ABSTRACT
Structure and action are mutually dependent driving forces of change and stability in all societies. Evolutionary development of the human species, history, beliefs and traditions dene structures, whereas actions are dened by the individual interpretations of the people involved. This article, a summary and development of an earlier thesis (Knutsson 1995), examines how particular examples of cultural change are subject to a wide range of different forces, and therefore cannot be interpreted as simple unilinear developments. It also illustrates the essential role of ethnographic and historical sources in developing meaningful interpretations of past cultures and their patterns of change over time. My focus is the change from the Mesolithic to Neolithic or from an anticipated mobile to settled life in Scandinavia, and the consequences of this change for the institution of social inequality. Changes from mobile to settled lives bring certain consequences for individual members of society, who must relate and adjust to them. These consequences can include a changed focus of social control, new territorial limitations, an increase in epidemic diseases and population increase, among others (Wiessner 2002:235). Social structures and material culture are equally constrained by natural forces and by human traditions, beliefs, habits and wishes. In some environments and under certain circumstances a change to settled life and a farming economy might have been easier, since the natural resources were plentiful and the change could have been a matter of deliberate choices. In others the choice may have been forced upon a starving group as an option for survival. Nevertheless, both scenarios included consequences that reached far beyond possibilities that could have been imagined when decisions were made to settle down and farm. The people involved had then to use the experiences stored in their worldviews, traditions and beliefs to deal with those consequences. These dealings can be understood in evolutionary terms (reduced to, for example, tness represented by exibility of mind), yet we still look for the keys to encode them in these terms (Diamond 1998, 2005; Wiessner 2002).
