Preface. The bulk of this book is dedicated to showing why the idea of the evolution from tribes to states is false. If the authors are correct, then the flexibility of societies to invent ways of living with more freedom and fulfilling lifestyles is far greater than we think, since we’re “stuck” now in modern civilizations (made possible by fossil fuels) and can’t see that other options exist.
The fact that new and better societies may arise out of the ashes of overshoot gives me great hopes for the future after fossil fuels are gone. I just hope enough people read this book who survive to help build better societies in the future, especially for women, who suffer in agricultural societies where the muscle power of men leads to domination and backbreaking tedious roles for women.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Graeber D, Wengrow D (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
Why ideas about how bureaucracies and states evolved are wrong
At this point it should be easy enough to understand why ancient Egypt is so regularly held out as the paradigmatic example of state formation. It’s not just that it is chronologically the earliest of what we’ve called second-order regimes of domination; aside from the much later Inca Empire, it’s also just about the only case where the two principles that came together were sovereignty and administration. In other words, it’s the only case from a suitably distant phase of history that perfectly fits the model of what should have happened.
Small, intimate groups (the argument goes) might be able to adopt informal, egalitarian means of problem-solving, but as soon as large numbers of people are assembled together in a city or a kingdom everything changes. Therefore, if you want to live in a large-scale society you need a sovereign and an administration. It is more or less taken for granted that some kind of monopoly of coercive force.
It was once widely assumed that if bureaucratic states tend to arise in areas with complex irrigation systems, it must have been because of the need for administrators to co-ordinate the maintenance of canals and regulate the water supply. In fact, it turns out that farmers are perfectly capable of coordinating very complicated irrigation systems all by themselves, and there’s little evidence, in most cases, that early bureaucrats had anything to do with such matters.
Urban populations seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-governance in ways which, while usually not quite ‘egalitarian’, were likely a good deal more participatory than almost any urban government today. Meanwhile most ancient emperors, as it turns out, saw little reason to interfere, as they simply didn’t care very much about how their subjects cleaned the streets or maintained their drainage ditches.
We’ve also observed that when early regimes do base their domination on exclusive access to forms of knowledge, these are often not the kinds of knowledge we ourselves would consider particularly practical (the shamanic, psychotropic revelations that seem to have inspired the builders of Chavín de Huántar would be one such example).
Our emerging archaeological understanding suggests that the first systems of specialized administrative control actually emerged in very small communities. The earliest clear evidence of this appears in a series of tiny prehistoric settlements in the Middle East, dating over 1,000 years after the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük was founded (at around 7400 BC), but still more than 2,000 years before the appearance of anything even vaguely resembling a city.
In a late Neolithic community of about 150 individuals, excavators discovered that not only did the inhabitants of this village erect central storage facilities, including granaries and warehouses; they also employed administrative devices of some complexity to keep track of what was in them. But these were not written archives: writing, as such, would not appear for another 3,000 years. What did exist were geometric tokens made of clay, of a sort that appear to have been used in many similar Neolithic villages, most likely to keep track of the allocation of particular resources.
It’s important to note that the central bureau and depot of Tell Sabi Abyad is not associated with any kind of unusually large residence, rich burials or other signs of personal status. If anything, what’s striking about the remains of this community is their uniformity: the surrounding dwellings, for instance, are all roughly equal in size, quality and surviving contents. The contents themselves suggest small family units which maintained a complex division of labor, often including tasks that would have required the co-operation of multiple households. Flocks had to be pastured, a variety of cereal crops sown, harvested and threshed, as well as flax for weaving, which was practiced alongside other household crafts such as potting, bead-making, stone-carving and simple forms of metalworking. And of course, there were children to raise, old people to care for, houses to build
What you find in the 5th millennium BC is the gradual disappearance from village life of most outward signs of difference or individuality, as administrative tools and other new media technologies spread across a large swathe of the Middle East. Households were now built to increasingly standard tripartite plans, and pottery, which had once been a way of expressing individual skill and creativity, now seems to have been made deliberately drab, uniform and sometimes almost standardized. Craft production in general became more mechanical, and female labor was subject to new forms of spatial control and segregation.
In fact this entire period, lasting around 1,000 years (archaeologists call it the ‘Ubaid, after the site of Tell al-‘Ubaid in southern Iraq), was one of innovation in metallurgy, horticulture, textiles, diet and long-distance trade; but from a social vantage point, everything seems to have been done to prevent such innovations becoming markers of rank or individual distinction – in other words, to prevent the emergence of obvious differences in status, both within and between villages. Intriguingly, it is possible that we are witnessing the birth of an overt ideology of equality in the centuries prior to the emergence of the world’s first cities, and that administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening.
Ayllu too were based on a strong principle of equality; their members literally wore uniforms, with each valley having its own traditional design of cloth. One of the ayllu ’s main functions was to redistribute agricultural land as families grew larger or smaller, to ensure none grew richer than any other – indeed, to be a ‘rich’ household meant, in practice, to have a large number of unmarried children, hence much land, since there was no other basis for comparing wealth. Ayllu also helped families avoid seasonal labor crunches and kept track of the number of able-bodied young men and women in each household, so as to ensure not only that none were short-handed at critical moments, but also that the aged or inform, widows, orphans or disabled were taken care of.
Between households, responsibilities came down to a principle of reciprocity: records were kept and at the end of each year all outstanding credits and debts were to be cancelled out. This is where the ‘village bureaucracy’ comes in. To do that meant units of work had to be measured in a way which allowed clear resolution to the inevitable arguments that crop up in such situations – about who did what for whom, and who owed what to whom. Each ayllu appears to have had its own khipu strings, which were constantly knotted and re-knotted to keep track as debts were registered or cancelled out. It’s possible that khipu were invented for such purposes.
It was the pre-existing ayllu system that continued to provide social security under Inca rule. By contrast, the overarching administrative structure put in place by the Inca court was largely extractive and exploitative in nature (even if local officers of the court preferred to misrepresent it as an extension of ayllu principles): for purposes of central monitoring and recording, households were grouped into units of 10, 50, 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000 and so on, each responsible for labor obligations over and above those they already owed to their community, in a way that could only play havoc with existing allegiances, geography and communal organization.
Those who were unable to meet labor debts or who tried unsuccessfully to flee or rebel, were reduced to the status of servants, retainers and concubines for Inca courts and officials. This new class of hereditary peons was growing rapidly at the time of Spanish conquest.
None of which is to say the Inca reputation as adept administrators is unfounded. They apparently were capable of keeping exact track of births and deaths, adjusting household numbers at yearly festivals and so on. Why, then, impose such an oddly clumsy and monolithic system on to an existing one (the ayllu) which was clearly more nuanced? It’s hard to escape the impression that in all such situations, the apparent heavy-handedness, the insistence on following the rules even when they make no sense, is really half the point. Perhaps this is simply how sovereignty manifests itself, in bureaucratic form. By ignoring the unique history of every household, each individual, by reducing everything to numbers one provides a language of equity – but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas, and therefore that there will always be a supply of peons, pawns or slaves. In the Middle East, very similar things appear to have happened in later periods of history.
