Author's reply

ETHNICITY AS A FORM OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NEOLITHIC CILICIA AND CENTRAL ANATOLIA

Isabella CANEVA                                                                                
isabella.caneva@uniroma1.it

As Peter Kuniholm pointed out, archaeologists (myself included) are generally at ease when speaking of numbers of pots or stratigraphic layers, though much less so when trying to interpret data variability in archaeological contexts: the most common interpretation consists of a mechanical reference of variability to specific functions within a unitary, coherent system of territorial resource exploitation. Prehistoric social relations, however complicated, are, in our mind, still confined to quests for food. The present debate underlines the difficulties we all have in envisaging, for prehistoric periods, a more subtle and less material-based group subdivision within each functional component of the system, even though such a scenario is easily outlined for only slightly more recent periods. The main reason for this scepticism is the absence of written sources: how to reconstruct human behaviour purely on the basis of material culture? If ethnicity is re-defined as a contingent phenomenon, however, it should be possible to reconstruct the dynamics of the phenomenon in a number of different contexts, to identify each of the material signs of these dynamics and, consequently, to test them against archaeological data from comparable contexts. In recent prehistoric research, the body of evidence of different sites belonging to the same culture and established in the same environment has been growing. As revealed on many occasions, an immediate result of food production is the accumulation of stock products used for exchange over wide areas. The Neolithic brought peoples into closer, more intensive contact than they had been before, thereby probably developing interests (related either to territory and specific resources or technology) which could best be defended by each group if they had a way of referring to the primordial origins of their respective ancestors. For Bordes and Binford the world comprised groups which were either different in ‘culture’ (Bordes) or in functional adaptation to the territory (Binford). Bordes’s ‘culture’, as well as Binford’s ‘adaptation’, probably encompassed a number of different notions, possibly even political and social relations. These two perspectives are, therefore, not so far from one another, and certainly do not exclude each other. In brief, what we need to do is consider a range of possible explanations, each of which should be tested against the archaeological data.