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CHAPTER 4

Durable Goods

A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.

—George Carlin, Braindroppings

Enlightenment philosophers were fascinated by Savages. In their efforts to devise a natural history of social life, Enlightenment thinkers either imaginatively reconstructed the earliest stages of human life or extrapolated from the miscellany of ethnographic “data” gleaned from explorers’ journals, missionaries’ accounts, or classical Latin and Greek texts. Originally, these philosophers agreed, savage life was lived without farming, law, or permanent dwellings.

Whether this original state was “rude,” as Montesquieu saw it, or an Edenic state of individual liberty, as Rousseau claimed, Enlightenment thinkers connected hunting and gathering, lawlessness, and impermanent dwellings. Central to these reconstructions was the assumption that hunting and gathering always required frequent movements in search of food. As the Scottish jurist John Millar described it: “A Savage who earns his food by hunting and fishing, or by gathering the spontaneous fruits from the earth, is incapable of attaining any considerable refinement in his pleasure…. His wants are few, and in proportion to the narrowness of his circumstances. His great object is to be able to satisfy his hunger; and, after the utmost exertion of labour and activity, to enjoy the agreeable relief of idleness and repose.”¹

This constant mobility, Montesquieu asserted, affected the institutions of society, as people wandered in grasslands and forests, mating in brief liaisons, unfettered by home-ownership, and given to “sometimes mix indifferently like brutes.”²

In yet another passage linking homelessness and casual sex, Rousseau observed that the absence of permanent dwellings also meant social relationships were similarly transient, “whereas, in this primitive state, men had neither houses, nor huts,… every one lived where he could, seldom for more than a single night; the sexes united without design;… and they parted with the same indifference.”³

The shift to agriculture and permanent dwellings led to the frictions of property, turning people against each other. Rousseau wrote that when people “ceased to fall asleep under the first tree, or in the first cave that afforded them shelter; they invented several kinds of implements of hard and sharp stones,” thus introducing “a kind of property, in itself the source of a thousand quarrels and conflicts.”⁴

Sedentism had additional consequences: lust and envy. In language simultaneously prurient and prudish, Rousseau imagined that “permanent neighbourhood could not fail to produce, in time, some connection between different families. Among young people of opposite sexes, living in neighbouring huts, the transient commerce required by nature soon led, through mutual intercourse, to another kind not less agreeable, and more permanent.”

Although proximity and young love bound society together, permanence and neighborly scrutiny led to the sin of covetousness. “Men began now to take the difference between objects into account, and to make comparisons; they acquired imperceptibly the ideas of beauty and merit, which soon gave rise to feelings of preference. In consequence of seeing each other often, they could not do without seeing each other constantly. A tender and pleasant feeling insinuated itself into their souls, and the least opposition turned it into an impetuous fury: with love arose jealousy; discord triumphed, and human blood was sacrificed to the gentlest of all passions.”⁵

Many of these Enlightenment speculations were simply wrong, and archaeologists have long known this. In 1936 the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe wrote, “The adoption of cultivation must not be confused with the adoption of sedentary life. It has been customary to contrast the settled life of the cultivator with the nomadic existence of the ‘homeless hunter.’ The contrast is quite fictitious.”⁶ Childe famously coined the term “Neolithic Revolution,” underscoring the seismic transformations that occurred when humans domesticated plants and animals. Childe understood, however, that agriculture and sedentism were two distinct, though often linked, phenomena.⁷

In contrast to the overblown Enlightenment musings, archaeology does point to two fundamental truths: Societies change when they form permanent settlements and where you live depends a lot on your stuff.

. . .

In the waning decades of the twentieth century, my wife and I moved thirteen times in six years. While this was hardly an itinerant lifestyle compared to highly mobile hunters and gatherers like the Ache of Paraguay, who reportedly moved fifty times each year, we had them beat in distance, thanks to the internal combustion engine and jet turbines.

