Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis

Replicas of ancient tombstones in the Kerameikos cemetery, Athens, including the Stele of Dexileos

In archaeology, the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis is a middle-range theory about the relationship between a society's burial practices and its social organisation. It predicts that the use within a society of specific areas for the disposal of the dead is correlated with the degree to which that society uses claims of lineal ties to dead ancestors to legitimise control over restricted resources. The hypothesis was first formulated as the last in a series of eight by the American anthropologist Arthur Saxe in 1970, and developed by Lynne Goldstein later in the 1970s. In reference to its origin, it is sometimes known as Hypothesis 8.

Drawing on the ethnographic work of Mervyn Meggitt and the role theory developed by Ward Goodenough, Saxe predicted that societies in which corporate groups legitimised their claims to crucial, restricted resources through narratives of ties to ancestors would be more likely to use formal areas for the disposal of the dead, and that societies using such areas would be more likely to contain such corporate groups. His work coincided with that of Lewis Binford, who argued for the use of funerary practices as evidence for social organisation and for the status of the deceased in life, such that the use of mortuary evidence for these purposes came to be known as the Saxe–Binford programme. Saxe's hypothesis was refined by Goldstein, who stipulated that formal cemeteries were only one possible means of claiming ties to ancestors and control over restricted resources, and therefore that the lack of such cemeteries need not imply the lack of corporate groups competing over such resources. As a result, it became known as the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis.

The Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis was credited with revitalising interest in funerary archaeology, and widely applied, particularly by adherents of processual archaeology, a body of archaeological theory which sought to bring archaeology closer to the natural sciences. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was applied to (among others) the distribution of megalithic tombs in the European Stone Age, to prehistoric Aboriginal burial grounds near Australia's Murray River, and to the different levels of state control over cemeteries in classical Athens and ancient Rome. It was criticised from within the processual movement for failing to account for important but archaeologically invisible means of funerary differentiation, and by post-processual archaeologists, such as Ian Hodder, who viewed it as ignoring the beliefs, motivations and competing interests of those responsible for disposing of the dead. By the twenty-first century, explicit use of the hypothesis was considered a minority pursuit, particularly in British archaeology, though it was also described as part of the "theoretical unconscious" of Neolithic archaeologists by James Whitley and as part of "the realm of archaeological common sense" by Robert Rosenswig, Margaret Briggs and Marilyn Masson in 2020.

Saxe's formulation

A Bontoc house on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, 1903

The Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis is a middle-range theory, in that it attempts to explain the processes behind the formation of the archaeological record. It is within the tradition of processual archaeology, a positivist school of thought developed in the 1960s which aimed to model archaeology upon the scientific method of the natural sciences. Processual archaeology emphasised the development and testing of hypotheses about general laws of human behaviour.

The anthropologist Arthur Saxe, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan, articulated the first version of the hypothesis in his 1970 doctoral dissertation. In his thesis, Saxe proposed eight hypotheses concerning the relationship between mortuary practices and the social structure of the society that uses them. His eighth hypothesis predicted that:

To the degree that corporate group rights to use and/or control crucial but restricted resources are attained and/or legitimised by means of lineal descent from the dead (i.e. lineal ties to ancestors), such groups will maintain formal disposal areas for the exclusive disposal of their dead, and conversely.

Saxe developed this hypothesis from the work of Mervyn Meggitt, who found (based on anthropological observations between 1933 and the early 1960s) that the Mae Enga people of Papua New Guinea determined the legitimate ownership of land through claims of lineal descent from ancestors who had once settled it. It was based in the role theory developed by Ward Goodenough in the 1960s, which interpreted acts in everyday life as acting out socially defined roles and categories. Matthew Suriano has also suggested that it was inspired by the work of Fustel de Coulanges, a nineteenth-century historian who connected mortuary practices with the growth of property rights in ancient cities. Saxe considered the hypothesis supported by the cases he studied – the Kapauku, Asante and Bontoc peoples, respectively of Central Papua, Ghana and Luzon – but to require further testing to be determined proven.

