They allow the members of
different communities to engage their opposites without abandoning their
places in their own societies. Those states whose revenues were derived
from controlling trade or taxing merchants often flourished on the margins
of states that extracted tribute in the form of labor and goods from their
subjects; the Maghreb and Egypt provide an example of this relationship
(Amin, 1978: 1223). These mercantile states resembled islands based on
merchant capital, money and petty commodity production for the market
in a vast sea of subsistence production i.e. the production of use-values
for consumption by the community members. Since only a small portion of
social production was geared to the market, merchant capital could develop
only to the extent that there was an active commodity sector.
Traditions of continual technological and scientific innovation are not
characteristic of precapitalist state-based societies. Their internal logics and
laws of motion are based on the appropriation of labor power and goods
from direct producers and on the reproduction of the conditions, social
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relations and practices that facilitate continued exploitation. Thus, in tributary states, the means of production tools, processes, technical knowledge
and labor power reside with the members of the subject communities.
Since artisans and producers are members of communities that exert
varying degrees of control over the means of production and their
conditions of work, the states and their associated classes strive to protect
and reproduce those institutions that provide them with the labor power
and knowledge of the direct producers (Brenner, 1986: 489).
In these circumstances, artisans are typically engaged in the production
of use-values rather than commodities for the market. Consequently, there
is no economic imperative to increase the efficiency of artisan production
through increased specialization or technical innovation. This does not
mean that the technologies of early civilizations were simple or that new
objects or processes were never invented. Those Andean weavers who wove
double-cloths that resembled much more easily produced tapestries seemingly took great delight in displaying their skills, and the metalworkers and
jewelers of the area had discovered processes of alloying and producing
pure metals that were known nowhere else. However, it does suggest that
artisans were not compelled to use observations made under one set of
conditions to establish scientific and technological principles which could
be generalized and applied in other circumstances or technical processes.
For example, Andean peoples under Inca rule used tweezers to remove
facial hair; however, they did not generalize the principle of the lever and
apply it to mechanically identical operations such as using tongs to move
crucibles of molten metal.
At the juridical level, patent law is poorly developed in early tributary
states, even though commercial law, involving contracts and usury, was well
developed in regions, like Assyria. Since the state provided little protection
to the rights of communities claiming ownership of technical processes and
knowledge, these were the trade secrets and lore of the community that
were passed from one generation of artisans to the next. The absence of
patent law suggests that possession of such esoteric knowledge still resided
in the kin-organized communities encapsulated by these precapitalist states.
Patent law, protecting rights of ownership to scientific and technological
knowledge, is well-developed in societies based on the production of
commodities, like the city-states of northern Italy during the Renaissance.
Patronage of intellectual creation in the arts and sciences by the state and/or
by members of the ruling class is also common in societies where artisans
have been separated from the subsistence production of their natal communities (Antal, 1947; Berger, 1972; Davis, 1983; Wallace-Hadrill, 1990).
Traditions of continuous scientific and technological innovation are an
essential feature of societies manifesting the industrial capitalist mode of
production. Continuous innovation reflects a tradition in which scientific
principles derived from observations made in one set of conditions or
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practices are generalized and extended to new applications and circumstances; it is also a tradition in which knowledge is cumulative and technological progress can be discerned (Zilsel, 1942, 1945/1957). These traditions
underwrite the production of commodities for competitive markets, the
increased productivity of artisans and machines, changes in the organic
composition of labor, the creation of new commodities and markets and the
accumulation of capital. The tendency toward greater efficiency and per
capita output also involves cost-cutting through specialization, innovation,
and the accumulation of the capital necessary for investment in new ways
of producing commodities. It too is a motor of economic growth and
development in industrial capitalist societies but not in precapitalist tributary states (Brenner, 1986: 24). Such scientific and technological traditions
are found in state-based societies, where artisans are increasingly removed
from their natal communities and forced to sell their skills, knowledge and
products in a labor market.
Robert Brenner (1986: 51) maintains that modern economic growth
requires the break-up of pre-capitalist property relations characterized by
the producers possession and the exploiters surplus extraction by extraeconomic coercion. He sees this break-up as the unintended consequence
of the relations of reproduction of individual actors and the conflicts that
exist between classes. He argues that such transformations are most likely
to occur in those precapitalist societies in which the direct producers
possess the means of production individually and that state and its associated classes extract goods and labor power directly from the individual
production units rather than from the community as a whole. He concludes
that capitalist economic development of this sort has not occurred very
often in human history.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In sum, the theory of societal evolutionism has a shared heritage with
mercantilism and liberalism; it was developed in France, Scotland and
England at a time when those societies were still largely rural. It was elaborated initially by theorists of agrarian capitalism who advocated the
development of commercial agriculture and stock-raising as well as expansion of the domestic markets for those goods. In their view, this would both
create wealth and increase the division of labor. While keen observers of
how production relations were being reorganized, they were less concerned
with the particulars involved in the development of capitalist manufactures
and industry.
Contemporary proponents of societal evolutionism share a vocabulary,
a set of assumptions, and a form of argumentation that derive from a
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particular socioeconomic and ideological context, one that was specifically

