In archaeology, the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis is a prediction about the relationship between a society's funerary practices and its social organization. It predicts a correlation between two phenomena: the use of specific areas to dispose of the dead, and the legitimation of control over restricted resources through claims of descent from dead ancestors. The hypothesis was first formulated by the American anthropologist Arthur Saxe in 1970, as the last in a series of eight, and was refined by Lynne Goldstein later in the 1970s. In reference to its origin, it is sometimes known as Hypothesis Eight.
Saxe's work drew on the ethnographic work of Mervyn Meggitt and the role theory developed by Ward Goodenough. He predicted that, if a society contained groups of people with a shared identity (known as "corporate groups") that legitimized their claims to important, restricted resources by claiming ties to ancestors, that society would be more likely to use formal areas, such as cemeteries, for the disposal of the dead. Conversely, societies using such areas would be more likely to contain such corporate groups. His work coincided with that of Lewis Binford, who argued that funerary practices provided useful evidence for social organization and for the status of the deceased in life. Studying the treatment of the dead to investigate these areas came to be known as the Saxe–Binford program. Lynne Goldstein modified the hypothesis to stipulate that formal disposal areas were only one possible means of claiming ties to ancestors, and therefore that the lack of such areas need not imply the lack of corporate groups using those ties to compete over resources. As a result, it became known as the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis.
The Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis was credited with revitalizing interest in funerary archaeology. It was widely adopted, particularly by adherents of processual archaeology, a body of theory that 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. Within the processual movement, the hypothesis was criticized for failing to account for practices that do not leave traces in the archaeological record. It was also criticized 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. However, it was also described as part of the "theoretical unconscious" of Neolithic archaeologists by James Whitley in 2002, and as part of "the realm of archaeological common sense" by Robert Rosenswig, Margaret Briggs, and Marilyn Masson in 2020.
Background
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 on archaeologists to make greater use of observations of living societies made by anthropologists as analogies for how societies may have operated in the past. He adapted an earlier comment by the archaeologists 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 reflect the social organization of the people who carry them out. This conflicted with the cultural diffusionist or culture-historical model then prevalent in archaeology, which instead saw them as determined by the ancestry of the cultural groups performing them, or by cultural exchange between different groups. Binford set out to test the degree to which a society's treatment of the dead ("mortuary practices") reflected the deceased individuals' social status and the whole society's level of social complexity. He predicted that simpler societies would have fewer criteria on which to mark out individuals in death (that is, they would "show fewer dimensions of differentiation"), while more complex societies would have more such criteria. From a study of 40 societies, he concluded that more complex societies indeed showed more degrees of differentiation in their funerary rituals between different individuals, and that they marked that differentiation in more abstract ways. He also considered that mortuary differentiation according to age correlated negatively with the level of hereditary inequality in a society.
Saxe's formulation of the hypothesis
The anthropologist Arthur Saxe, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan, proposed Hypothesis Eight in his 1970 doctoral dissertation. It was developed from the work of Mervyn Meggitt, who had made anthropological observations of the Mae Enga people of Papua New Guinea between 1933 and the early 1960s. He had concluded that, in Mae Enga society, claims of descent from the ancestors who had once settled a piece of land were used to determine who legitimately owned it. Saxe's work was further based on the role theory developed by Ward Goodenough in the 1960s, which interpreted acts in everyday life as acting out socially defined roles and categories. The archaeologist and philologist Matthew Suriano has also suggested that Saxe was inspired by the work of Fustel de Coulanges, a nineteenth-century historian who connected funerary practices with the growth of property rights in ancient cities.
In his dissertation, Saxe proposed eight hypotheses concerning the relationship between mortuary practices and the social structure of the society that uses them. The eighth argues that a society's use of formal areas to dispose of the dead, such as cemeteries, correlates with certain other cultural features. Specifically, it focuses on corporate groups (groups of people sharing a common identity), which legitimize their claims to restricted resources by claiming ties to ancestors. According to the hypothesis, societies with these corporate groups are more likely to use such areas; conversely, societies using such areas are more likely to contain corporate groups using ancestral ties in this way. In Saxe's phrasing:
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 on a larger sample.
As applied to past societies, the hypothesis is an example of middle-range theory, in that it attempts to draw general conclusions about the relationship between the archaeological record and the people who produced it. It is within the tradition of processual archaeology, a movement begun in the 1960s which aimed to model archaeology on the scientific method of the natural sciences. Processual archaeology emphasized the development and testing of hypotheses about general laws of human behavior. In this respect, it was part of the larger positivist school of thought, in which knowledge is considered to be based upon observable ("empirical") facts, which can themselves be predicted from consistent rules, laws and patterns. The belief that an individual's treatment in death can be used to infer information about both their status in life and the organization of their society has been termed the "Saxe–Binford program" or "Saxe–Binford hypothesis". The archaeologist Robert Chapman has characterized the work of both Saxe and Binford in this area as "exploratory rather than ... fully theorized [or] theoretical".
Development by Lynne Goldstein Saxe's eighth hypothesis was widely adopted and developed by processual archaeologists during the 1970s. Joseph Tainter used it in a study of a cemetery at Kaloko in Hawaii, where the community was made up of the inhabitants of four residential units. He argued, based on the hypothesis, that the unified nature of the cemetery reflected a unified identity shared between the inhabitants of different units. Lynne Goldstein, then a doctoral student in archaeology at Northwestern University, wrote her own thesis on the hypothesis, reanalyzing Saxe's data and producing a study of 30 societies in relation to Hypothesis Eight. In a 1981 chapter, Goldstein agreed with Saxe that formal disposal areas for the dead generally occur in societies with social structures organized around lineal descent. However, she further argued, against Saxe, that maintaining such areas was not an essential part of expressing these social structures.
Goldstein reframed Saxe's single hypothesis as three related sub-hypotheses. Her reformulation made Hypothesis Eight a one-way argument: while formal disposal areas could be taken as evidence that corporate groups used claims of ancestry to claim control of restricted resources, it did not follow that a society that included such groups would always institute such disposal areas. Instead, different cultures may have different ways of legitimizing ancestral claims to resources, including through non-funerary symbols and rituals. Goldstein's formulation largely displaced that of Saxe, with the result that the overall idea became generally known as the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis.
Goldstein first hypothesised that corporate groups making claims based on ties to ancestors would express these through regular religious or ritual acts. She stated that these acts would be more prominent in societies where claims based on ancestors were more important, and that one form of such acts could be to maintain formal disposal areas:
She then argued that the existence of such formal disposal areas could be taken as evidence for corporate groups making these kinds of claims, either based on biological ancestry or traditions of inheritance:
Finally, she argued that researchers could be more confident in linking formal disposal areas with claims based on ancestors if those disposal areas were more rigorously defined and organized:
Having assessed these sub-hypotheses against the Mississippian societies studied in her doctoral research, Goldstein concluded that:
Application
In collaboration with L. P. Gall, Saxe studied itinerant swidden farmers in Malaysia who had been forced to move into permanent villages. In a 1977 publication of this study, Saxe and Gall noted that these farmers subsequently shifted toward burying their dead in formal cemeteries, and took this as evidence for Hypothesis Eight. Robert Chapman, in 1981, argued that the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis could be used to explain the distribution of megalithic tombs in prehistoric Europe. 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.