Schismogenesis on the Scandinavian Peninsula during the Late Neolithic Transition

Summary

This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A pungent statement in *The Dawn of Everything* is that the enormous diversity in hunter-gatherer societies makes it impossible to talk about one transition to agriculture. There are several consequences to this statement. One is that hunter-gatherers did not wait for an inevitable revolution, and another is that the agricultural turn was all but one-sided. A theoretical premise used by the authors in several parts of their book to make sense of this is schismogenesis. The concept, originally framed by Gregory Bateson, is used to understand how groups have a tendency to identify themselves against others and adapt their own unique take on external elements. In this paper this concept of schismogenesis will be explored and adapted in a region on the edge of northern Europe to understand the agricultural turn. The change has been presented as a slow, drawn-out process until it suddenly changed around the turn to the Late Neolithic (ca. 2350 BCE). The archaeological evidence is here presented with the concept of schismogenesis in mind, arguing that resistance and adaptation created a unique agropastoral system that was highly impervious and dynamic to the local ecology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38072.0