concerned with the rise of agrarian capitalism. Here, I have argued that the
framework of analytical categories, assumptions and rhetorical forms inherited from this discourse makes it difficult to examine the development of
craft and industrial production in the kinds of precapitalist societies typically studied by archaeologists. I suggest rethinking analytical categories,
which are so broadly conceived that they miss fundamental differences and
obscure essential features of the precapitalist societies we study. As Anne
Pyburn (2004: xi) recently remarked in a quite different context, the
reasoning of cultural [societal] evolutionary explanations predetermines
and drastically limits what we can know about the past. I agree with her
sentiments.
I have tried to show that historians, social theorists and other scholars
besides archaeologists are concerned with questions about the processes
involved in the rise of civilization, the origins of states and the appearance
of specialization. The problems are the same, only the kinds of data and the
methods they use to interrogate them differ. It is beneficial, I believe, to
begin to look at their arguments more closely, to incorporate them into our
discussions and to insert ourselves into theirs. I have also argued that it is
important to look at the social theoretical frameworks we use to explain
the past in order to see more clearly the relative advantages and limitations.
In this article, I attempted to develop in a preliminary manner a framework
rooted in Marxist social thought that would allow us to look at questions
about craft specialization, the reorganization of production relations and
state formation from a different vantage point.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was prepared and presented at a pre-congress
meeting of the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological
Sciences on Artisanal Production throughout the Ages in Africa, Asia, Europe, and
the Americas, organized by June Nash, Jane Schneider and John Clark, 2023 July,
1993 in San Cristbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. This much revised version has
profited over the years from the work, constructive criticism and thoughtful
comments of Wendy Ashmore, Elizabeth Brumfiel, Edward Calnek, Cathy Costin,
Tim Earle, John Gledhill, Christina Halperin, Russell Handsman, Frederic Hicks,
Lynn Meskell, Robert Paynter, Karen Spalding and, more recently, the observations
of three anonymous reviewers.
Notes
1 In the eighteenth century, sociocultural evolutionism was based on a notion of
development, i.e. change was normal and resulted in general betterment
(Trigger, 1998: 30). As William Outhwaite (1994: 59) noted, this unfolding
model of evolution differed from some subsequent versions that
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emphasize[d] the Darwinian theme of the adaptations of systems to their