In August 1988 we left Santa Barbara, California, and took separate jobs in Manhattan, Kansas, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, where we each taught as one-year temporary lecturers in anthropology departments. At that point our peregrinations began in earnest: we went from Kansas and Minnesota to southern Mexico (for fieldwork); back to Minneapolis (teaching); and then to Antigua Guatemala (a Fulbright grant); on to Albany, New York (“soft-money” research jobs); to Southern California (finally, a tenure-track job); back to Albany (birth of son); south to Washington, D.C. (fellowship); back to Albany (summer jobs and house-sitting); return to Southern California (return to tenure-track job); then to the United Kingdom (fellowship); and finally back to Southern California in August 1994.

It was a six-year Wanderjahre that covered 30,862 miles.

About midway through this phase of our lives (I think we were in Guatemala), someone pointed out that all the time I had spent moving was the equivalent of getting up on a Saturday morning, loading up my truck, driving nonstop until Sunday afternoon, parking and unloading the truck… and doing this every weekend for three years. It was a very depressing analogy.

We seriously considered renting a self-storage unit near the geographical center of the lower forty-eight states. We calculated this would be around Kansas City, Missouri, where the north-south Interstate 35 and the east-west Interstate 40 intersect. That way, if we needed something in the course of another cross-country journey—“Do you know whatever happened to the espresso maker?”—we could simply swing by and pick it up.

Although our situation seems excessive, it was not far from the average American experience. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American moves 11.7 times in a lifetime, although most people move relatively short distances. Fifty-seven percent of Americans have never lived outside of their home state; 37% have never left their hometown.⁸ Since the 1950s, when more than 20% of Americans changed residences each year, Americans’ mobility actually has decreased, although 11%–12% of Americans moved in 2008 alone.

A number of factors account for Americans’ mobility. The principle reason for moving is employment: people move to find work and support themselves, a rationale understandable to any hunter-gatherer. Interestingly, people who earn more move more. Only 25% of Americans with household incomes of $100,000 or more live in the community where they were born. Similarly, more educated Americans have moved more, going away to college and then moving on to pursue jobs.

The young move more than the elderly. Westerners move more than Midwesterners. When Americans move, they tend to head south.

These patterns of mobility in the United States are not shared by other industrialized nations. Overall, Europeans move about half as much as Americans.⁹ While mobility in the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries approaches the American pace, in other nations—such as Italy, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland—less than 5% of the population moves annually.

So despite a decrease in mobility over the last sixty years, Americans still move a lot. Which you would think would mean that we would have less stuff.

But if you have moved recently, you know that isn’t true.

. . .

The prehistoric shift to permanent dwellings and settled villages occurred after 18,000–15,000 years ago, but at various times in different places for distinct reasons. In southwestern Japan in southern Kyushu, summer villages and winter villages existed by 13,500 years ago. These were the prehistoric forebears of a durable cultural tradition known as Jomon.¹⁰ The Jomon tradition lasted for approximately 10,000 years, the name (“cord-marked”) associated with the distinctive pottery with its twine-stamped exterior, some of the earliest ceramic vessels known in the world. Initially recognized from its pottery, more recent archaeological research has pushed knowledge of Jomon back in time to its pre-ceramic antecedents.

The origins of sedentism in Japan is nuts. Quite literally nuts, because the diet was based on acorns, beechnuts, walnuts, buckeyes, and chestnuts. Previously, Paleolithic foragers had used stone mortars, pestles, and hammer-stones to crack and pulverize nuts to supplement their diets. But as climate warmed and deciduous broadleaf groves replaced conifer forests, nuts became staples in ancient Japanese cuisine.¹¹

The earliest Jomon houses were pit-houses or tents associated with other features that suggested a prolonged stay. Special hearths with sloping underground flues may have been used to smoke meat. Heavy grinding stones—some weighing more than 85 pounds—indicate sustained encampments.

Even more substantial and permanent communities developed by 13,000 years ago. For example, the site of Uenohara contains one area—Sector 4—that was the largest known Japanese settlement of its time. Spread over 13,000 square meters, the site has 52 house pits, a dozen of which were occupied at a single time during the four different phases in the hamlet’s history. The houses were roughly rectangular, approximately 3 × 5 meters in area, and some of the dwellings had ventilated hearths. In addition to the houses, storage pits and networks of paths indicate that Uenohara was a permanent Jomon village, inhabited until 12,800 years ago when it was covered by ash and cinders from a nearby volcano’s eruption.

