[1] Archaeological interpretations of large-scale communal feasting have long oscillated between two functional poles. [2] The older, broadly consensual view treated feasts as instruments of social integration: by gathering dispersed households around a shared meal, the feast dissolved everyday tensions, reaffirmed kinship, and manufactured the solidarity on which small communities depended. [3] On this reading the defining feature of the feast was its inclusiveness, and its residues—concentrations of animal bone, oversized cooking vessels, specially constructed hearths—were read as the material signature of a leveling, communitarian institution.
[4] Beginning in the 1980s a rival interpretation gained ground, one that reframed the feast not as an engine of equality but as an arena of competition. [5] In this “political” model, hosts stage feasts to advertise their capacity to mobilize surplus, place guests under obligations they cannot immediately repay, and so convert perishable food into durable prestige and, eventually, authority. [6] Far from dissolving hierarchy, the feast on this account creates it.
[7] The evidentiary problem is that a single deposit of bones and pots is often compatible with both readings, and much recent work has been devoted to specifying what material patterns, if any, would reliably distinguish the two. [8] Proponents of the competitive model point to indicators of display and asymmetry: exotic or labor-intensive foods that only a well-provisioned host could furnish, standardized serving wares that imply ranked and unequal portions, and a spatial separation that sets hosts apart from their guests. [9] Their critics reply that these same features may accompany feasts that are, in intent and effect, thoroughly integrative, and that the competitive reading too readily projects onto the past the acquisitive individualism of the ethnographer’s own society.
[10] The more circumspect current position treats the two functions as endpoints of a continuum rather than as mutually exclusive alternatives. [11] A feast may knit a community together at the same time that it advances the standing of its host; indeed, its political efficacy may depend precisely on its being experienced as generous rather than as calculating. [12] What has changed is less the roster of available interpretations than the recognition that the archaeological record underdetermines them, and that the analyst’s task is not to assign a feast to one category but to specify, for a particular case, the conditions under which one function or the other predominated.
