Specialization characterizes all economies to some degree, but its variation is profound, and an objective of economic theory has been to explain its development. Since Adam Smith, economic specialization has been a focus of social scientific inquiry into the evolution of sociopolitical-economic complexity. In the words of Henrich and Boyd (2008:715), “Anthropologists and sociologists … have defended a wide variety of theories that link economic specialization, a division of labor, and the emergence of socially stratified inequality since the birth of their discipline at the end of the 19th century.” Archaeological inquiry, however, compels us to rethink this simple correlation. As the flip-side to self-sufficiency (Chapter 3), we examine variation in economic specialization found in thirteen ancient, premodern, or small-scale economies across Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas. Our analysis looks at the nature, type, and scale of specialization found in societies of different sizes and internal complexity. This is followed by a discussion of production, distribution, and infrastructural/service specializations, and where they occur within the thirteen societies examined. Although specialization apparently has different causes related to efficiency, it links strongly to developing markets with their expanded access to demand.

All societies mobilize resources for different purposes. The product of human labor, these goods and services become especially important in the formation and support of multi-scalar organizations that include communities, regional polities, and beyond. The labor and its resources must be mobilized to finance these organizations as they are developed and maintained across time.

We start by considering the complementary relationship between the goals of self-sufficiency and specialization in human economies. Self-sufficiency seems to have often been a goal to retain control and independence for a social unit, but as we describe, specialization was frequent because of the complexity and risks of tasks and the availability of lower-cost options through exchange. Among households, self-sufficiency in production for internal consumption was a reasonable objective of many traditional economies. Households often sought to retain economic independence for most subsistence foods and some everyday technology. Marshall Sahlins (1972) captured this traditional objective as the domestic mode of production (DMP), and it is foundational for Kenneth Hirth’s (2020) analysis of traditional economies. The independent household was idealized in early Western philosophy. In the Archaic period of Greece, the autarkic peasant household was desirable, and many ancient farmers produced most of their own food. In Politics written in the fourth century BCE, Aristotle maintained that, although the individual could not be self-sufficient, households could and should achieve it for daily needs. The village community could then be self-sufficient in more than basic needs.

Thirteen scholars using original and thorough historical information have worked together to consider variability across thirteen cases of premodern economies representing a worldwide distribution, contrasting sociopolitical scale, and forms of organization. In Chapter 1, we defined economies as organized to extract resources, mobilize labor, and make things and distribute them for consumption. This consumption meets the ever-changing demand of human populations and their institutional formations that create the diversity of material life of human societies. With extended interactions, our comparative study probably represents the best available overall consideration of economic variability in premodern societies. We do not see our book as a final statement with evident conclusions of premodern economies, but as a substantial step forward.

As human societies formed multi-scalar organizations assembling household units, labor and resources were needed to support supra-family activities. Perhaps most important was the way that labor was mobilized in reciprocal relationships between household and in support of community and political institutions. In colloquial parlance, ‘work’ and ‘labor’ are interchangeable, the essential human actions in all economic activities involving subsistence procurement, manufacture, building, transport, warfare, and ritual. Though in many respects isomorphic, we will speak mostly of labor. One difference is that work applies to expenditure of energy in individual and group tasks. Labor is social work engaged between parties (including for supernaturals); the social connections activated in labor parties could be the key motivator for people to work at all (Weiss and Rupp 2011:91). Labor contrasts with organic work (breathing, masticating, pumping blood) or habitual work (tying shoes, brushing teeth). Lucassen (2021:2) quotes Charles and Chris Tilly’s definition of work: “human effort adding use value to goods and services.” Weiss (2014:39) defines work as “agentic activity for changing the environment and creating artifacts,” a definition pleasing to archaeologists. Weiss and Rupp recommend a person-centric approach, finding out what it is like to be working – the lived experience (2011:83, 87). To Lucassen, empirical study of labor should focus on descriptions of men’s and women’s daily practice in their own words (2021:xvii). Lucassen concluded that the “satisfaction, pride, pleasure and the propensity for cooperation and the pursuit of equality in remuneration for effort” characterize labor (2021:45). All that tallies with George Cowgill’s admonition that archaeology should be eliciting human “lived experience” (2013:132–133).

The formations of central places in human societies involved the development of multi-scalar institutions, for which central places played key roles in the economy, politics, social stratification, and religion. With the development of cities, we see a clear linkage to a multiplicity of hierarchical relationships that increasingly dominated ancient and modern societies. The term city has been applied variously to large, populous settlements, depending on the theoretical orientation of scholars, different cultural and geographical areas where they occur, and phases of urbanization through which they pass (Marcus and Sabloff 2008). As seen from cases considered by our group, not all societies had large cities. Pueblo IV in the American Southwest, the Nordic Bronze Age (BA) chiefdoms, and the South Pare people of East Africa lived in settlements without having anything approaching a city. Cities were dynamic and diversified communities that changed according to the social, environmental, and political conditions that shaped their political and economic roles within their territories. They arose for different reasons and their formation requires understanding the economies and environmental conditions that supported them. But what is a city and what is urban? Those are important distinctions to make before comparing the economies of early urban societies.

The effectiveness of comparative studies resides in the breadth and suitability of the cases used in pursuit of a research question. We have selected thirteen societies to develop a comparative understanding of how premodern economies were organized and operated. These span a broad range of societies in terms of organization, complexity, and their place in time and space. They include societies from around the world: six from the Americas and seven from Eurasia and Africa (Figure 2.1). They are diverse in adaptation and scale, and include horticultural, foraging, pastoral, mixed economy, and sedentary agricultural groups. Examples include tribal, chiefdom, and ancient state-level societies. Despite this diversity and the historical independence of the Americas and Eurasian/African examples, commonalities exist in economic structures because of the cumulative and shared nature of economic behaviors that we hope to capture.

Social scientists need to employ a comparative approach if they want to explain cultural variation from a cross-cultural perspective (Smith et al. 2012). The fundamental analytical problem is that the modern era simply does not encapsulate enough of the variation for how humans have lived or in fact do live. Although a few economists have attempted to include premodern economies into formal modeling of economic systems (Dow and Reed 2022), the collection of evidence on premodern economies and its interpretation primarily is the job that anthropologists and historians must undertake. This volume undertakes the challenge of developing a comparative understanding of premodern economies. We feel that economists often misrepresent modern economies by oversimplifying processes by not considering many earlier economic relationships of labor and exchange that continue into the present day. We envision economies as historically developed, adding new processes related to scale and changing objectives over time. As a first step, we should clarify what we mean when we discuss premodern economies.

Ritual and its linkage to meaning permeates human relations from households through complex state and inter-state organizations. As globally understood, religions and associate ritual creates common and opposing relationships of identify and meaning that motivate group formations from regional forager groups to imperial conquests. Religion, however, is not abstract and held only in human heads; it is manifest in ritual activities, objects, and labor contributions that link to an economic sector supporting religious activities, monumental construction, and personal engagement.