Marriage in the standard North American style (a monogamous union based on love) is often taken as the normal and right way for a man and a woman to live together and have children. However, in the panoply of cultures throughout the world, this is a relatively unusual type of marriage. Anthropologists try to identify patterns of marriages and understand why different forms of marriage occur. These patterns are the basis for archaeologists’ interpretations of what marriage was like prehistorically. Anthropologists also try to understand why Industrial societies tend to have the kind of marriage system that we have, sometimes referred to as romantic marriage.
Probably the most common characteristics of marriages in Pre-industrial societies are that they are based on the economic and survival needs of parents. Therefore, they are arranged by the parents, and the more wealth or power a man has the more wives he can have.
Among generalized hunter/gatherers, the major imperative is survival, especially in times of starvation or conflict. One strategy for dealing with droughts, floods, or conflicts, was to leave the afflicted area for a place where conditions were better. But all the surrounding areas were usually occupied by other groups who generally regarded strangers as enemies. Having a son or daughter married into those communities gave families the connexions needed to be welcomed in times of need (or allies in times of conflict). It was the parents who therefore arranged marriages for their children at young ages. In more complex hunting and gathering societies, control over, and access to, productive food resources was the key to wealth–whether fishing sites, trap lines, drive lines, or prime patches of root foods. A corollary of arranging marriages for these purposes was that the more marriage partners that could be acquired, the more resources could be accessed (or the more places of refuge could be visited when needed). Thus, those men who could do so, sought to obtain additional wives–up to a maximum of about 10 wives in Australia as well as on the Northwest Coast of North America.
Access to more resources or wealth was frequently engineered by marrying children into families holding rights to those resources, again with the parents arranging to marry their children at young ages at for high prices! A form of this marriage logic continued through the ages, even into Industrial times (and perhaps today) in which elite parents sought to arrange marriages for their children that would be most beneficial economically and politically for the parents and their estates.
Thus, for the vast majority of human history and in the vast majority of human cultures, marriage was not generally based on love. It was based on survival and economic concerns of the parents. Even among the poorer groups, as Emile Petitot commented about the Dené in 19th century northwest Canada:
“They never consider beauty in getting married…She should be submissive, ready to work hard and laboriously, fecund, round-cheeked, and in good health; everything else is of little importance. A boy and a girl, however ugly they may be, will always find a mate if they are capable of working and of nourishing a family.”
In order to make my adventure story of a boy in the Ice Age as realistic as possible, I have incorporated these Pre-industrial aspects of marriage in the book, The Eyes of the Leopard. If you are interested in these and other details of societies 20,000 years ago, please check this book out!