Most famously, perhaps, the books of the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible preserve memories of powerful protests that ensued as demands for tribute drove farmers into penury, forced them to pawn their flocks and vineyards, and ultimately surrender their children into debt peonage. Or wealthy merchants and administrators took advantage of crop failures, floods, natural disasters or neighbors’ simple bad luck to offer interest-bearing loans that led to the same results.
Similar complaints are recorded in China and India as well. The first establishment of bureaucratic empires is almost always accompanied by some kind of system of equivalence run amok.
What’s important here is the fact that this equality could be viewed as making people (as well as things) interchangeable, which in turn allowed rulers, or their henchmen, to make impersonal demands that took no consideration of their subjects’ unique situations. This is of course what gives the word ‘bureaucracy’ such distasteful associations almost everywhere today. The very term evokes mechanical stupidity.
As anyone knows who has spent time in a rural community, or serving on a municipal or parish council of a large city, resolving such inequities might require many hours, possibly days of tedious discussion, but almost always a solution will be arrived at that no one finds entirely unfair. It’s the addition of sovereign power, and the resulting ability of the local enforcer to say, ‘Rules are rules; I don’t want to hear about it’ that allows bureaucratic mechanisms to become genuinely monstrous.
FORAGING SOCIETIES HAD WIDE VARIATIONS IN GOVERNANCE IN THEIR SOCIETIES
Societies from roughly 50,000–15,000 BC – with their ‘princely’ burials and grand communal buildings – seem to completely defy our image of a world made up of tiny egalitarian forager bands. The disconnect is so profound that some archaeologists have begun taking the opposite tack, describing Ice Age Europe as populated by ‘hierarchical’ or even ‘stratified’ societies. In this, they make common cause with evolutionary psychologists who insist that dominance behavior is hardwired in our genes, so much so that the moment society goes beyond tiny bands, it must necessarily take the form of some ruling over others.
Notes: Recent and historical hunter-gatherers range from assertively egalitarian groups like the Ju/ ‘hoansi of the Kalahari, the Mbendjele BaYaka of Congo or the Agta in the Philippines to extremely non-egalitarian, hierarchical ones like those of native Americans in the Canadian Northwest Coast, the Calusa of the Florida Keys, or the forest-dwelling Guaicuru of Paraguay, many of them keeping slaves and living in ranked societies.
So holding up any particular subset of recent foragers as representative of ‘early human society’ is cherry picking.
AS POLITICAL ACTORS, TRIBES CREATED MANY KINDS OF SOCIETIES
Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth – ridicule, shame, shunning (and in the case of inveterate sociopaths, sometimes even outright assassination) – none of which have any parallel among other primates.
These bands understand what their society might look like if they did things differently: if skilled hunters were not systematically belittled, or if elephant meat was not portioned out to the group by someone chosen at random (as opposed to the person who actually killed the beast). This is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another.
If the very essence of our humanity consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements, would that not mean human beings should actually have explored a wide range of social arrangements over the greater part of our history?
HUMANS AS POLITICAL ACTORS: EUROPEANS & ANTHROPOLIGISTS VASTLY UNDERESTIMATED WHAT PAST SOCIETIES WERE CAPABLE OF
The really insidious element of Rousseau’s legacy is not so much the idea of the ‘noble savage’ as that of the ‘stupid savage’. We may have got over the overt racism of most nineteenth-century Europeans, or at least we think we have, but it’s not unusual to find even very sophisticated contemporary thinkers who feel it’s more appropriate to compare ‘bands’ of hunter-gatherers with chimps or baboons than with anyone they’d ever be likely to meet.
Perhaps the real question here is what it means to be a ‘self-conscious political actor’. Philosophers tend to define human consciousness in terms of self-awareness; neuroscientists, on the other hand, tell us we spend the overwhelming majority of our time effectively on autopilot, working out habitual forms of behavior without any sort of conscious reflection. When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else.
Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem. True individual self-consciousness, meanwhile, was imagined as something that a few wise sages could perhaps achieve through long study, exercise, discipline and meditation.
Over the course of the 18th AND 19th centuries it was political self-consciousness that European philosophers came to see as some kind of amazing historical achievement: as a phenomenon which only really became possible with the Enlightenment itself, and the subsequent American and French Revolutions. Before that, it was assumed, people blindly followed traditions, or what they assumed to be the will of God. To Victorian intellectuals, the notion of people self-consciously imagining a social order more to their liking and then trying to bring it into being was simply not applicable before the modern age – and most were deeply divided as to whether it would even be a good idea in their own time.
And if certain hunter-gatherers turn out not to have been living perpetually in ‘bands’ at all, but instead congregating to create grand landscape monuments, storing large quantities of preserved food and treating particular individuals like royalty, contemporary scholars are at best likely to place them in a new stage of development: they have moved up the scale from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers, a step closer to agriculture and urban civilization. But they are still caught in the same Turgot-like evolutionary straitjacket, their place in history defined by their mode of subsistence, and their role blindly to enact some abstract law of development which we understand but they do not; certainly, it rarely occurs to anyone to ask what sort of worlds they thought they were trying to create.
Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages, and watching them argue with one another, tend to be well aware that even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as skeptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments.
Paul Radin in his 1927 book Primitive Man as Philosopher, ended up concluding that at least those he knew best – Winnebago and other Native North Americans – were actually, on average, rather more thoughtful. What really struck him about the ‘primitive’ societies he was most familiar with was their tolerance of eccentricity. This, he concluded, was simply the logical extension of that same rejection of coercion that so impressed the Jesuits in Quebec. If, he noted, a Winnebago decided that gods or spirits did not really exist and refused to perform rituals meant to appease them, or even if he declared the collective wisdom of the elders wrong and invented his own personal cosmology (and both these things did, quite regularly, happen), such a skeptic would definitely be made fun of, while his closest friends and family might worry lest the gods punish him in some way. However, it would never occur to them to punish him, or that anyone should try to force him into conformity – for instance, by blaming him for a bad hunt and therefore refusing to share food with him until he agreed to perform the usual rituals.
There is every reason to believe that skeptics and non-conformists exist in every human society; what varies is how others react to them. Radin was interested in the intellectual consequences, the kind of speculative systems of thought such out-of-sync characters might create. Others have noted the political implications. It’s often people who are just slightly odd who become leaders; the truly odd can become spiritual figures, but, even more, they can and often do serve as a kind of reserve of potential talent and insight that can be called on in the event of a crisis or unprecedented turn of affairs.
There are no discrete stages of political organization from bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states
Amazonian chiefs were calculating politicians forced to maneuver in a social environment apparently designed to ensure they could never exercise real political power. In the winter, the groups they led were tiny and inconsequential. In the summer, they didn’t ‘lead’ at all. Yes, their houses might have resembled social service dispensaries in modern welfare states; but as a result, in terms of material wealth, they were actually the poorest men in the village, since chiefs were expected constantly to give everything away. They were also expected to set an example by working much harder than everybody else. Even where they did have special privileges, like the Tupi or Nambikwara chiefs, who were the only men in their villages allowed to have multiple wives, the privilege was distinctly double-edged. The wives were held to be necessary to prepare feasts for the village. If any of those wives looked to other lovers, which it appears they ordinarily did, there was nothing much the chief could do about it, since he had to keep himself in everyone’s good graces to remain chief.
