certain areas, the dead are buried in others, and—as the excavations at Kebara Cave demonstrate—humans have done this for more than 60,000 years. In open air encampments, people will tend to deal with messy or potentially dangerous tasks on the edge of camp, whether butchering reindeer at Pincevent during the Upper Paleolithic or rebuilding a truck engine in central Australia in the 1970s. This is not, I repeat, because the Alyawara are representatives of the Upper Paleolithic, but because this is what humans do. Whether in a desperate camp in the Sonoran desert or a comfortable encampment on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, we humans order space, we modify our worlds, and in that process we leave archaeological signatures of our passing.
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.