Parallel work by Lewis Binford

A burial with grave goods at Las Herrerías in Spain, from the Argaric culture of the Early Bronze Age

In the 1970s and 1980s, the American archaeologist Lewis Binford was a leading figure in the theoretical movement known as the "New Archaeology" (later called processual archaeology). In a 1962 article, Binford had called upon archaeologists to make greater use of ethnographic parallels, as Saxe later did, to draw conclusions about past societies, adapting an earlier comment by Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips to write that "archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing".

In a 1971 article titled "Mortuary Practices: Their Study and Their Potential", Binford argued that funerary practices should be understood as reflections of the social organisation of the people who carry them out, rather than as consequences of the ancestry of different cultural groups or of contacts between them (the cultural diffusionist or culture-historical model then prevalent in archaeology). He set out to test the degree to which the social status of an individual and the social complexity of their society were reflected in mortuary practice, and concluded that simpler societies would show fewer dimensions of differentiation between individuals in death, and conversely. The belief that an individual's treatment in death can be used to infer information about both their status in life and the organisation of their society has been termed the "Saxe–Binford programme" or "Saxe–Binford hypothesis".

Robert Chapman has characterised the work of both Saxe and Binford in this area as "exploratory rather than ... fully theorised [or] theoretical". Binford investigated a sample of 40 societies and concluded that more complex societies indeed showed more and more abstract degrees of differentiation in funerary ritual, and that mortuary differentiation according to age correlated negatively with the level of hereditary inequality in a society. Joanne Curtin, in 2017, described the work of Saxe and Binford as the most significant recent development in funerary archaeology.

Development by Lynne Goldstein

Saxe's Hypothesis 8 was widely adopted and developed by processual archaeologists during the 1970s. Lynne Goldstein, then a doctoral student at Northwestern University, wrote her own thesis on it, re-analysing Saxe's data and producing a study of 30 societies in relation to the hypothesis. In a 1981 chapter, Goldstein argued that Saxe had been correct that formal disposal areas for the dead generally indicated a society in which social structures were organised around lineal descent, but disagreed that such social structures would necessarily be expressed through the maintenance of such areas. She reframed the hypothesis as three related sub-hypotheses:

• To the degree that corporate group rights to use and/or control crucial but restricted resources are attained and/or legitimised by lineal descent from the dead (i.e. lineal ties to ancestors), such groups will, by the popular religion and its ritualisation, regularly reaffirm the lineal corporate group and its rights. One means of ritualisation is the maintainence of a permanent, specialised, bounded area for the exclusive disposal of their dead.
• If a permanent, specialised, bounded area for the exclusive disposal of the group's dead exists, then it is likely that this represents a corporate group that has rights over the use and/or control of crucial but restricted resources. This corporate control is most likely to be attained and/or legitimised by means of lineal descent from the dead, either in terms of an actual lineage or in the form of a strong, established tradition of the critical resource passing from parent to offspring.
• The more structured and formal the disposal area, the fewer alternative explanations of social organisation apply, and conversely.

Based on her doctoral research, Goldstein concluded that:

If there is a formal bounded disposal area, used exclusively for the dead, then the culture is probably one which has a corporate group structure in the form of a lineal descent system. The more organised and formal the disposal area is, the more conclusive this interpretation.

Goldstein's reformulation made Hypothesis 8 a one-way argument: while formal burial areas could be taken as evidence that corporate groups existed with control of restricted resources, it did not necessarily follow that all societies that included such groups would institute formal burial areas – different cultures may create different symbolic and ritual expressions of these social structures. Goldstein's formulation of the hypothesis largely displaced that of Saxe, with the result that it became generally known as the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis.