Chiefs found themselves in this situation because they weren’t the only ones who were mature and insightful political actors; almost everyone was. Rather than being trapped in some sort of Rousseauian innocence, unable to imagine more complex forms of organization, people were generally more capable than we are of imagining alternative social orders, and therefore had created ‘societies against the state’.
How could one possibly claim that stateless societies were self-consciously organizing themselves to prevent the emergence of something they’d never actually experienced? There are a lot of possible ways in which to respond to this objection. Were Amazonians of centuries past, for instance, entirely unaware of the great Andean empires to their west? People used to get around. It’s unlikely they simply had no idea of developments in neighboring parts of the continent.
It’s easy to see why the neo-evolutionists of the 1950s and 1960s might not have known quite what to do with this legacy of fieldwork observations. They were arguing for the existence of discrete stages of political organization – successively: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states – and held that the stages of political development mapped, at least very roughly, on to similar stages of economic development: hunter-gatherers, gardeners, farmers, industrial civilization.
It’s surely no coincidence that the most popular ethnographic films of the post-war era either focused on the Kalahari Bushmen and Mbuti Pygmies (‘band’ societies, which could be imagined as roughly resembling hippie communes); or on the Yanomami or ‘fierce people’ (Amazonian horticulturalists who, in Napoleon Chagnon’s version of reality – but not, let’s recall, in Helena Valero’s – do bear a rather disturbing resemblance to Hell’s Angels).
Since in this new, evolutionist narrative ‘states’ were defined above all by their monopoly on the ‘legitimate use of coercive force’, the 19th century Cheyenne or Lakota would have been seen as evolving from the ‘band’ level to the ‘state’ level roughly every November, and then devolving back again come spring. Obviously, this is silly.
it exposes the much deeper silliness of the initial assumption: that societies must necessarily progress through a series of evolutionary stages to begin with.
If we are right, and if human beings really have spent most of the last 40,000 or so years moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies then dismantling them again, the implications are profound. For one thing, it suggests that rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so.
Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation – but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility.
DOES AGRICULTURE ALWAYS LEAD TO INEQUALITY & RISE OF THE STATE?
Rousseau’s argument that it was only the invention of agriculture that introduced genuine inequality, since it allowed for the emergence of landed property. This is one of the main reasons people today continue to write as if foragers can be assumed to live in egalitarian bands to begin with – because it’s also assumed that without the productive assets (land, livestock) and stockpiled surpluses (grain, wool, dairy products, etc.) made possible by farming, there was no real material basis for anyone to lord it over anyone else.
Conventional wisdom also tells us that the moment a material surplus does become possible, there will also be full-time craft specialists, warriors and priests laying claim to it, and living off some portions of that surplus. Or warriors, spending the bulk of their time trying to figure out new ways to steal it from each other. Before long, merchants, lawyers and politicians will inevitably follow. These new elites will, as Rousseau emphasized, band together to protect their assets, so the advent of private property will be followed, inexorably, by the rise of ‘the state’. While there is a broad truth here, it is so broad as to have very little explanatory power.
Ruling classes are simply those who have organized society in such a way that they can extract the lion’s share of that surplus for themselves, whether through tribute, slavery, feudal dues or manipulating ostensibly free-market arrangements.
Truly egalitarian societies are those with ‘immediate return’ economies: food brought home is eaten the same day or the next; anything extra is shared out, but never preserved or stored. All this is in stark contrast to most foragers, and all pastoralists or farmers, who can be characterized as having ‘delayed return’ economies, regularly investing their energies in projects that only bear fruit at some point in the future. Such investments inevitably lead to ongoing ties that can become the basis for some individuals to exercise power over others. Hadza and other egalitarian foragers understand all this perfectly well, and as a result they self-consciously avoid stockpiling resources or engaging in any long-term projects. Far from rushing blindly for their chains like Rousseau’s savages, immediate return hunter-gatherers understand precisely where the chains of captivity loom, and organize much of their lives to keep away from them.
This might sound hopeful or optimistic. It’s anything but. What it suggests is equality is essentially impossible for all but the very simplest foragers.
Few anthropologists are particularly happy with the term ‘egalitarian societies’, for reasons that should now be obvious; but it lingers on because no one has suggested a compelling alternative. The closest we’re aware of is the feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock’s suggestion that most members of what are called egalitarian societies seem less interested in equality per se than what she calls ‘autonomy’. What matters to Montagnais-Naskapi women, for instance, is not so much whether men and women are seen to be of equal status but whether women are, individually or collectively, able to live their lives and make their own decisions without male interference.
The ancient forager ethos of leisure (the ‘Zen road to affluence’) only broke down when people finally –began to settle in one place and accept the toils of agriculture. They did so at a terrible cost. It wasn’t just ever-increasing hours of toil that followed but, for most, poverty, disease, war and slavery – all fueled by endless competition and the mindless pursuit of new pleasures, new powers and new forms of wealth.
Not all modern hunter-gatherers value leisure over hard work, just as not all share the easy-going attitudes towards personal possessions of the!Kung or Hadza. Foragers in northwestern California, for instance, were notorious for their cupidity, organizing much of their lives around the accumulation of shell money and sacred treasures and adhering to a stringent work ethic in order to do so. The fisher-foragers of the Canadian Northwest Coast, on the other hand, lived in highly stratified societies where commoners and slaves were famously industrious. According to one of their ethnographers, the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island were not only well housed and fed, but lavishly supplied: ‘Each household made and possessed many mats, boxes, cedar-bark and fur blankets, wooden dishes, horn spoons, and canoes.
There was no truly ‘original’ state of affairs.
Clearly, foragers didn’t shuffle backstage at the close of the last Ice Age, waiting in the wings for some group of Neolithic farmers to reopen the theatre of history. Why, then, is this new knowledge so rarely integrated into our accounts of the human past?
- On the shores of the Atlantic and around the Gulf of Mexico lie enigmatic structures: just as remarkable as Poverty Point, but even less well known. Formed out of shell in great accumulations, they range from small rings to massive U-shaped ‘amphitheatres’ like those of St Johns River valley in Northeast Florida. These were no natural features. They too were built spaces where hunter-gatherer publics once assembled in their thousands.
- An entire, forgotten social history of pre-agricultural Japan is resurfacing, for now largely as a mass of data points and state heritage archives. In future, as the bits get pieced back together, who knows what will come into view?
- Europe, too, bears witness to the vibrant and complex history of non-agricultural peoples after the Ice Age. Take the monuments called in Finnish Jätinkirkko, the ‘Giants’ Churches’ of the Bothnian Sea between Sweden and Finland: great stone ramparts, some up to 195 feet long, raised up in thei tens by coastal foragers between 3000 and 2000 BC.
THE CALUSA: You don’t need agriculture to get extreme inequality & stratification of wealth
Fish, shellfish and larger marine animals comprised a major part of the Calusa diet, supplemented by deer, raccoon and a variety of birds. Calusa also maintained a fleet of war canoes with which they would launch military raids on nearby populations, extracting processed foods, skins, weapons, amber, metals and slaves as tribute. When Juan Ponce de León entered Charlotte Harbor on 4 June 1513 he was met by a well-organized flotilla of such canoes, manned by heavily armed hunter-gatherers.