environments.
2 During the transition from feudalism to capitalism, feudal lords who, in
practice if not in theory, supported the ideal of a self-sufficient natural
economy were pitted against serfs, peasants and artisans, on the one hand,
and merchant capitalists who sought increasing control of local and regional
markets, on the other. Marx (18637/1977: 87795) outlined the dialectics of
class struggle in England during the transition. The serfs succeeded in breaking
the bonds of servitude by the end of the fourteenth century, becoming a class
of free peasant proprietors. The lesser feudal lords no longer able to
appropriate goods and services from their former serfs dissolved by the end of
the fifteenth century, and their former retainers, who never had direct access to
the means of production and who lacked the ability to appropriate surplus
from the direct producers, were recast as a proletariat. In the sixteenth century,
the great feudal lords used coercion, laws and taxes to expropriate the
resources they held in common and to force the peasants, formerly in
possession of their means of subsistence and production, into growing
dependence on the market and on production for exchange. This was
accompanied by social differentiation in the rural communities, the
simultaneous appearance of capitalist farmers who produced for the market
and a rural proletariat whose members lacked the means of subsistence and
were forced to hire themselves out as agricultural laborers.
3 The discovery of the Americas, its peoples, and the wealth of its resources
played a fundamental role in the development of the discourse that yielded
liberalism, political economy and evolutionism. In what is viewed as one of the
foundational documents of liberal social thought, Second Treatise on
Government, John Locke (1690/1980: 29, 58) moved quickly from a biblical
account of human history rooted in Genesis to a developmental account
rooted in human nature and the world, when he interpreted the available
ethnographic literature to indicate that in the beginning all the world was
America (49) and that the kings of the Indians in America . . . [are] still a
pattern of the first ages in Asia and Europe (108). The individuals who wrote
and used this literature typically had axes to grind and, as many scholars have
noted, their writings had important intellectual and political consequences (e.g.
Meek, 1976).
4 Other worldviews were clearly articulated by the latter half of the eighteenth
century. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a critic of the commercial
culture crystallizing in France, gave voice both to the sentiments of the urban,
middling classes composed of artisans, small shopkeepers, and the like whose
standards of living had been declining steadily for several generations and to
the political ideal of popular sovereignty (Lwy and Sayre, 2001; Wood, 1988).
Thomas Malthuss views on the interrelations of food supply, population,
child-bearing and poverty and support for the Corn Laws gave solace to the
landed gentry who were the primary beneficiaries of this protective tariff on
imported grains (Rubin, 1929/1979: 291300). The Encyclopedia of Denis
Diderot and Jean dAlembert with its emphasis on scientific and technological
progress, on the one hand, and on rationality and progressive social thought,
on the other, gave hope to the largely urban, educated middle classes of the
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332
10
day. Spokesmen or apologists for industrial capitalism like Jeremy Bentham,

Jean-Baptiste Say, or David Ricardo, for example began to articulate their
views in the first-quarter of the nineteenth century (McNally, 1988: 266; Tribe,
1978: 11061, 1981: 10120). Critics of industrialization and the impoverishment
of wage workers such as Henri Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, or Charles
Fourier began to offer alternative perspectives in the 1820s and 1830s.
The Physiocrats, as Ronald Meek (1962: 24) notes, recognized that the
prevalence of small-scale, capital-starved, subsistence farming hindered the
further development of agriculture.
Whether these family farm production units were capitalist or precapitalist
depends not on the form of the work their members performed or whether or
not they were involved with wider socioeconomic structures but rather on the
nature of their involvement with those structures. By contrast, Alexander
Chayanov (1924/1986), who focused on the organization and nature of peasant
production processes, viewed peasant family farms as autonomous,
transhistorical economic units that were independent of those wider structures.
He placed a great deal of emphasis on the relations between family size and
productivity and, hence, on the demographic aspects of domestic production.
Numerous writers have pointed out that Chayanov did not adequately
theorize the transformation from precapitalist to capitalist forms of production
and involvements in wider structures (e.g. Kriedte et al., 1977/1981: 423, 235).
The weaknesses of the proto-industrialization thesis, according to critics, were
(1) that its concentration on an organizational form of production obscured
both the diversity and complexity of the form itself as well as the social
property relations that underwrote domestic and workshop industries in the
countryside and (2) that its emphasis on an essentially linear and stageist
model of economic development concealed the dynamics underlying the
formation of pre-factory industry in rural areas (Berg et al., 1983).
Putting-out systems are forms of sub-contracting in which owners or
middlemen distributed raw materials to workers for manufacture in their
homes or even in factories. The workers typically employed family members
and friends in the production process. An example of the former involved the
distribution of raw cotton to spinners who produced thread; the thread was
then collected and given to weavers to produce woven fabrics. An example of
the latter occurred in early cotton mills, where skilled spinners were put in
charge of machinery and engaged their own help, usually child assistants from
among their families and acquaintances. Foremen sometimes added to their
direct supervisory function the practice of taking a few machines on their own
account and hiring labor to operate them (Braverman, 1974: 61).
Charles Babbage (1835/1963), an early theorist of capitalist manufacture,
observed that it was men rather than machines that produced profits. Thus,
unlike many of his contemporaries who were concerned with machines, he
focused on the organization of the workplace. He advocated technical
divisions of labor (specialization) and segmenting the labor process, so that no
single individual had to possess all of the skills required to complete the
production of a particular commodity.
The fact that Marx never fully developed a theory of transition or fully
described the modes of production he mentioned, except for the capitalism,
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Patterson
generated an enormous literature, especially from the 1970s onward, partly in

