Big Roles for Smallholders in Complex Societies

Archaeology provides the unique opportunity to investigate historically silenced groups, such as the non-elite members of complex societies. With increasing emphasis on household assemblages in the past several decades, the artifactual remains of smallholders (or "peasants") make up a growing portion of archaeological data from early complex societies. It remains unclear, however, what types of roles smallholders played. Building on a spate of archaeological research into smallholders in the 1970s and 80s that provides the empirical background on how smallholders practice agriculture, the goal of this session is to tie their range of social practices, including participation in market economies, self-sufficiency, and household division of labor, to long-standing research questions related to the formation of complex societies. How did the role of smallholders vary between emergent complex societies in terms of the creation and maintenance of inequality? Did they facilitate, resist, and respond to large-scale social change in a uniform manner that we can use to generate a general theory of smallholders? This session addresses these questions from Old and New World perspectives. In seeking a broader theoretical framework for understanding smallholders, this session aims to generate unifying ideas of interest to anthropologist of both the ancient and modern world.