The man known as ‘Carlos’, the ruler of Calos at the time of initial European contact, even looked like a European king: he wore a gold diadem and beaded leg bands and sat on a wooden throne – and, crucially, he was the only Calusa allowed to do so. His powers seemed absolute. ‘His will was law, and insubordination was punishable by death.’
He was also responsible for performing secret rituals that ensured the renewal of nature. His subjects always greeted him by kneeling and raising their hands in a gesture of obeisance, and he was typically accompanied by representatives of the ruling class of warrior nobles and priests who, like him, devoted themselves largely to the business of government. And he had at his disposal the services of specialized craftsmen, including court metallurgists who worked silver, gold and copper.
Court life appears to have been made possible not only by complex systems of access to coastal fishing grounds, which were exceedingly rich, but also by canals and artificial ponds dug out of the coastal everglades. The latter, in turn, allowed for permanent – that is, non-seasonal – settlements (though most Calusa did still scatter to fishing and gathering sites at certain times of year, when the big towns grew decidedly smaller).
By all accounts, then, the Calusa had indeed ‘got stuck’ in a single economic and political mode that allowed extreme forms of inequality to emerge. But they did so without ever planting a single seed or tethering a single animal.
Adherents of the view that agriculture was a necessary foundation for durable inequalities have two options: ignore them, or claim they represent some kind of insignificant anomaly. Surely, they will say, foragers who do these kinds of things – raiding their neighbors, stockpiling wealth, creating elaborate court ceremonial, defending their territories and so on – aren’t really foragers at all, or at least not true foragers.
In academic thought, there’s another popular way of propping up the myth of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and thereby writing off people like the Calusa as evolutionary quirks or anomalies. This is to claim that they only behaved the way they did because they were living in ‘atypical’ environments.
Anyone who was still living mainly by hunting animals and gathering wild foodstuffs in the early to mid 20th century was almost certainly living on land no one else particularly wanted. That’s why so many of the best descriptions of foragers come from places like the Kalahari Desert or Arctic Circle.
There was nothing atypical about the Calusa. They were just one of many fisher-forager populations living around the Straits of Florida – including the Tequesta, Pojoy, Jeaga, Jobe and Ais.
They were also among the first Native American societies to be destroyed since, for obvious reasons, coasts and estuaries were the first spots where Spanish colonizers landed, bringing epidemic diseases, priests, tribute and, eventually, settlers. This was a pattern repeated on every continent, from America to Oceania, where invariably the most attractive ports, harbors, fisheries and surrounding lands were first snapped up
That the Calusa managed to maintain a sufficient economic surplus to support what looks to us like a miniature kingdom does not mean such an outcome is inevitable as soon as a society is capable of stockpiling a sufficient quantity of fish.
It’s possible they were simply imitating more powerful neighbors. Or maybe they were just odd. Finally, we don’t really know how much power even a divine king like Carlos really had.
Environmental determinism
Environmental determinists have an unfortunate tendency to treat humans as little more than automata, living out some economist’s fantasy of rational calculation.
Anthropologists who object to this kind of determinism will typically appeal to culture, but ultimately this comes down to little more than insisting that explanation is impossible: English people act the way they do because they are English, Yurok act the way they do because they’re Yurok; why they are English or Yurok is not really ours to say. Humans – from this other perspective, which is just as extreme in its own way – are at best an arbitrary constellation of cultural elements, perhaps assembled according to some prevailing spirit, code or ethos, and which society ends up with which ethos is treated as beyond explanation, little more than a random roll of the dice.
Putting matters in such stark terms does not mean there is no truth to either position. The intersection of environment and technology does make a difference, often a huge difference, and to some degree, cultural difference really is just an arbitrary roll of the dice: there’s no ‘explanation’ for why Chinese is a tonal language and Finnish an agglutinative one; that’s just the way things happened to turn out.
Both approaches presume that we are stuck. This is why we ourselves place so much emphasis on the notion of self-determination. Just as it is reasonable to assume that Pleistocene mammoth hunters, moving back and forth between different seasonal forms of organization, must have developed a degree of political self-consciousness – to have thought about the relative merits of different ways of living with one another – so too the intricate webs of cultural difference that came to characterize human societies after the end of the last Ice Age must surely have involved a degree of political introspection.
Since this book is mainly about freedom, it seems appropriate to set the dial a bit further to the left than usual, and to explore the possibility that human beings have more collective say over their own destiny than we ordinarily assume.
It is popular in certain circles to claim that ‘nations make choices’, that some have chosen to be Protestant and others Catholic, and that this is the main reason so many people in the United States or Germany are rich, and so many in Brazil or Italy are poor. This makes about as much sense as arguing that since everyone is free to make their own decisions, the fact that some people end up as financial consultants and others as security guards is entirely their own doing (indeed, it’s usually the same sort of people who make both sorts of argument).
It seems part of the human condition that while we cannot predict future events, as soon as those events do happen we find it hard to see them as anything but inevitable. There’s no way to know. So precisely where one wishes to set the dial between freedom and determinism is largely a matter of taste.
Slavery, we’ve argued, became commonplace on the Northwest Coast largely because an ambitious aristocracy found itself unable to reduce its free subjects to a dependable workforce.
Was farming from the very beginning about the serious business of producing more food to supply growing populations? Most scholars assume, as a matter of course, that this had to be the principal reason for its invention. But maybe farming began as a more playful or even subversive kind of process – or perhaps even as a side effect of other concerns, such as the desire to spend longer in particular kinds of locations, where hunting and trading were the real priorities.
Generations of archaeologists have wanted to see Çatalhöyük as a monument to the ‘origins of farming’. Certainly, it’s easy to understand why this should be. It is among the first large settlements we know of whose inhabitants practiced agriculture, and who got most of their nutrition from domesticated cereals, pulses, sheep and goats.
Since the 1990s, new methods of fieldwork at Çatalhöyük produced a string of surprises, which oblige us to revise both the history of the world’s oldest town and also how we think about the origins of farming in general. The cattle, it turns out, were not domestic: those impressive skulls belonged to fierce, wild aurochs. The shrines were not shrines, but houses in which people engaged in such everyday tasks as cooking, eating and crafts – just like anywhere else, except they happened to contain a larger density of ritual paraphernalia. Even the Mother Goddess has been cast into shadow. It is not so much that corpulent female figurines stopped turning up entirely in the excavations, but that the new finds tended to appear, not in shrines or on thrones, but in trash dumps outside houses with the heads broken off and didn’t really seem to have been treated as objects of religious veneration.
Today, most archaeologists consider it deeply unsound to interpret prehistoric images of corpulent women as ‘fertility goddesses’. The very idea that they should be is the result of long-outmoded Victorian fantasies about ‘primitive matriarchy’. In the 19th century, it’s true, matriarchy was considered the default mode of political organization for Neolithic societies (as opposed to the oppressive patriarchy of the ensuing Bronze Age). As a result, almost every image of a fertile-looking woman was interpreted as a goddess. Nowadays, archaeologists are more likely to point out that many figurines could just as easily have been the local equivalents of Barbie dolls. So we should dismiss the entire debate by insisting we simply have no idea why people created so many female images and never will, so any interpretations on offer are more likely to be projections of our own assumptions about women, gender or fertility than anything that would have made sense to an inhabitant of Neolithic Anatolia.