response to of Eric Hobsbawms (1964) introduction to Marxs comments on
precapitalist forms and partly as an elaboration of what both wrote about
them.
11 This contrasts with some advocates of the domestic economy, who build on
Chayanov or Marshall Sahlinss (1972) discussion of the domestic mode of
production and who tend to view the household rather than the community as
the primary economic unit.
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THOMAS C. PAT TERSON is Distinguished Professor and Chair of

Anthropology, University of California, Riverside. Besides his works on the
history of anthropology and archaeology, his books include Marxs Ghost:
Conversations with Archaeologists and Foundations of Social Archaeology:
Selected Writings of V. Gordon Childe (edited with Charles E. Orser, Jr.).
[email: thomas.patterson@ucr.edu]
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Journal of Social Archaeology

Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)

Craft specialization, the reorganization of

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Journal of Social Archaeology 5(3)

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and formation of a domestic or household mode of production that

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Journal of Social Archaeology 5(3)

SOCIETAL EVOLUTIONISM: ITS POLITICAL-ECONOMIC

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Journal of Social Archaeology 5(3)

perspectives were championed by John Locke, the French Physiocrats and

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population, movable property, landed property, use production, population

Fourth, the evolutionist/developmentalist discourse came into being at a

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Journal of Social Archaeology 5(3)

which has played so prominently in archaeological theories, was less clear

PRODUCTION RELATIONS AND THE TOWN-COUNTRY

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controlled production? In medieval Europe, merchants were mainly

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Journal of Social Archaeology 5(3)

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Journal of Social Archaeology 5(3)

Marxs later theory of the transition from feudalism to capitalism appeared

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. . . production, distribution, exchange, and consumption are [not] identical,

In the late 1850s, Marx (18578/1973: 471514, 1859/1970: 21) mentioned or

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Journal of Social Archaeology 5(3)

the development of the capitalist mode of production could be grasped by

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(2) everyone engaged in a variety of tasks, some involving physical labor

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WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ARCHAEOLOGISTS?

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an opportunity to consider other circumstances in which transformation

Case 1: Aztec Mexico

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Case 2: The intersection of state and communal economies in

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It appears that local Andean communities retained significant control over

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to consider how state-based societies organized the production, distribution,

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Journal of Social Archaeology 5(3)

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particular socioeconomic and ideological context, one that was specifically

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emphasize[d] the Darwinian theme of the adaptations of systems to their

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Journal of Social Archaeology 5(3)

day. Spokesmen or apologists for industrial capitalism like Jeremy Bentham,