Despite this volcanic setback at Uenohara, over subsequent millennia sedentary life was fundamental to Jomon culture. Throughout the Japanese archipelago, the number of Jomon sites increased through time with population peaking after 5000 B.C. during the Middle Jomon period. Houses became more substantial, especially in the cooler northern islands.

Given the Jomon tradition’s long duration, it is not surprising that settlements would vary in size and composition. But most known Jomon sites are small; most Jomon houses are tiny. In part, these limits were not a mark of failure, but an index of sustainability. Bigger is not always better.

Located in the middle of the bustling port city of Aomori on the northern tip of Honshu, the site of Sannai Marayama is the largest known Jomon site.¹² Discovered in the mid-1990s during a construction project, the site was excavated and then preserved as a major cultural center. More than 600 buildings have been uncovered at Sannai Marayama, dating over 12 phases between 3900 and 2300 B.C. Most of these houses were small pit houses and rectangular raised dwellings less than 5 meters long. A few much larger buildings were constructed, a couple of them 23–32 meters long, but it is unclear what these structures were or exactly how long they were occupied.

FIGURE 6. Reconstructions of Jomon houses at Sannai Maruyama.

In the case of the Jomon, it was not the sheer abundance of food that allowed for larger and more permanent homes and hamlets. Rather, it was the timing and location of foods that selected for those human responses. Acorns, chestnuts, buckeyes, and walnuts were harvested in the fall, stored in pits, and eaten throughout the winter. Fall was also the time for fishing for migrating salmon, hunting fat deer, and—in general—preparing stored foods for winter.¹³

Such a diet tends to select for sedentary life, especially when different habitats are relatively close. Living near the ocean in a delta crossed by rivers and streams and with densely forested hills and mountains only 5–10 kilometers to the south, the people of Sannai Marayama were ideally positioned to take advantage of rich natural resources. Similar factors account for Jomon sedentism through much of the Japanese archipelago.

And that explains the successful growth of the community—until it grew just a little too big.

The excavations uncovered a complex history of ancient Japanese homes. For much of its history, Sannai Marayama was a modest village, larger than Uenohara, but usually with fewer than 50 dwellings, housing 200–300 people. In the middle of the Middle Jomon, however, the settlement experienced a building boom, growing into a large village of 200 houses. But after reaching this peak population, Sannai Marayama withered in size, reverting to a modest village of people living in small huts.

What happened?

Junko Habu, an archaeologist from the University of California, Berkeley, who has excavated at Sannai Marayama, argues that the site’s population grew to unsustainable levels. Because of poor preservation, ancient plant and animal remains were unevenly preserved at the site. In order to gain an indirect insight into subsistence at Sannai Marayama, Habu analyzed in great detail the different stone tools used in hunting, gathering, and food preparation (like inferring dietary differences based on the ratios of salad forks to steak knives in a vegan’s and a meatlover’s respective kitchens).

Habu’s analysis pointed to major shifts in subsistence over time. Beginning with the Early Jomon levels, the relative number of grinding stones increased, until peaking in the early phases of the Middle Jomon, when these tools used for grinding plants comprised 80% of all the stone tools. Then the pattern changed calamitously: the percentage of grinding tools was halved and arrowheads became the most common stone tool. The preponderance of arrowheads marked an increased emphasis on hunted game rather than collected plant foods.

Habu argues that the people of Sannai Marayama were victims of overspecialization. When hunters and gatherers are mobile, they usually collect and hunt a wide array of plants and animals. When hunters and gatherers become more sedentary, they become more specialized. The people of Sannai Maruyama could no longer be sustained by wild plant foods. Adjustments were critical. People first tried to make up for lost calories by hunting more; that was not enough. The community inevitably declined. Ultimately Jomon hunting and gathering—a supremely successful adaptation for more than ten thousand years—gave way to village life based on cultivating rice.

This is one of the fundamental lessons from the past. Human communities may evolve extraordinarily successful ways of life, but they do this by making specific choices with often unforeseen consequences. In the process, the range of possible options inevitably narrows, which presents a problem when circumstances change. The changes need not be dramatic, just enough to tip the balance of stability. When this happens, humans—like all other animals—have a fundamental choice: Adapt or die.