There is no evidence that Çatalhöyük’s female inhabitants enjoyed better standards of living than its male ones. Detailed studies of human teeth and skeletons reveal a basic parity of diet and health, as does the ritual treatment of male and female bodies in death. Yet the point remains that there exist no similarly elaborate or highly crafted depictions of male forms in the portable art of Çatalhöyük. Wall decoration is another matter. Where coherent scenes emerge from the surviving murals, they are mainly concerned with the hunting and teasing of game animals such as boar, deer, bear and bulls. The participants are men and boys, apparently depicted in different stages of life, or perhaps entering those stages through the initiatory trials of the chase. Some of these spritely figures wear leopard skins; in one deer-baiting scene, all have beards.
One thing to emerge clearly from the newer investigations at Çatalhöyük is the way in which household organization permeates almost every aspect of social life. Despite the considerable size and density of the built-up area, there is no evidence for central authority. Each household appears more or less a world unto itself – a discrete locus of storage, production and consumption. Each also seems to have held a significant degree of control over its own rituals, especially where treatment of the dead was concerned. The residents of Çatalhöyük seem to have placed great value on routine. We see this most clearly in the fastidious reproduction of domestic layouts over time. Individual houses were typically in use for 50 to100 years, after which they were carefully dismantled and filled in to make foundations for superseding houses. Clay wall went up on clay wall, in the same location, for century after century, over periods reaching up to a full millennium. Still more astonishing, smaller features such as mud-built hearths, ovens, storage bins and platforms often follow the same repetitive patterns of construction, over similarly long periods. Even particular images and ritual installations come back, again and again, in different renderings but the same locations, often widely separated in time.
What were the underlying realities of social life and labor at Çatalhöyük? Perhaps the most striking thing about all this art and ritual is that it makes almost no reference to agriculture. As we’ve noted, domestic cereals (wheat and barley) and livestock (sheep and goats) were far more important than wild resources in terms of nutrition. We know this because of organic remains recovered in quantity from every house. For 1,000 years the cultural life of the community remained stubbornly oriented around the worlds of hunting and foraging.
Another kind of social life altogether may have existed on the rooftops. It is in fact quite likely that what we are seeing in the surviving remains of Çatalhöyük’s built environment are largely the social arrangements prevalent in winter. With the harvest in, the organization required for agricultural labor would have given way to a different type of social reality as the community’s life shrank back towards its houses, just as its herds of sheep and goats shrank back into the confines of their pens.
What we can learn from The Fertile Crescent
Note 33: The initial growth of permanent villages – between 11,000 and 9500 BC – may have had to do with the temporary return of glacial weather conditions (the “Younger Dryas” period), obliging foragers in the lowland parts of the Fertile Crescent to commit to well-watered locations.
Between 10,000 and 8000 BC, foraging societies in the ‘upland’ and ‘lowland’ sectors of the Fertile Crescent underwent marked transformations, but in quite different directions. The differences cannot easily be expressed in terms of modes of subsistence or habitation. In both regions, in fact, we find a complex mosaic of human settlement: villages, hamlets, seasonal camps and centers of ritual and ceremonial activity marked out by impressive public buildings. Both regions, too, have produced varying degrees of evidence for plant cultivation and livestock management, within a broader spectrum of hunting and foraging activities. Yet there are also cultural differences, some so striking as to suggest a process of schismogenesis, such as the Pacific North West and California tribes. It might even be argued that, after the last Ice Age, the ecological frontier between ‘lowland’ and ‘upland’ Fertile Crescent also became a cultural frontier with zones of relative uniformity on either side, distinguished almost as sharply as the ‘Protestant foragers’ and ‘fisher kings’ of the Pacific Coast.
In the uplands, there was a striking turn towards hierarchy among settled hunter-foragers, most dramatically attested at the megalithic center of Göbekli Tepe and at nearby sites like that recently discovered at Karahan Tepe. In the lowlands of the Euphrates and Jordan valleys, by contrast, such megalithic monuments are absent, and Neolithic societies followed a distinct but equally precocious path of change.
‘Lowlanders’ and ‘uplanders’ – were well acquainted. We know this because they traded durable materials with each other over long distances. Obsidian from the Turkish highlands flowed south, and shells (perhaps used as currency) flowed north from the shores of the Red Sea.
The lowlanders who lived here were devoted craft specialists and traders. Each hamlet seems to have developed its own expertise (stone-grinding, bead-carving, shell-processing and so on), and industries were often associated with special ‘cult buildings’ or seasonal lodges, pointing to the control of such skills by guilds or secret societies. By the 9th millennium BC, larger settlements developed along the principal trade routes. Lowland foragers occupied fertile pockets of land among the drainages of the Jordan valley, using trade wealth to support increasingly large, settled populations. Sites of impressive scale sprang up in such propitious locations, some, such as Jericho and Basta, approaching ten hectares in size. The lowland crescent was a landscape of intimate contrasts and conjunctures (very similar, in this respect, to California). There were constant opportunities for foragers to exchange complementary products – which included foods, medicines, drugs and cosmetics.
Local growth cycles of wild resources were staggered by sharp differences in climate and topography. Farming itself seems to have started in precisely this way, as one of so many ‘niche’ activities or local forms of specialization. The founder crops of early agriculture – among them emmer wheat, einkorn, barley and rye – were not domesticated in a single ‘core’ area (as once supposed), but at different stops along the Levantine Corridor, scattered from the Jordan valley to the Syrian Euphrates, and perhaps further north as well.
At higher altitudes, in the upland crescent, we find some of the earliest evidence for the management of livestock (sheep and goats in western Iran, cattle too in eastern Anatolia), incorporated into seasonal rounds of hunting and foraging. Cereal cultivation began in a similar way, as a fairly minor supplement to economies based mainly on wild resources: nuts, berries, legumes and other readily accessible foodstuffs. Cultivation, however, is rarely just about calories. Cereal production also brought people together in new ways to perform communal tasks, mostly repetitive, labor-intensive and no doubt freighted with symbolic meaning; and the resulting foods were incorporated into their ceremonial lives.
At the site of Jerf el-Ahmar, on the banks of the Syrian Euphrates – where upland and lowland sectors of the Fertile Crescent converge – the storage and processing of grain was associated less with ordinary dwellings than with subterranean lodges, entered from an opening in the roof and suffused with ritual associations.
In crops, domestication is what happens when plants under cultivation lose features that allow them to reproduce in the wild. Among the most important is the facility to disperse seed without human assistance. In wheat, seeds growing on the stalk are contained by tiny aerodynamic capsules known as spikelets. As wild wheat ripens, the connection between spikelet and stem (an element called the rachis) shatters. The spikelets free themselves and fall to the ground. Their spiky ends penetrate the soil, deep enough for at least some seed to survive and grow (the other ends project upwards, equipped with bristle-like awns to deter birds, rodents and browsing animals).
