Storage Technologies as Embedded Social Practices

Unlike other aspects of ancient economies, such as production (e.g. Hendon 2007), consumption (e.g. Dietler and Hayden 2001) and exchange (e.g. Dillian and White 2010), storage ¹ is still considered within traditional neo-evolutionary and economistic ² frameworks in archaeology (e.g. Christakis 2008). Storage remains and the size of storage structures are viewed as evidence for surplus, and in effect, as a kind of index for socio-political change in the past, especially economic centralisation and the emergence of complexity. Such approaches have been particularly resilient in Aegean prehistoric archaeology given the influential and pioneering work of Renfrew (1972). On the basis of recent anthropological perspectives on social change that stress historicity, collective action and other forms of agency, while decoupling complexity and centralisation (e.g. Blanton et al. 1996; Blanton and Fargher 2008; Feinman 2000; Pauketat 2007; Saitta 1999; Yoffee 2005), we argue that the significance of storage practices and strategies for the emergence of institutionalised inequality has to be investigated within the specific socio-economic dynamics of past societies. For the generalised economies of societies without state institutions, such as the ones we investigate in northern Greece during the Bronze Age and for most of the Iron Age, the relationship that connects storage to complexity via surplus is neither straightforward nor necessarily predicated upon uncertainty, risk and fear of scarcity (Feinman and Neitzel 1984; Halperin 1994: 89–90; Hayden 1995; Margomenou 2008: 194–97). Furthermore, practices and technologies associated with storage, as well as storage spaces and containers, may have carried significations beyond their functional and utilitarian dimensions (Hendon 2000; Margomenou 2008). Such significations could have been manipulated within local political networks in reproducing, maintaining or challenging relations of inequality already present within communities without state institutions (Bender 1989; Price and Feinman 1995). To accommodate such a political framework, an analytical scheme is required that addresses the multiple dimensions of storage and considers it as embedded in the social fabric, in the actions (and interactions) of people within living past communities.