Application

A megalithic tomb, Harhoog, in Keitum on the island of Sylt, constructed c. 3000 BCE

In collaboration with L. P. Gall, Saxe studied swidden farmers in Malaysia who had been forced to move into permanent villages; in a 1977 publication of this study, they noted that these farmers subsequently shifted towards burying their dead in formal cemeteries, which they took as evidence for Hypothesis 8. In 1982, Maurice Bloch made a study of the Merina people of Madagascar, for whom he concluded that "the notion of ancestral land, that is land belonging to the deme [community], is totally merged with the notion of ancestors. The ancestors had lived and were buried in the ancestral land; the land, in the form of terraces, had been made by the ancestors". The anthropologist James A. Brown considers this reinforcing evidence for the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis. In 1984, Jack Glazier made a study of the Mbeere people of Kenya, who traditionally disposed of corpses with little ritual until a 1930 government decree mandated the burial of the dead, and concluded that this alteration in mortuary practice allowed the newly created graves to be used to legitimise claims to hereditary control of the land around them. This has likewise been cited as evidence in support of the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis.

In 1981, Brown described the methods of Saxe and Binford as a means of applying the social theories of Morton Fried and Elman Service, who studied the development and evolution of socio-political organisation, to material culture. Robert Chapman, in the same year, argued for the utility of the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis to explain the distribution of megalithic tombs in prehistoric Europe. In 1988, Colin Pardoe applied the hypothesis to prehistoric Aboriginal burial grounds in southeastern Australia, considering it a useful tool to interpret these as means of legitimising control over territory near the Murray River. Umesh Chattopadhyaya did the same in 1996, concluding that it could be applied to Mesolithic hunter-gatherer societies of the Ganges valley. Patricia McAnany popularised the hypothesis among Mesoamerican archaeologists through her 1995 book Living with the Ancestors, in which she argued for the use of burial as creating a "principle of first occupancy", giving claims to land through descent from those who originally farmed it. Carla Antonnacio, also in 1995, used the hypothesis as a foundation of her study of the use of cemeteries between the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in Greece, arguing that the evidence of feasting and libations at ancient tombs, as well as their re-entry and re-use, was evidence for the ancestor worship of mythical heroes. Matthew C. Velasco's 2014 study of prehispanic burials in Peru's Colca Valley used the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis alongside traditionally post-processual focuses on the agency of material objects and the role of funerary rituals in constructing social identities.

In 1983, Douglas Charles and Jane E. Buikstra made a study of Mississippian funerary sites from the Archaic period (c. 8000 – c. 1000 BCE). They connected the hypotheses of Saxe and Goldstein to modes of subsistence, arguing that sedentary modes of subsistence correlated with the use of formal cemetery areas, and that the inclusion of individuals in cemeteries implied their inclusion in corporate groups competing for restricted resources. Ian Morris invoked the hypothesis in 1991 to explain the differences in burial practice between the classical cities of Athens and Rome, by which cemeteries were tightly controlled by the state in Athens but comparatively unregulated in Rome. He added a cognitive explanation, based on the use of textual evidence, to suggest that Athenian cemeteries were used to legitimise claims to citizenship, which was comparatively more restricted and more valuable in Athens than in Rome. Morris qualified the hypothesis by emphasising that claims of descent from ancestors need not be associated with ancestor worship. Luca Cherstich employed the hypothesis in his 2024 study of the tombs of classical Cyrene, but wrote that it was necessary to temper it with a post-processual investigation of the intent and agency behind the formation of the funerary record.

Reception

Criticism

A burial from Varna in Bulgaria, with golden grave goods, dated to c. 4,600 – c. 4,200 BCE

The Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis was criticised by post-processual archaeologists of the 1980s, who argued that it did not leave sufficient room for the beliefs and intentions of those who lived in the past and created the archaeological record. Ian Hodder, in 1982, used the example of the Mesakin people of Sudan to argue that the burial record may only represent an idealised fraction of the social relations that exist within a society, drawing attention to what he called "the disjunction between burial pattern and social pattern". In the same year, his students Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley criticised the functionalist position adopted by Saxe and other processualists, writing that such explanations were inadequate to explain the specific content and context of funerary ritual, and that mortuary practices may be used to invert and misrepresent the social order as much as they may reflect it.