In domestic varieties, these aids to survival are lost. A genetic mutation takes place, switching off the mechanism for spontaneous seed dispersal and turning wheat from a hardy survivor into a hopeless dependent. Unable to separate from its mother plant, the rachis becomes a locus of attachment. Instead of spreading out to take on the big bad world, the spikelets stay rigidly fixed to the top part of the stem (the ‘ear’). And there they remain, until someone comes along to harvest them, or until they rot, or are eaten by animals.
Distributing agricultural land fairly and communally
Any student of agrarian societies knows that people inclined to expand agriculture sustainably, without privatizing land or surrendering its management to a class of overseers, have always found ways to do so. Communal tenure, ‘open-field’ principles, periodic redistribution of plots and co-operative management of pasture are not particularly exceptional and were often practiced for centuries in the same locations. The Russian mir is a famous example, but similar systems of land redistribution once existed all over Europe, from the Highlands of Scotland to the Balkans, occasionally into very recent times.
The rules of redistribution varied from one case to the next – in some, it was made per stirpes, in others according to the number of people in a family. Most often, the precise location of each strip was determined by lottery, with each family receiving one strip per land tract of differing quality, so that nobody was obliged to travel much further than anyone else to his fields or to work soil of consistently lower quality. In pre-industrial Germany, where land tenure was apportioned between ‘mark associations’, each tenant would receive lots divided among the three main qualities of soil.
There is simply no reason to assume that the adoption of agriculture in more remote periods also meant the inception of private land ownership, territoriality, or an irreversible departure from forager egalitarianism.
Geographers and historians used to believe that plants and animals were first domesticated in just a few ‘nuclear’ zones: the same areas in which large-scale, politically centralized societies later appeared. This invited speculation that the former led to the latter: that food production was responsible for the emergence of cities, writing, and centralized political organization, providing a surplus of calories to support large populations and elite classes of administrators, warriors and politicians.
Invent agriculture – or so the story once went – and you set yourself on a course that will eventually lead to Assyrian charioteers, Confucian bureaucrats, Inca sun-kings or Aztec priests carrying away a significant chunk of your grain. Domination – and most often violent, ugly domination – was sure to follow; it was just a matter of time. Archaeological science has changed all this. Experts now identify between 15 and 20 independent centers of domestication, many of which followed very different paths of development to China, Peru, Mesoamerica or Mesopotamia. To those centers of early farming must now be added, among others, the Indian subcontinent (where browntop millet, mungbeans, horse gram, indica rice and humped zebu cattle were domesticated); the grasslands of West Africa (pearl millet); the central highlands of New Guinea (bananas, taroes and yams); the tropical forests of South America (manioc and peanuts); and the Eastern Woodlands of North America, where a distinct suite of local seed crops – goosefoot, sunflower and sumpweed – was raised, long before the introduction of maize from Mesoamerica.
We know much less about the prehistory of these other regions than we do about the Fertile Crescent. None followed a linear trajectory from food production to state formation. Nor is there any reason to assume a rapid spread of farming beyond them to neighboring areas. Food production did not always present itself to foragers, fishers and hunters as an obviously beneficial thing. Historians painting with a broad brush sometimes write as if it did, or as if the only barriers to the ‘spread of farming’ were natural ones, such as climate and topography.
The failure of farming to ‘reach’ California is not a particularly compelling way to frame the problem. This is just an updated version of the old diffusionist approach, which identifies culture traits (cat’s cradles, musical instruments, agriculture and so on) and maps out how they migrate across the globe, and why in some places they fail to do so. In reality, there’s every reason to believe that farming ‘reached’ California just as soon as it reached anywhere else in North America. It’s just that (despite a work ethic that valorized strenuous labor, and a regional exchange system that would have allowed information about innovations to spread rapidly) people there rejected the practice as definitively as they did slavery.
Even in the American Southwest, the overall trend for 500 years or so before Europeans arrived was the gradual abandonment of maize and beans, which people had been growing in some cases for thousands of years, and a return to a foraging way of life.
In more recent times, crops and livestock were able to ‘spread’ like wildfire, transforming existing habitats in ways that often rendered them unrecognizable within a few generations. But this has less to do with the nature of seed cultivation itself than with imperial and commercial expansion: seeds can spread very quickly if those carrying them have an army and are driven by the need endlessly to expand their enterprises to maintain profits.
Domestic plants and animals could not ‘spread’ beyond their original ecological limits without significant effort on the part of their human planters and keepers. Suitable environments not only had to be found but also modified by weeding, manuring, terracing, and so on. The landscape modifications involved may seem small-scale – little more than ecological tinkering – to our eyes, but they were onerous enough by local standards. Of course, there were always paths of least resistance, topographical features and climatic regimes conducive or less conducive to the Neolithic economy. The east–west axis of Eurasia discussed by Jared Diamond in his Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) or the ‘lucky latitudes’ of Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules – For Now (2010) are ecological corridors of this sort.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, a geographer called Alfred W. Crosby came up with a number of important theories about how ecology shaped the course of history. Among other things, he was the first to draw attention to the ‘Columbian exchange’, the remarkable crossover of non-human species set in motion by Europeans’ arrival in the Americas after 1492, and its transformative effect on the global configuration of culture, economy and cuisine. Tobacco, peppers, potatoes and turkeys flowed into Eurasia; maize, rubber and chickens entered Africa; and citrus fruits, coffee, horses, donkeys and livestock travelled to the Americas. Crosby went on to argue that the global ascendance of European economies since the sixteenth century could be accounted for by a process he called ‘ecological imperialism’. The temperate zones of North America and Oceania, as Crosby pointed out, were ideally suited to Eurasian crops and livestock; not only because of their climate, but because they possessed few native competitors and no local parasites, such as the various funguses, insects or field mice that have developed to specialize in sharing human-grown wheat. Unleashed on such fresh environments, Old World domesticates went into reproductive overdrive, even going feral again in some cases. Outgrowing and out-grazing local flora and fauna, they began to turn native ecosystems on their heads, creating ‘Neo-Europes’ – carbon copies of European environments, of the sort one sees today when driving through the countryside of New Zealand’s North Island, for example; or much of New England. The ecological assault on native habitats also included infectious diseases, such as smallpox and measles, which originated in Old World environments where humans and cattle cohabited. While European plants thrived in the absence of pests, diseases brought with domestic animals (or by humans accustomed to living alongside them) wreaked havoc on indigenous populations, creating casualty rates as high as 95%, even where settlers were not enslaving or massacring the indigenous population – which, of course, they often were.
Regional collapse around 5000 BC in Austria/Northern Europe, cereal farming lost for 1,000 years
The arrival of farming in central Europe was associated with an initial and quite massive upsurge in population – which is of course exactly what one would expect. But what followed was not the anticipated ‘up and up’ pattern of demographic growth. Instead came a disastrous downturn, a boom and bust, between 5000 and 4500 BC, and something approaching a regional collapse. People enclosed their settlements within large ditches, which yield evidence of warfare in the forms of arrows, axe heads and human remains. In some cases, when the sites were overrun, these ditches were turned into mass graves for the residents they had failed to defend. These Early Neolithic groups arrived, they settled, and then in many (but, we should emphasize, not all) areas their numbers dwindled into obscurity, while in others they were bolstered through intermarriage with more established forager populations. Only after a hiatus of roughly 1,000 years did extensive cereal-farming take off again in central and northern Europe.
