Chief and Chiefdoms

Prologue¦

In 1879¸ Frank Cushing¸ a young anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institution ¸ arrived at Zuñi– pueblo on a mule. A pall of wood smoke covered the town as the sun set behind the settlement. The mud – brick walls melted into the landscape. He wrote ¦ “It seemed still a little island of mesas¸ one upon the other¸ reared from a sea of sand¸ in mock rivalry of the surrounding grander mesas of Nature’s rearing.” A pioneer of the anthropological method known as participant observation¸ Cushing lived among the Zuñi for four–and–a–half years¸ learning their language and recording their traditional life in great detail.

After three years¸ the Zuñi initiated him into the secrete Priesthood of the Bow. Cushing now dressed in Indian clothing. He spent many hours sitting in kivas watching ¦ “the blazes of the splinter–lit fire on the stone altar¸ sometimes licking the very ladder–poles in their flight upward toward the skyholes ¸ which served at once as door–way¸ chimney¸ and window.” He listened to “the shrill calls of the rapidly coming and departing dancers¸ their wild songs¸ and the din of the great drum¸ which fairly jarred ancient¸ smoke–blackened rafters.”

Frank Cushing enjoyed the confidence of the Zuñi¸ but unfortunately died before he could set down his account of their culture. Cushing’s observations have been of priceless value to archaeologists¸ as they work back from the present into the remote past in the American Southwest. Food production was the foundation of the world’s earliest civilizations¸ but agriculture did not lead¸ invariably¸ to state–organized societies or cities. As we saw in the pre history part of this site, the archaeologists of a century ago often thought in linear, evolutionary terms, of an inevitable ladder of human progress from the simple hunting and gathering to civilization. The linear approach, with its overtones of cultural superiority and racism, was intellectually bankrupt by 1910. Multi–linear evolution, developed a half century later and a common model for studying the past, likens human cultural evolution in bewilderingly diverse ways. The branching model argues that no single society, however simple or complex, is superior to another. In other words, civilization, for all its variety well as social and technological complexity, is only one way of adapting to the world's many environments.

A generation ago¸ the anthropologist Elman Service made a fundamental distinction between pre–state and state-organized societies, dividing the former into bands¸ tribes¸ and chiefdoms. (see box page 29). Ferocious academic debates about the nature of tribes and chiefdoms have erupted in recent years many of them revolving around the relative complexity of chiefdoms both in the ancient and modern worlds. At issue here is not so much stages of social complexity¸ but the whole issue of complexity itself. This chapter describes several examples of emerging social complexity in the ancient world, which did not result in literate civilizations. The chiefdoms surveyed here, from the Pacific Islands and the American Southwest and Southeast¸ represent a wide range of complexity¸ which resulted from diverse environmental and cultural circumstances.

Inevitably, multi-linear cultural evolution has acquired somewhat of a step-like association. Some scholars choose to consider “evolution” a racist and pejorative creation of Western science, ignoring in the process the branch-like model, which allows for many forms of equally successful human society without recourse to ethnocentric or racist assumptions.

Reciprocity and “Big Men”

As we saw in the pre-history section. precise definitions of chiefdoms¸ or of cultural complexity¸ are virtually impossible to formulate. There is no question however¸ that all more-complex human societies depend heavily on ties of kin and reciprocity for their long-term viability. All the world's more– intricate ancient societies, whether foragers or farmers, were based on permanent¸ or at least semipermanent settlements.

While a considerable degree of cultural complexity arose in some hunter-gatherer societies, like for example¸ those of the Chumash of southern California or the Pacific Northwest. The most profound changes in human society arose after the advent of farming. Perhaps the greatest changes in the new farming societies were social and political rather than economic. They stemmed inn large part from the necessity for farmers to live in compact¸ permanent settlements¸ to adopt sedentary life–ways and to maintain very close ties to their lands.

Early agricultural villages like Abu Hureyra or Merimda in western Asia¸ or permanent farming settlements In Mexico's Tehucán valley¸ brought households into much closer juxtaposition than ever before. The members of a small forager band could always move away when factional disputes threatened to disrupt the band. Farmers anchored to the land did not have such a luxury. As a result¸ kinship ties not only of immediate family¸ but of more distant kin assumed much greater importance in daily life. Subsistence farming households produce their own food needs¸ but their survival depends both on cultivating a diversity of soil types and on reciprocal obligations with fellow kin. Reciprocity was vital to survival, for it created networks of obligation between near and more distant kin. These allowed people to ask for help when their crops failed¸ knowing that one day their kin would need help in turn assistance given without question.

The ties of kinship of membership in hereditary clans and lineage's with all their reciprocal obligations provided not only institutions that allowed for the settlement of domestic disputes¸ but also mechanisms for the ownership and inheritance of farming and grazing land. The ownership of land was vested not in individual hands¸ but in a clan or lineage founded by a powerful ancestor. Thus¸ the relationship between people and their land was closely related to their links to their ancestors, who were the guardians of the soil. It is probably for this reason that early farmers in the Levant and Turkey maintained figurines or the plastered skulls to their forebears.

Trade and exchange played an important role in the development of more complex societies. Everywhere the new farming economies developed farmers relied increasingly on their neighbors. While late Ice Age hunters–gatherers traded fine–grained rock and exotic objects over long distances¸ the more sedentary agriculturist was forced to obtain many more commodities from elsewhere. These include foodstuffs¸ game meat and hides¸ hut poles¸ obsidian¸ and other vital materials¸ to say nothing of ornaments and other rare objects from afar. Complicated exchange networks linked village with village and household with household. Narrow trails that carried visitors from one community to the next¸ brought objects bartered from hand to hand over enormous distance. It was such networks that brought Gulf Coast seashells deep into the North America Midwest and obsidian from Turkey to the distant Jordan Valley. The individuals who controlled such exchange networks, or supplies of key commodities and exotic luxuries¸ became natural leaders of newly complex village societies.

Everything points to the earliest farming villages having been egalitarian communities for signs of social rankings do not appear in burials until long after food production took hold. In time¸ however¸ this egalitarian form of village life often gave way to new more complex agricultural societies headed by powerful kin leaders. These were individuals¸ often gave way to new more complex agricultural societies headed by powerful kin leaders. These were individuals often shamans or people with extraordinary supernatural powers linked to their followers by close ties¸ and by their ability to reward loyalty with gifts or food and exotic commodities and goods obtained from afar. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins¸ who has studied modern–day Pacific Island societies¸ calls such people “Big Men”. They are clever entrepreneurs, whose power is based strictly on their above– average abilities and the loyalty they command from their followers. Their loyalty is but transitory for it does not pass from one generation to the next. This makes for volatile ever changing political economic hereditary dynasties¸ which passes chiefly authority from one generation to the next.

Pre–state societies of this greater complexity developed in almost every part of the ancient world, in late prehistoric Europe¸ in sub–Saharan Africa¸ Polynesia¸ and parts of volatile¸ as then reins of political and economic power passed from one chiefly family to another¸ and from once center to the next. None of these elaborate pre–state societies was able to maintain light political, economic , and social control; over little more than a local area. It was state-organized societies that achieved such larger-scale integration¸ which often transcended local ecological zones. Some complex pre–state societies, notably those in Western Europe, eventually came under the the sway of expanding civilizations like that of Rome. Others¸ like those of Africa, Polynesia, and North America, survived into historic times, until the arrival of European explores during the Age of Discovery, which began in the fifteenth century C.E. We cannot hope to describe all the more complex pre–state farming societies that developed throughout the world, so we shall confine our discussion to the first settlement of the Pacific and to the emergence of chiefdoms in North America.