Attempts to use mortuary evidence to infer social status or organisation fell from scholarly favour in the 1980s, and were generally replaced by investigations of what funerary practices meant to those who carried them out. In 1984, Hodder again criticised the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis as presenting a "relatively passive view of society", in which cultural context was ignored and the meanings of funerary actions, which Hodder considered critical to understanding the effects of those actions, were lost. Other criticisms levelled by Morris, among others, included that burial itself represents only part of the funerary ritual, and that excessive reliance upon it in archaeological explanation may neglect the role of other aspects which are less archaeologically visible. In a 1986 dissertation, R. A. Kerber argued that the framework proposed by Saxe and Binford only held where the transfer of power between generations was unquestioned, rather than being a site of negotiation, contention or competition.

Over the course of the 1980s, the hypothesis came to be generally rejected; James Whitley suggests that this was due to a mistaken belief among archaeologists that it must be used as a rigid law rather than a general relationship. It was criticised, including from within the processual movement, on both ethnographic and archaeological grounds. John M. O'Shea argued that important indicators of mortuary differentiation would not necessarily be preserved in the archaeological record. In 1991, Whitley questioned the validity of the ethnographic evidence behind the hypothesis, writing that the burial practices of the Merina (used as evidence by Saxe) owed more to ideology and beliefs about the dead than to the social position of the deceased, and that it was "seriously misleading" to use them as straightforward confirmation of Saxe's hypothesis. In 2002, William Rathje, Vincent Lamotta and William Longacre used the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis as an example of what they called the "black hole" of archaeological explanation, suggesting that its poor fit with burial practices in the contemporary United States illustrated the unwilligness of archaeologists to incorporate observations from their own societies into supposedly general models of human behaviour.

Whitley considered the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis a generalisation, rather than a universal truth, and that it could not be considered proven; he further suggested that it underemphasised the competing agencies and interests of the individuals involved in the burial process. He further criticised, in 2002, the reliance of the hypothesis (as used by Morris) on ancestors as an explanation, suggesting that ethnographic parallels gave insufficient support for the level of social centrality that Saxe, Goldstein and their followers placed upon them. In 2012, André Strauss wrote that the hypothesis was of limited interpretative value for Brazilian sites of the Archaic period, particularly due to the difficulty of precisely defining a "formal disposal area" within the terms of the prediction.

Legacy

Some post-processual archaeologists returned to using funerary evidence to infer social hierarchies in the 1990s. However, during this period, funerary archaeology played a comparatively small role in (in particular) American archaeology, due both to cultural changes and to methodological difficulties with its study. Parker Pearson, in 1999, wrote that the hypothesis had value as a partial explanation of why cemeteries may be constructed, but did not explain why cemeteries, rather than other means of legitimation through lineal descent, would be adopted in a society, and that it did not encompass the full significance of relationships between the living and the ancestors. It remained a minority position, particularly among British archaeologists; in 2010, Emma Elder wrote that it was "in the graveyard of disused theoretical tools", though she considered that it could still be useful with proper qualification. In 2013, David Edwards wrote that the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis could be applied to certain African burial rites, such as the below-house burial practised in West Africa, though these rituals also contained other meanings and alternative methods could be used alongside them to assert territorial claims.

Hypothesis 8 was described by Robert Chapman in 2013 as the most famous of Saxe's eight hypotheses, and by Parker Pearson as the only one which had continued to be used and discussed by 1999. In 2002, Whitley wrote that it had become part of the "theoretical unconscious" of Neolithic archaeologists, including those who subscribed to post-processual theories that generally rejected the basis of the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis. Brown wrote in 2007 that it was the "most enduring accomplishment" of the processual approach to mortuary studies, and that it had remained useful into the present. While he judged that the use of the hypothesis had seen "limited success in producing durable findings", he credited it with renewing scholarly interest in funerary practices among archaeologists, other scholars, and the public. Robert Rosenswig, Margaret Briggs and Marilyn Masson similarly considered it part of "the realm of archaeological common sense" in 2020.

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