We learn a great deal about these Holocene hunter-foragers from their funerary customs. From northern Russia through Scandinavia, and down to the Breton coast, they are illuminated by finds of prehistoric cemeteries. Quite often, the burials were richly adorned. In the Baltic and Iberian regions they include copious amounts of amber. Corpses lie in striking postures – sitting or leaning, even flipped on their heads – suggesting complex and now largely unfathomable codes of hierarchy. On the fringes of northern Eurasia, peat bogs and waterlogged sites preserve glimpses of a wood-carving tradition that produced decorated ski runners, sledges, canoes and monuments resembling the totem poles of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Staffs topped with elk and reindeer effigies, reminiscent of Pleistocene rock art depictions, appear over broad areas: a stable symbolism of authority, crossing the boundaries of local foraging groups.
Lacking the obvious advantages of coastal environments. It may have been precisely this that allowed Linear Pottery colonists to spread freely west and north on the loess plains to begin with: they were moving into areas with little or no prior occupation. While raiding and warfare were clearly part of the picture, it would be simplistic to attribute the initial failure of Neolithic farming in Europe to such factors alone.
Early European Farmers
Almost everything came to revolve around a single food web for Europe’s earliest farmers. Cereal-farming fed the community. Its by-products – chaff and straw – provided fuel, fodder for their animals, as well as basic materials for construction, including temper for pottery and daub for houses. Livestock supplied occasional meat, dairy and wool, as well as manure for gardens. With their wattle-and-daub longhouses and sparse material culture, these first European farming settlements bear a peculiar resemblance to the rural peasant societies of much later eras. Most likely, they were also subject to some of the same weaknesses – not just periodic raiding from the outside, but also internal labor crunches, soil exhaustion, disease and harvest failures across a whole string of like-for-like communities, with little scope for mutual aid.
Surely, the skeptical reader might object, what matters in the wider scheme of things are not the first faltering steps towards agriculture, but its long-term effects. After all, by no later than 2000 BC agriculture was supporting great cities, from China to the Mediterranean; and by 500 BC food-producing societies of one sort or another had colonized pretty much all of Eurasia. A skeptic might continue: agriculture alone could unlock the carrying capacity of lands that foragers were either unable or unwilling to exploit to anything like the same degree. So long as people were willing to give up their mobility and settle, even small parcels of arable soil could be made to yield food surpluses, especially once ploughs and irrigation were introduced.
And let’s face it, the same skeptic might conclude, the world’s population could only grow from perhaps 5 million at the start of the Holocene to 900 million by AD 1800, and now to billions, because of agriculture. How too, for that matter, could such large populations be fed, without chains of command to organize the masses, formal offices of leadership; full-time administrators, soldiers, police, and other non-food-producers, who in turn could only be supported by the surpluses that agriculture provides?
Farming, as we can now see, often started out as an economy of deprivation: you only invented it when there was nothing else to be done, which is why it tended to happen first in areas where wild resources were thinnest on the ground.
Strangers and grifters taking over a society
How do we resolve the puzzle of this Mayan depiction of Teotihuacan kings? Well, first of all, if history teaches us anything about long-distance trade routes, it’s that they are likely to be full of unscrupulous characters of various sorts: bandits, runaways, grifters, smugglers, religious visionaries, spies – or figures who may be any combination of these at a given time. This was no less true in Mesoamerica than anywhere else. The Aztecs, for instance, employed orders of heavily armed warrior-merchants called pochteca, who also gathered intelligence on the cities where they traded. History is also full of stories of adventurous travelers who either find themselves taken into some alien society and miraculously transformed there into kings or embodiments of sacred power: ‘stranger-kings’ like Captain James Cook, who – on casting anchor in Hawaii in 1779 – was accorded the status of an ancient Polynesian fertility god called Lono.
Worldwide, a remarkably large percentage of dynastic histories begin precisely this way, with a man (it’s almost always a man) who mysteriously appears from somewhere far away. It is easy to see how an adventurous traveler from a famous city might have taken advantage of such notions. Could something like this have happened in the Maya lowlands in the fifth century AD? From examination of burials at Copán we also know that, before their elevation to royal status, at least some of these adventurous individuals led extremely colorful lives, fighting and travelling and fighting again, and that they may not originally have come either from Copán or from Teotihuacan but somewhere else entirely. Taking all lines of evidence into account, it seems likely that these progenitors of Maya dynasties were originally members of groups that specialized in long-distance travel – traders, soldiers of fortune, missionaries or perhaps even spies – who, perhaps quite suddenly, found themselves elevated to royalty.
Many centuries later, when the focus of Maya culture – and most of its largest cities – had shifted to Yucatán in the north, a similar wave of central Mexican influence occurred, most dramatically evident in the city of Chichén Itzá, whose Temple of the Warriors seems to be directly modelled on the Toltec capital of Tula. We don’t really know what happened, but later chronicles, written secretly under Spanish rule, described the Itzá in almost exactly these terms: as a band of uprooted warriors, ‘stuttering foreigners’ from the west, who managed to seize control of a series of cities in Yucatán and ended up in a prolonged rivalry with another dynasty of Toltec exiles – or at least, exiles who insisted they were originally Toltec – called the Xiu. These chronicles are full of accounts of the exiles’ wanderings in the wilderness, temporary periods of glory, accusations of oppression, and somber prophecies of future tribulation. Once again, we seem to be dealing with a feeling among the Maya that kings really should come from somewhere far away, and with the willingness of at least a few unscrupulous foreigners to take advantage of this idea.
If not a monarchy, then, what was Teotihuacan? There is, we suggest, no one answer to this question – and over a period of five centuries there is no particular reason why there ought to be. Teotihuacan’s growth to urban dimensions began around the year 0. At that time, whole populations were on the move across the Basin of Mexico and Valley of Puebla, fleeing the effects of seismic activity.
From AD 50 to 150, the flow of people into Teotihuacan siphoned life from surrounding areas. Villages and towns were abandoned, and also whole cities, like Cuicuilco, with its early traditions of pyramid-building. Under several feet of ash lie the ruins of other abandoned settlements.
What we can refer to as Teotihuacan’s ‘Old City’ was organized on a parish system, with local shrines serving particular neighborhoods. We have no clear idea how the fledgling city divided access to arable land and other resources among its citizens. Maize was widely farmed, to be eaten by humans and domestic animals. People kept and ate turkeys, dogs, rabbits and hares. They also grew beans, and enjoyed access to whitetail deer and peccaries, as well as wild fruits and vegetables. Seafood arrived from the distant coast, presumably smoked or salted; but how far the various sectors of the urban economy were integrated at this time, and how exactly resources were pulled in from a wider hinterland, is altogether unclear.
The Teotihuacanos’ efforts to create a civic identity focused initially on the building of monuments: the raising of a sacred city in the midst of the wider urban sprawl. This meant the creation of an entirely new landscape in the center of Teotihuacan, requiring the work of some thousands of laborers. Pyramid-mountains and artificial rivers went up, providing a stage for the performance of calendrical rituals. In a colossal feat of civil engineering, the channels of the Rio San Juan and Rio San Lorenzo were diverted, tying them to the city’s orthogonal grid and transforming their marshy banks into solid foundations (all this, recall, without the benefit of working animals or metal tools).
