Stonehenge and the Patriarchal Counter-Revolution

Discussion

From an interview of the Radical Anthropology Group journal with Lionel Sims:

"Contrary to Parker-Pearson, you call Stonehenge a ‘monument of counter-revolution’. First, tell us what revolution and counter-revolution you are talking about. Stonehenge was built by settled Neolithic farmers, wasn’t it?

LS: Like Engels I believe that we humans are a revolutionary species. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors overthrew primate jealousy and selfishness and established a mode of production through the revolutionary creation of matrilineal/matrilocal clans. The solidarity of classificatory brothers and sisters, what Morgan and Engels called ‘the gens’, was the organisational heart of the first communist society. Chris Knight, a professor of anthropology at the University of East London, and others, have made this claim scientifically respectable on the basis of modern scientific methods.

However, that theory, sex-strike theory, has a number of assumptions for it to work. The main one is a materialist assumption – that there are plenty of big game animals for launching a predictably successful, monthly big game hunt. Now, that assumption cannot be true by at least ten thousand years ago, if not much earlier. Many of the big game animals died out by then, and much of the grasslands of the world disappeared under forests – which have a much lower biomass than grasslands. All I asked is – what would we predict the hunters would have done? All we do is test out the available alternatives – they could have been conservative, and carried on hunting, or they innovated. To carry on hunting in the old way meant dispersing into smaller, more scattered, more mobile groups and, perhaps, coming back together again once or twice a year. This is what happened over most of the world in a period we call in British archaeology the Mesolithic. If they innovated there were two main ways to do so – become complex hunters who ‘farmed’ salmon/cod from the sea and rivers (for example), or become ‘farmers’.

Up until 20 years ago, it was the ‘farming revolution’ theory that held sway. Archaeologists assumed that the hunter-gatherer precursors of farmers were irrelevant since “nothing much happened” (as archaeologist Colin Renfrew put it) until the farming of the Neolithic. We now know that the first ‘farmers’ who built Stonehenge (and Avebury, and so on) weren’t settled farmers at all, but cattle herders who still hunted, occasionally planted and were not living in settled villages but were still ‘nomadic’, ie, they preserved as much of their earlier hunter-gatherer lifestyle as possible. This has been established by the last two decades of research in archaeology, and is found to be true for much of the world.

Intensive, sedentary farming was resisted as much as possible by all the people of the world. It was only under the most pressing circumstances that it was adopted.

The key to this, I am sure, was sexual/economic politics. In a hunting society, a man only earns sexual rights, marriage, in return for hunting services to his wife and in-laws. This is called bride-service. Once domestic cattle have been adopted, they are not used for food, but for purchasing wives. Then a man can approach another man who has a daughter, and instead of promising a life-time of hunting he now bargains to purchase a wife in perpetuity for a once-for-all payment of a number of cattle. This is called bride-price. Now look at this arrangement from the point of view of the bartered woman. What if she doesn’t like her new husband? What if she complains to her brother(s) or her mother(s) that he is not a nice man?

What will they say? Go back to him, they will say. Do you think we are going to return his cattle? How will we get a wife/children if we return his cattle? Now brother/sister solidarity has broken down, patrilineal/patrilocal clans become the organisational heart of a society increasingly stratified by degrees of cattle wealth and warring cattle-raiders. One way to keep such groups from falling apart from internal competition is to build monuments.

I’m no stone-hugger. These monuments were labour-intensive structures to test the loyalty of groups with the need to atone for the crime of women’s oppression. That’s a counter-revolution.

...

in the last 40 years there has been a revolution in the life sciences and, I would claim, this revolution has provided the method and the data to confirm the truth of Engels’ claim that we are a revolutionary species, and that we established the first human culture as communist.

Second, this communist society started breaking down as the big game animals of the Palaeolithic started to die out. By the Neolithic, when monument building began, wealthy cattle-owning men are establishing their power, partly through monument building, at the expense of the earlier brother-sister solidarity of the matrilineal/matrilocal clans. This event was, as Engels claimed, the world-historic defeat of women and the establishment of the first class societies.

Third, as the Neolithic counterrevolution was based on economics, not biology, and as we were present at our own making as communists, then the next revolution is a return to the first, but now on the basis of modern technology that can assure plenty for all." (http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/new/Journal_files/journal_02.pdf)