Labor in the Making of Iberian Copper Age Lineages

Abstract

In this chapter, I will argue that the period known as the Copper Age saw the rise of lineage societies, made possible and sustained through the cyclical involvement of different communities in collective labor processes and other public events. Collective infrastructural investments were non-agricultural facilities: enclosures, fortifi cations, and monumental burials. Th ese kinship-based societies had limited technological development, and groups were by no means economically “caged,” to use Mann’s terms (Mann 1986). Consequently, inclusive — and frequently ritualized — strategies would have been more effi cient than coercion as means of legitimizing political authority in and between aggregated corporate groups.