A Comment on Steponaitis' Determination of ...

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AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

have to come to terms with my ignorance and my deficiencies. This is not necessarily a deflating experience. It has, at least for me, been a n exhilerating discovery of the many areas where I can learn how to become a 20th-century anthropologist who knows that there is a need for anthropologists in urban centers, in refugee camps, at the World Bank, in UNICEF and UNESCO, as well as in my own backyard.

Notes ‘Southwestern Anthropological Association Newsletter, Fall 1981, Vol. XX, No. 4 , pp. 2-3.

6000 Years in Suswa JOHN R. F. BOWER Iowa State University Included in the Film Notes section of the September, 1981, American Anthropologist is a brief comment (Conant 1981) on the movie “6000 Years in Suswa,” directed and filmed by J. Scott Dodds, with consultation from me. The comment is severely critical, and that is fair enough. It is also misleading in general, erroneous or misleading concerning particulars, and says more about what is not in the film than about what i s in it, all of which are not especially fair to either the filmmaker or the potential audience. Conant’s comment states that I am the film’s narrator; this is incorrect. My voice is, to be sure, on the sound track, but so are two others, one of which (the narrator’s) is female. The comment also states that the film “purports” to be about the archeology of East Africa and the contemporary Masai (sic), implying that it is actually something else. In fact, the film does contain material on East African archeology and the Maasai, but it “purports” to be about excactly what it conveys: information on the extraordinary longevity of the pastoral life-way in Maasai country. This is a point which seems to have completely eluded Conant, since he decries as “shocking oversimplification” the film’s observation about the persistence of a way of life akin to that of contemporary Maasai (i.e., pastoralism) over perhaps more than six millenia. The emphasis is clearly on the continuity of pastoralism, not, as Conant’s critique suggests, on the continuity of Maasai culture. In

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view of the current pressures on pastoral (including Maasai) life-ways, the film’s point seems worthy of emphasis. Among other material included in the film, but omitted from Conant’s remarks, are scenes showing an archeology student, Stephen Mbutu, from Kenya. One would imagine that this, together with other evidence of participation by Africans in African archeology, might serve some useful purpose. Also worthy of mention is the fact that, in addition to portraying something of field methods in East African archeology, the film dwells on one of the most interesting aspects of archeology everywhere in Africa: continuities between archeological past and ethnographic present. Opinion might vary as to how effectively these topics are pursued, but I think fairness requires at least mentioning their presence in the film. Conant asserts that “it is difficult to see why this film was submitted for professional review”; in my opinion, it has yet to receive such a review.

References Cited Conant, Francis P. 1981 Film Notes on “6000 Years in Suswa.” American Anthropologist 83:746.

A Comment on Steponaitis’ Determination of Catchment Productivity LAURA FINSTEN McMaster University GARY FEINMAN Bloomsburg State College RICHARD E . BLANTON Purdue University STEPHEN A. KOWALEWSKI University of Georgia In an effort to formulate a mathematical model for measuring the degree of political centralization in nonmarket societies, Steponaitis ( A A 83:320-363, 1981) constructs a series of relationships concerning energy, tribute flows, and settlement size; the relationships are based on the proposition that in such societies there is a direct relationship between the number of in-

COMMENTARIES T A B L E I . PARTIAL CORRELATION COEFFICIENTS

(‘13 2)

FOR SITE A R E A , SITE RADIUS, A N D

STEPONAITIS’ CATCHMENT PRODUCTIVITY VALUES (LATE FORMATIVE).

‘13.2

Centers (excluding CH-5) Nucleated villages

,9770 ,0024

habitants in a community and the amount of energy available to it. T o derive an index of relative centralization, he first calculates leastsquares regression coefficients (r2) for settlement size and catchment productivity for Middle, Late, and Terminal Formative archeological sites in the eastern and southeastern Valley of Mexico. Steponaitis found strong positive correlations between site area and catchment productivity in all three periods. We suggest that these correlations are in large part an artifact of his method of determining catchment produc-

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tivity, thereby necessitating a reevaluation of his procedure for measuring political centralization. Steponaitis measured catchment areas as a function of settlement radius plus a constant radius (here we discuss only his constant radius of 1.5 km). Because any increase in settlement areas creates a proportionate increase in catchment area, larger settlements will obviously have larger catchments. For example, assuming a constant radius of 1.5 km, the catchment area of a community with a settlement radius of 120 m is only 16% greater than the catchment if the site’s area is not added, that is, using only the radius of 1.5 km (707 ha). But, using his method, a site with a radius of 640 m is assigned a catchment 85% larger than the 707 ha constant area. Steponaitis arrived at catchment productivity values by simply bisecting overlapping portions of catchments and subtracting areas of obviously unarable land (steep slopes or cinder cone, former lakebed, and land above 2750 m in

TABLE 11. DATA USED FOR CALCULATIONS.