And here is another lesson from the past: transitions are reversible. Like the Enlightenment philosophers, we often think of human history as progressing inevitably from gathering to farming, from windbreaks to substantial dwellings, from mobile hunters to sedentary town folk and city dwellers. But prehistory demonstrates that these cultural thresholds, once crossed, are not inevitably permanent.

. . .

In the last six decades, we Americans have doubled our rates of consumption and we are paying the price. Measured in constant 1982 dollars, the average American spent $6,600 on consumption in 1947; in 1990 that number had grown to $14,400.¹⁴ Which means that although the average American house size has increased (see chapter 5) and the average American family has decreased, we literally have tons and tons more stuff.

If you move from your comfortable three-bedroom, 2,000-squarefoot house, you will need to schlep about 16,000 pounds of stuff (this is after the garage sale and the trip to the dump).¹⁵

Our most mobile home-owning fellow Americans—people whose only homes are their recreational vehicles—calculate that their RV’s must be sufficiently sturdy to accommodate 1,500 pounds of stuff per person (and remember, this doesn’t count their already built-in beds, fridge, stoves, and other furnishings).¹⁶

Correlated with our consumptions is the growth in self-storage facilities, now a $20 billion business.¹⁷ Worldwide there are approximately 60,000 self-storage facilities; 52,000 of them are in the United States. In 1984 there were 6,601 storage facilities with a total volume of 289.7 million square feet. By late 2008 this had increased more that 800% to 2.35 billion square feet. The single largest self-storage facility in the United States is thought to be Alpine Storage, an enormous, sixteen-acre facility located in north Salt Lake City, with easy access from Interstate 15.

The burdens of the American dream are demonstrated by ongoing archaeological research into modern material culture. At the University of California, Los Angeles, the Sloan Center on Everyday Lives of Families includes a research group led by the archaeologist Jeanne Arnold. Arnold is an expert on the evolution of prehistoric Chumash chiefdoms on the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and on late prehistoric and contact period Sto:lo villages in the Fraser River Valley of British Columbia. In these regions, Arnold’s research frequently considered how ancient households were reshaped by changing patterns of politics and economy.

Since 2001, Arnold has applied archaeological methods to modern American households. Beginning with a sample of homes in Los Angeles, Arnold and her team carefully mapped houses with detailed locations of modern artifacts. Residents were video-interviewed about their ideas and uses of domestic spaces. The researchers systematically clocked how people used different parts of their homes and backyards, contrasting what informants said they did with what they actually did. Digital photos recorded interiors and exteriors, resulting in a 21,000-image archive of the use of domestic space in early twenty-first-century America.

Arnold and her colleagues have documented “archaeologically” the modern American “storage crisis.”¹⁸ The crisis has various causes—the increase in American consumerism, the explosion of goods—but also results from some unexpected factors illuminated by the modern archaeology of home.

Collecting data in the Los Angeles area before the recession-driven foreclosures of 2008–2012, Arnold and coauthor Ursula Lang noted that skyrocketing real estate prices had forced middle-class families into less-expensive housing, including older and smaller houses. Unlike homes in the Midwest and East, California houses rarely have basements for heaters, and attics are smaller because ridgelines are lower, since steep roofs are not necessary to shed snow.

So that leaves the garage.

As the garage was transformed from a carriage shed in the backyard or alley to an integrated sector of a house, the garage became, as the late landscape historian J.B. Jackson noted, “thoroughly domesticated, an integral part of home life and the routine of work and play.”¹⁹

And in that process, the garage’s function changed. No longer a place for protecting automobiles, especially in the mild weather of Southern California, the garage was transformed into home office, entertainment, and exercise areas, but preeminently a place for stuff.

Only 25% of the households in Arnold and Lang’s study actually parked a car in the garage, and nobody used the space exclusively for an auto.

Most families didn’t even try.

Some garages had been converted into bedrooms or recreation areas, but the majority of garages were exclusively for storage. “The garages of middle-class America,” Arnold and Lang write, “are suffering an identity crisis.”

