Property in prehistory

Abstract

The evolution of property rights has been of great interest to legal scholars, economists, and anthropologists from at least the seminal philosophical thoughts of Locke (1689) and the expanding knowledge of property among traditional peoples (Maine, 1861; Demsetz, 1967). Based largely on first principles, property systems have been modeled as unintended consequences of costs-benefits choices by individuals and as intentional design of codes by governing bodies (Krier, 2009). These evolutionary formulations provide logically consistent and pleasing outlines of the past, but they would seem to demand empirical validation. It is broadly felt by social scientists, however, that 'because property began in prehistoric times, no one can really prove what actually happened, as a matter of historical truth' (Krier, 2009: 9). Without written documentation, can we know with any certainty about the history of property? I hope to show that the robust material record provided by archaeology allows reasonable evaluations of how property systems developed. An evolution theory of property can be formulated using a combination of the ethnographic and archaeological records to test theoretical concepts from anthropology, economics, political economy, and legal theory. Following the logic of Flannery and Marcus (2012), I combine ethnographic and archaeological evidence to describe property relationships in traditional societies and how they developed through prehistory. Cross-culturally, many forms of property have existed (Strathern, 1999) probably as a continuum from identification or association with things to social and political possession to ownership enforced by the rule of written law (Hodder, 2012). The 20th-century archives of ethnographies provide vivid descriptions of alternative ways that property operated outside of modern states, and property relationships can be arranged into pseudo-evolutionary patterns, hypotheses really, that link sociopolitical complexity to particular developmental trajectories in line with the views of legal and economic thinkers (

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