Site

Site type

Steponaitis’ P(1.5) in ha

CH- 1 CH-12 CH-15 CH-16 CH-2 CH-20 CH-35/36 CH-4 CH-48 CH-5 CH-50 CH-53 CH-6 CH-9 IX-12 IX-2 IX-3 IX-6 IX-7 IX-8 TX-12 TX-14 TX-22 TX-29 TX-8 TX-9

N.V. N.V. N.V. D.V. N.V. N.V. D.V. N.V. N.V. C. N.V. N.V. C. D.V. N.V. C. N.V. C. N.V. N.V. C. N.V. N.V. D.V. D.V. N.V.

1020.3 1059.8 613.0 786.3 978.0 1183.4 898.0 753.2 859.2 830.0 695.2 539.5 1027.0 515.2 488.0 466.0 638.0 562.0 455.0 261.0 1070.0 -

1083.0 647.0 969.0 963.0

Site size 59.7 ha 43.2 14.0 19.7 67.0 73.6 10.0 34.8 11.8 130.0 17.8 20.5 86.0 17.8 15.0 37.0 20.0 65.0 30.0 7.0 86.0 4.5 40.0 12.0 20.0 33.0

Site radius .44 km .37 .21 .25 .46 .48 .18 .33 .19 .64 .23 .26 .52 .24 .22 .34 .25 .45 .31 .15 .52 .12 .36 .20 .25 .32

CPI 1

CPI 2

685 707 525 524 616 707 707 616 707 543 707 471 703 525 530 506 530 520 41 1 607 707

495 523 359 366 398 513 638 482 707 386 605 322 547 359 332 405 416 295 234 391 396

-

-

707 707 707 707

374 497 390 402

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A M E R I C A N A N T H R 0 P O L OGIST

elevation). Thus, his productivity values are heavily determined by catchment area. A problem is his failure to consider salient environmental factors that impinge on catchment productivity in the Valley of Mexico. Two critical variables are environmental setting (alluvium versus piedmont) and the amount of annual rainfall, which varies along north-south and east-west gradients. We suspected that site radius explains much of the relationship between site area and Steponaitis’ catchment productivity since it figures prominently in his calculations of both of these variables. As an example, for one of the periods he analyzed - the Late Formative-we calculated partial correlation coefficients for centers and for nucleated villages, the two classes of settlement for which he found strong positive correlations. The partial correlation coefficients express the degree of correlation between the independent variable (site area) and dependent variable (catchment productivity) after the intervening independent variable (site radius) is allowed to explain all it can of both the dependent and independent variables. The formula is as follows:

r

13.2

-

-

I

-

where ‘13 is the correlation coefficient for site area and catchment productivity, ‘12 is the correlation coefficient for site area and site radius, and ‘23 is the correlation coefficient for site radius and catchment productivity (Blalock 1979:460). The results are presented in Table I (the data from which the calculations were made are presented in Table 11).

The partial correlation coefficients strongly suggest that at least for nucleated villages the relationship between site area and Steponaitis’ productivity values is a spurious one, determined by the very high correlation of site radius with both his dependent and independent variables. To further assess the extent to which Steponaitis’ method gives a misleading measure of the relationship between settlement size and catchment productivity, we calculated two additional catchment productivity indices for Late Formative sites. Catchment Productivity Index I (CPI 1) eliminates possible correlations between site area and catchment productivity due solely to the addition of site radius to the constant catchment radius. We held catchment size constant, examining only the area within a 1.5 km radius of each settlement’s center (an area of 707 ha). This is based on the simplifying assumption that if community size is determined by catchment productivity, then it should follow that more productive catchments will eventually produce larger settlements. While this is not entirely satisfactory, it eliminates the circularity inherent in Steponaitis’ technique. We then replicated Steponaitis’ method as closely as possible (bisecting overlapping parts of catchments and subtracting areas of steep slope or cinder cone, former lakebed, and land above 2750 m in elevation). Catchment Productivity h d e x 2 (CPI 2) further refines CPI l values by taking into consideration the following: 1 . Steponaitis did not compensate for hamlets or dispersed villages smaller than 10 ha lying within the catchment areas of larger sites. T o rectify this, we reduced the CPI 1 values by 19.6 for each hamlet or small dispersed village within a settlement’s catchment (or portion thereof, if hamlets are located on or near the edge of the catchment). The hectarage subtracted is

TABLE 111. RESULTS OF ANALYSIS FOR T H E L A T E FORMATIVE

Steponaitis’ Site type Centers (Ch-5 excluded) (n = 4) Nucleated villages (n = 15) Dispersed villages (n = 5)

r

CPI 1

r2

r

r2

.92

.85

.89

.78

.61

-

-

CPI 2 rS

r

r2

rS

.80

.95

.38

.14

.21

.37

.14

.35

.07

.01

.18

- .57

.32

-.58

-.93

.86

-.90

COMMENTARIES

127

90

/ 70

/

/

CENTRES

/ c

40

” W N

YI w

r

catchment productivity Fig. 1. Steponaitis’ (Figure 2c) schematic depiction of model for a three-tiered hierarchy. V , L , and R represent best-fit regression lines for each hierarchical level. V is villages inhabited solely by producers. L represents local centers, which are inhabited by both producers and nonproducers because they exact tribute. R is regional centers, where the number of nonproducers is augmented because of the regional centers’ comparatively greater access to tribute.

Y)

1c

-I