The disorder of the middle-class American life is captured by the qualitative variable used to describe storage in 14 of the 24 houses in the study: “chaotic.”²⁰

There is no doubt that American consumerism is excessive at a global scale. As the planet’s principal consumers of fossil fuels and everything else, one would expect no less. Even so, is ours the only society that has too much stuff?

Obviously, the spreading forces of globalization encourage the “global consumer culture.” Studies of global household wealth indicate the shameful inequalities: the wealthiest 10% of the world’s adults own approximately 85% of global wealth, while the poorest 50% scrape by with barely 1% of global wealth.²¹ So clearly, current consumption in the developed world—and particularly in the United States—is excessive by global standards.

But how does this translate into material possessions? The World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study provides national summaries for a number of developing countries, but a more visual if less systematic view of global consumption is found in the photography collection, Material Worlds: A Global Family Portrait.²²

The project was designed by the photojournalist Peter Menzel, as “a unique tool for capturing cross-cultural realities.” In the early 1990s, Menzel and a team of photographers focused on thirty of the 183 countries that belonged to the United Nations. In each sample country, Menzel and colleagues chose families that reflected the national average according to location, type of dwelling, family size, annual income, occupation, and religion.

Menzel and fifteen other world-class photojournalists photographed these families at meals, at work, studying school lessons, and worshiping. But the key image was the Big Picture: “a unique photo of each family with all its possessions outside its dwelling.”²³

Not surprisingly, the differences are striking.

The Thoroddsen family of Hafnarfjördur, Iceland, stand outside their three-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot home in the violet twilight of a December afternoon. They are surrounded by two televisions, a pair of Icelandic horses, two cars in the driveway, a showroom’s worth of furnishings, a bevy of kitchen appliances, and two cellos. Still inside the Thoroddsen house are a baby grand piano, hundreds of books, miscellaneous housewares, and six canaries.

The Calabay Sicay family lives in San Antonio de Palopó, a village on the edge of Lake Atitlán in the highlands of Guatemala. They sit on the family bed outside their one room adobe house. A new corrugated metal roof, a glistening porcelain toilet perched above a latrine hole, and a portable two-speaker stereo all point to this family’s success. A large floor loom, a smaller loom, and a spinning wheel are tools the mother uses to weave bright scarlet cloth. The father’s farming implements—wide-bladed hoes, a single-bit axe, machetes, and a sickle—are in neat piles or hang from the wall. Just outside the separate, small, and smoke-blackened cookhouse are large clay pots, a stone metate, water jugs, and serving jars. A frying pan, a sieve, and a thermos dangle from nails in the adobe wall.

The poorest family photographed in Material Worlds is the Getu family of Moulo, Ethiopia. In 1994 Ethiopia ranked 180th in affluence among the 183 U.N. countries. Outside the Getu’s 320-square foot home, the mother and five children, ages eight months to ten years, perch on the family bed. The father stands between his two oxen. One of his three horses is nearby and five cattle are in the corral. There is a waist-tall wooden mortar and long pestle pole for milling grain. An assortment of storage, serving, and winnowing baskets. Pottery water jugs and cooking pots. A tea kettle and cups. Frying pans. Empty tin cans used as drinking cups. The Getu family also has a radio, but the battery is dead.

Each image in Material World is a fascinating glimpse of global domestic life, an intimate perspective on the objects that make up home. And although there are marked and obvious disparities in the range and variety of each family’s possessions, there is a basic truth common to them all.

No one could carry all their stuff.

This is not a trivial point. After about 15,000 years ago, human societies in different portions of the world increasingly relied on stored food—foodstuffs initially collected, then cultivated, and eventually farmed. With those changes, the configurations of our material culture diversified and our stuff weighed more. When that happened, our homes changed from principally places of temporary shelter into refuges for ourselves and our possessions.

Which is what also happened in the deserts and mountains of the ancient Near East.

. . .

