Abstract
The past few decades have witnessed a growing realisation that market-based measures of human well-being—measures that centre on income and consumption distributions—miss some other perhaps even more essential elements of human well-being. This insight has found a prominent expression in the work of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen’s so-called capability approach. At the same time, the market-based measure of inequality as a function of the distribution of material remains in graves and other locations remain dominant in archaeology. In this paper, we explore the significance of the capability approach, and the associated concept of human well-being based on the idea of capabilities, to the archaeology of social inequality and social malintegration. We discuss these notions using the case study of the Late Neolithic Bosnian tell site Okolište and argue that there, in c. 5200–4600 bce, the monopolisation of certain critical goods led to a critical capability inequality, malintegration and to a prolonged period of social unrest and decline.
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Notes
In the theoretical roots of his approach, Sen traces to figures like Aristotle (the concept of Eudaimonia or human flourishing) and classical political economists such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx (Sen 1989, p. 43). Sen’s emphasis on doings can also be seen to chime well with the more contemporary philosophies of pragmatism and practice theory with the roots in the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger (see e.g. Preucel and Mrozowski 2010; Schatzki et al. 2001; Dobres and Robb 2000).
Sen’s collaborator, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has developed a comprehensive account of capabilities in Nussbaum (2000).
In the book, Anderson makes only an implicit reference to Sen’s work acknowledging and appreciating its revisionary thrust (see Anderson 2010, Chap. 1, footnote 18).
Another issue related to current interpretations of inequality is the status of commodities, since in general, we tend to take these to be a direct measure of inequality levels. While the analysis of commodities does indeed produce valuable insights into economic processes and scales of transaction (Kopytoff 1986), it still leaves open the weight each commodity type has within different societies.
It has, however, also been argued that “heterarchy has always, it seems, been thought of in relation to its accompanying other, hierarchy. Analyses of heterarchies display a search for powerholders, even if temporary ones, and thus continue to be part of an academic fascination with the functioning of (semi-)institutionalized political power” (Bernbeck 2012, 157; see also DeMarrais 2013).
The excavation of Okolište 2002–2009 was a project of the University of Kiel, the German Archaeological Institute and the National Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In addition to financial and logistic support from the aforementioned institutions, the project was generously funded by the German Research Foundation.
The figure of 30 km2 is an estimation of the area of the valley floor (suitable as arable land), a figure that can be extended up to 130 km2 if the surrounding hills and mountains (suitable for cattle herding) are included.
Ethnographic analogies were used as a proxy to estimate the population size of the individual houses and the whole settlement (cp. Müller 2007, see also Müller 2013). The contemporaneity of houses was established from stratigraphic and spatial information. Furthermore, dating information, installation and house size were used for the interpolation of the average number of inhabitants.
Given that there was some displacement of sediment during the Neolithic in Okolište, the distribution of artefacts is quite fuzzy. However, the concentration of artefacts—such as the concentration of loom weights in clusters in the northeast corner of the houses—are in situ depositions. In contrast to the Vinca houses, the Butmir houses of Okolište and other sites have yet to reveal any deposition of items prior to the construction or after the burning of houses (cp. Chapman 1999; Verhoeven 2000; Twiss et al. 2008, p. 53 with Müller et al. 2013; Hofmann 2013).
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Lieske Voget-Kleschin for her comments to a draft of this paper. Naturally, the authors remain solely responsible for all views expressed in this paper.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the research, authorship, and/or the publication of this paper.
Funding
The authors disclosed the following research financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this paper: Robert Hoffman and Johannes Müller’s research regarding Okolište was funded by the German Research foundation project Mu 1259/10-1-3 titled ‘Die Rekonstruktion spätneolithischer Siedlungsprozesse in Zentralbosnien’. The remaining author’s research was funded through the German Research Foundation’s Graduate School Project (GSC 208) titled ‘Human Development in Landscapes’.
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Arponen, V.P.J., Müller, J., Hofmann, R. et al. Using the Capability Approach to Conceptualise Inequality in Archaeology: the Case of the Late Neolithic Bosnian Site Okolište c. 5200–4600 bce . J Archaeol Method Theory 23, 541–560 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9252-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9252-0