for instance, the extraordinary outlays of labour involved in making grave goods (10,000 work hours for the Sunghir beads alone, by some estimates); the highly advanced and standardized methods of production, possibly suggesting specialized craftspeople; or the way in which exotic, prestigious materials were transported from very distant locations; and, most suggestive of all, a few cases where such wealth was buried with children, maybe implying some kind of inherited status.
But what has mostly intrigued scholars of different disciplines so far is something else: the apparent proof they offer that ‘hunter-gatherer societies had evolved institutions to support major public works, projects, and monumental constructions, and thus had a complex social hierarchy prior to their adoption of farming.’27 Again, matters are not so simple, because these two phenomena – hierarchy and the measure of time – were closely interwoven.
