From the Axial Age to the Fifth Sun. The articulation of the local with the global

In 1949, Karl Jaspers published his enduring book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, a volume which set up one classic model of globalism and the local (Jaspers 1949; 1953). It is a book which posits a global, but causationally disconnected, transformation of the Eurasian world of the 1st millennium B.C., when society moved from the archaic to the modern, accompanied by new forms of political production, thought and religion. This was a book by a philosopher rather than a historian, one that deployed generalities rather than details provided by archaeological evidence. The concept of the axial age has had a surprisingly long innings, because of the attraction of a global theory, even though often under attack for the lack of fit both spatially and chronologically when confronted with archaeological data (Spinney 2019). One of its major attractions is that it provides a flexible (perhaps more properly fuzzy), generalized model that can become the testing ground for Big Data. The associated big question is whether archaeological data can meaningfully address such global matters when the zone of operation is often the local region.

In 2019, seventy years later, Camilla Townsend took the local perspective of a global process, a series of events, in a continent neglected by Jaspers. It is a book (Townsend 2019) by a historian that has given voice back to the indigenous inhabitants of Central America, by interrogating the native accounts, written down in the Nahuatl language with the new technologies provided by the conquistadores. This account reveals the agency of the local communities in their interaction with the incomers, an agency that was considerable in spite of the impact of disease and new coercive technologies. The indigenous are revealed as multifaceted political strategists, counting amongst their number ‘Phoenician’ Chontal Maya, the ruling Mexica and opportunistic Tlaxcalans. The analysis is accompanied by a critique of the narrow-minded use of archaeology and the Spanish sources, positing an alternative history of the local and its many scales, layers and transformations, notably when African slaves were later added to the political mosaic.

These two introductory texts set challenges for archaeologists. One such challenge for archaeology is that textual historians are sometimes inclined to see us as the foot soldiers, rather than the generals of strategy (Garnsey, Hopkins and Whittaker 1981). More recently, non-archaeologists as diverse as Abulafia (2011) and Belich, Darwin and Wickham (2016) have defined global trends that need to be assessed by primary archaeological data. All efforts to counter the impression of the historians (as by Riva and Grau Mira) are to be welcomed and the construction of grand global narratives undertaken by archaeologists is strongly to be encouraged, in the spirit of Broodbank (2013) and Morris (2013) (both nevertheless trained initially as historians). The sceptical perspective of the historians is enhanced by the fact that many of us are fieldworkers with the ability to bivouac and nestle comfortably in our microregions, and are sometimes vulnerable to accusations of apparent lack of concern for how our excavation or field survey fits into a wider pattern. A strong argument for the primacy of our efforts is that our profession has a greater understanding of the data, and more specifically of the formation processes of settlements, cemeteries and land use where the building blocks of material culture find context.

Indeed, one of the major lessons offered by those who sample the evidence is the variability of its quality. In the current pandemic, we have encountered many lessons of data quality, where theoretical modelling based on initially flimsy evidence has driven policy response. The work of the statistician Spiegelhalter has been frank and honest (see www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/m0014644). Archaeologists are similarly well practised in messy, fuzzy data, and for this reason their skills are undervalued. I remember anecdotally a seminar by Andrew Sherratt in around 1992, in front of modern geographers in Oxford, where he asked his audience to identify the key factors when dealing with archaeological data. His answer was that the recovered sample was fragmentary and required knowledge, skill and experience to avoid substantial overinterpretation (cf. Townsend’s (2019, 213) discussion of metadiscourse of historical data).

A similarly enduring thread of good archaeological research, particularly that inspired by landscape approaches, has equally been to study the combination of scales, as properly professed here by Riva and Grau Mira. In a thematic review of landscape articles from antiquity, it became clear that a range of scholars who differed substantially in their theoretical outlook shared the integration of spatial scales into one interpretive pattern (Stoddart 2000, 3). The classic article of the Glastonbury Lake Village, way back in 1972, even if subjected to later empirical critique, already had this sense of the contribution of different scales very much at its heart (Clarke 1972). So the important theme presented by Riva and Grau Mira has a long historiography.

One accessible archaeological element of scale is the settlement, or focus of activity, a central theme already in David Clarke’s approach, to which can be added the layers of experience of landscape from other locales. The detailed definition of what is meant locally by settlement is a central route to the comparative approach, and one that I found relatively missing in Riva and Grau Mira’s account, which was centred around the cemetery, part of the lived experience, but only a partial proxy of the understanding of scales of experiences, perhaps more cosmological than practical.

Another crucial archaeological element is a focus on temporality (cf. Townsend 2019). Many non-textual global accounts can be frozen methodologically into a longue durée. Cemeteries often have greater temporality than settlements, but are largely abodes of memory as much as lived practice. In the 1st millennium B.C., the application of radiocarbon is less habitual than in deeper periods of prehistory, hindered by the Hallstatt plateau in the radiocarbon curve. However, new approaches can begin to tease away at the margins of this plateau to uncover new unsuspected temporalities of demography, matched by climatic studies (Parkinson et al. 2021; Palmisano et al. 2021).

A major focus of the global is the comparative. For this purpose, a quantitative element, perhaps more easily found in the settlement, needs to be combined with the qualitative, perhaps more easily found in the cemetery and the sanctuary. The modelling of settlement size and density across landscape allows a comparison even beyond the confines of the Mediterranean. The areas covered here are rarely part of the broader global debates about the development of complexity which tend to be dominated by the examples of Greece and Rome, strong examples of qualitative evidence ignoring the important examples of Spain, southern France, central and northern Italy and south-west Germany, where a balance with quantitative evidence can be achieved. What is needed is comparative study of rural settlement and the relationship between major centres and their hinterlands. This allows a proper integration of top-down and bottom-up analysis.

The Riva and Mira Grau essay concentrates on the Mediterranean proper, alluding to the relationship to the east, but focuses on the west. In this immediate context, it is worth adding the extension of the same approach to Gaul, Etruria and relationships with the northern rim and beyond. Recent work on Etruria has shown the diversity of the local by combining scales that include both the large urban centres and the rural landscape (Stoddart 2020; Stoddart et al. 2020). Here the powerful tool of surface survey has been energetically engaged. In southern France, the work of Dietler (2010) has addressed this multi-scalar approach, combining all facets of landscape with the distribution of material culture. We can also take other avenues north, following the example of Zamboni (2021). In this region of northern Italy, the sampling strategy has been substantially from state archaeology and we find the large nucleations of population and the cemeteries, but the rural settlement is less developed. One further deep historiographical debate is over the relationship of the Mediterranean to central Europe. More detailed studies of the local scales of these regions are permitting an effective and coherent assessment of old models of core and periphery, and replacing them with subtler post-colonial understandings of the interrelationships, extending the argument of Riva and Grau Mira to other regions.

These examples, and that of Riva and Grau Mira, show that archaeologists can indeed meet the challenge set by philosophers and historians in writing grand narratives that pay equal attention to the global and the local. We nevertheless need to respond to the precise challenges of Jaspers and Townsend. The Jaspers model may be flawed, but it shows ambition in operating above the level of the local. The Townsend methodology may have a certain level of rhetoric, and the accounts of the indigenous in many parts of the Mediterranean may be lost, but we do need to search out the agency of the local to a level that has so far been underdeveloped in archaeological research.