The Near East has been the focus of archaeological excavations—amateurish, piratical, and professional—for more than a century.²⁴ The first permanent archaeological research group ever established, the Palestine Expedition Fund, was founded in 1865 with the goal of sponsoring sustained programs of excavations. Despite being modeled on the outstanding successes of Austen Henry Layard’s multiyear investigations of Nineveh, the Palestine Expedition Fund was not an immediate success. Only after World War I came to its bloody end were sustained archaeological projects developed.

Dorothy Garrod (1892–1968) was an amazing archaeologist whose extensive fieldwork transformed knowledge of the ancient Near East and the Zagros Mountains of eastern Iraq and western Iran.²⁵ From a distinguished British family of scientists and doctors, Garrod was trained as a Paleolithic archaeologist by the eminent French prehistorian, Abbé Breuil. Garrod excavated Upper Paleolithic deposits in then-lawless Kurdistan, her team accompanied by armed guards. Later, in northern Israel, Gar-rod directed a multiyear excavation that richly documenting the existence of non-European Neanderthals in the caves surrounding Mt. Car-mel—one of the most important excavations in the Near East. Garrod’s outstanding accomplishments were recognized in 1939 with her appointment as the Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University. Garrod was the first female professor at Cambridge (or Oxford, for that matter), a barrier-breaking appointment which was made without significant resistance. She was, as her former student recalled, “a valued member of a valued class.”²⁶

Garrod’s excavations in the Mt. Carmel vicinity began as a salvage archaeology project when the caves were slated to be quarried. Garrod had originally planned to continue excavations at the Cave of Shukbah on the Wadi-en-Natuf in the Judean Desert, where Garrod had found, as she remarks in her clear and understated prose, “a microlithic culture that would not fit exactly into any of the pigeon-holes already existing, and I therefore decided to give it a label of its own.”²⁷ She called it “Natufian” after the Wadi-en-Natuf.

More Natufian materials were uncovered during the Mt. Carmel excavations, including adult skeletons who still wore delicate ringlets of shells around their skulls. The most distinctive Natufian tools were the microlithic blades used on stone sickles. The chipped flints were serrated on one edge, dulled and blunt on their back side, and snapped off at each end into roughly rectangular flakes. The microliths were hafted on bone handles, creating a nearly continuous edge to form sickles. There was other evidence for processing plant foods: heavy mortars, basalt bowls, and other grinding stones. It was an assemblage that could have been used by early farmers.

Yet, all the animal remains were from wild game. None of the Natufian levels had pottery, which prehistorians expected to be associated with agriculture. Garrod concluded, “In the circumstances it may seem surprising that we get evidence of the practice of agriculture at such an early date among a people who possess no pottery and do not appear to have domesticated animals.”²⁸ Garrod’s basic assumption was flawed: the Natufians intensively collected wild plants, but they did not farm.

The Natufian tradition is now recognized as a transformative moment in the past. The Natufian strategy of complex hunting and gathering was, in a sense, a conceptual and adaptive bridge between the mobile hunters and gatherers of the late Paleolithic and the early farmers of the Neolithic. Of course, to the Natufians, their “strategy” was a mix of calculated actions, unforeseen consequences, and human responses—a combination of planning and accident that usually characterizes human life.

Since the 1970s, increasingly precise radiocarbon dates and high-resolution data about ancient climate have resulted in a remarkably detailed understanding of the changing post-Pleistocene world of the western portion of the Near East known as the Levant.²⁹

In the Levant, rain falls in the winter months between October and May, but annual variations result in frequent droughts. At a longer time scale, the Levant underwent several long-term shifts in climate and vegetation over the last 25,000 years.

As Paleolithic Europeans shivered through the Last Glacial Maximum at approximately 24,050 years ago, climate in the western Near East was cold and dry, although the coastal mountains near the Mediterranean were well watered and forested. After 17,450 years ago, rainfall gradually increased throughout the region, and then precipitation increased dramatically between 16,000 and 13,300 years ago. These damp millennia were followed by a thousand years of drier conditions between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago. After 12,200 years ago, there was a general increase in rainfall in the northern Levant and Anatolia, while the southern Levant remained dry.

It is an oversimplification to summarize 12,000 years of paleoclimate in the language of a weekend forecast from the Weather Channel. Yet, this synopsis captures some of the generous opportunities and stark challenges to which people adapted in the Near East.