All that effort of monumental construction required sacrifices, not just of labor and resources but of human life. Each major phase of building is associated with archaeological evidence of ritual killing. Adding together human remains from the two pyramids and the temple, the victims can be counted in the hundreds. Their bodies were placed in pits or trenches arranged symmetrically to define the ground plan of the edifice that would rise over them. At the corners of the Sun Pyramid, offerings of infants were found; under the Moon Pyramid, foreign captives, some decapitated or otherwise mutilated; and in the foundations of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent lay the corpses of male warriors, arms tied back at point of death, buried with the tools and trophies of their former trade.
You would think that at this point – around AD 200 – the fate of Teotihuacan was sealed: its destiny to join the ranks of ‘classic’ Mesoamerican civilizations with their strong traditions of warrior aristocracy and city-states governed by hereditary nobles. What we might then expect to see next, in the archaeological record, is a concentration of power around the city’s focal monuments: the rise of luxurious palaces, inhabited by rulers who were the font of wealth and privilege, with attached quarters for elite kinsmen; and the development of monumental art to glorify their military conquests, the lucrative tribute it generated and their services to the gods.
But the evidence tells a very different story, because the citizens of Teotihuacan chose a different path.
Instead of building palaces and elite quarters, the citizens embarked on a remarkable project of urban renewal, supplying high-quality apartments for nearly all the city’s population, regardless of wealth or status. Without written sources, we can’t really say why. The big turnaround in Teotihuacan’s fortunes seems to have begun around AD 300. At that time, or shortly after, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent was desecrated and its stores of offerings looted. Not only was it set on fire; many of the gargoyle-like heads of the Feathered Serpent on its façade were smashed or ground to a stump. At this point all new pyramid construction stopped permanently, and there is no further evidence of ritually sanctioned killing at the established Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, which remained in use as civic monuments until around AD 550 – albeit for other, less lethal purposes about which we know little.
The evidence suggests we should picture small groups of nuclear families, living comfortable lives in single-story buildings, each equipped with integral drainage facilities and finely plastered floors and walls. Each family seems to have had its own set of rooms within the larger apartment block, complete with private porticoes where light entered the otherwise windowless rooms. Even the more modest apartments show signs of a comfortable lifestyle. In other words, few were deprived. More than that, many citizens enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own. How was this remarkable transformation achieved? Apart from spoilage of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, there are few signs of violence. Land and resources appear to have been allocated to family groups who became neighbors.
Perhaps authority was distributed among local assemblies, answerable to a governing council. It may seem hard to imagine a city this size running successfully in this way for centuries without strong leaders or an extensive bureaucracy; but as we’ll see, first-hand accounts of later cities from the time of the Spanish conquest lend credence to the idea.
Another, more ebullient face of Teotihuacan’s civic identity is revealed in its mural art. Despite efforts to see them as somber religious iconography, these playful pictorial scenes – painted on the interior walls of apartment compounds from around AD 350 – often seem veritably psychedelic. Streaming effigies emerge from clustered plant, human and animal bodies, framed by figures with elaborate costumes, sometimes grasping hallucinogenic seeds and mushrooms; and among the crowd scenes we find flower eaters with rainbows bursting from their heads.
Below the surface of civil society at Teotihuacan there must have been all sorts of social tensions simmering away among groups of radically different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds who were constantly moving in and out, consolidating relationships with foreign trading partners, cultivating alter egos in remote places and sometimes bringing those forms of identity back with them. By around AD 550, the social fabric of the city had begun to come apart at the seams. There is no compelling evidence of foreign invasion. Things seems to have disintegrated from within. Almost as suddenly as it had once coalesced some five centuries previously, the city’s population dispersed again.
The rise and decline of Teotihuacan set in motion a roughly cyclical pattern of demographic concentration and dispersal in central Mexico which repeated itself a number of times between AD 300 and 1200, down to the disintegration of Tula and the fall of the Toltec state.
Mann concluded that the Indian leaders concluded from the results of their battles that they could wipe out the Europeans, though at great cost, so it was seen as a win-win deal to stop attacking Cortés, spare his life and the lives of the surviving Spaniards, and those of many Indians, if he in return would join with Tlaxcala in a united assault on the hated Triple Alliance. Now there is a basic problem with this account. There were no kings in Tlaxcala. Therefore, it could not in any sense be described as a confederation of kingdoms. So how did Mann come to think there were? As an award-winning science journalist, but not a specialist in the history of 16th century Mesoamerica, he was at the mercy of secondary sources; and this, it turns out, is where much of the problem begins. No doubt Mann must have assumed (as would any reasonable person) that if Tlaxcala were anything other than a kingdom – say a republic or a democracy, or even some form of oligarchy – then the secondary literature would have been full of lively debates about what this implies, not just for our understanding of the Spanish conquest as a key turning point in modern world history, but for the development of indigenous societies in Mesoamerica, or indeed for political theory in general. Oddly, he’d have been wrong to assume this. Finding ourselves in a similar position, we decided to delve a little deeper.
By 1519 Cortés had considerable experience in identifying Mesoamerican kings and either recruiting or neutralizing them, since this is largely what he had been doing since his arrival on the mainland. In Tlaxcala, he couldn’t find any. Instead, after an initial clash with Tlaxcalteca warriors, he found himself engaged with representatives of a popular urban council whose every decision had to be collectively ratified. Here is where things become decidedly strange, in terms of how the history of these events has come down to us. We assume that nobody – even the most ardent believer in the forces of technological progress, or ‘guns, germs, and steel’ – would go so far as to claim that fewer than 1,000 Spaniards could ever have conquered Tenochtitlan (a highly organized city, covering over five square miles, containing roughly a quarter of a million people) without the help of these indigenous allies, who included some 20,000 warriors from Tlaxcala. In which case, to understand what was really going on it becomes crucial to understand why the Tlaxcalteca decided to joined forces with Cortés, and how – with a population of tens of thousands, and no supreme overlord to govern them – they arrived at a decision to do so.
On the first matter, our sources are clear. The Tlaxcalteca were out to settle old scores. From their perspective, an alliance with Cortés might bring to a favorable end their struggles against the Aztec Triple Alliance, and the so-called ‘Flowery Wars’ between the Valleys of Puebla and Mexico. As usual, most of our sources reflect the perspective of Aztec elites, who liked to portray Tlaxcala’s long-standing resistance to their imperial yoke as something between a game and imperial largesse (they allowed the Tlaxcalteca to remain independent, the Aztecs later insisted to their Spanish conquerors, because, after all, the empire’s soldiers needed somewhere to train; their priests needed a stockyard of human victims for sacrifice to the gods, and so forth). But this was braggadocio. In fact, Tlaxcala and its Otomí guerrilla units had been holding the Aztecs successfully at bay for generations. Their resistance was not just military. Tlaxcalteca cultivated a civic ethos that worked against the emergence of ambitious leaders, and hence potential quislings – a counter-example to Aztec principles of governance.
Starting with Alfred Crosby and Jared Diamond, writers in this vein have repeatedly pointed out that the conquistadors had something akin to manifest destiny on their side. Not the divinely ordained sort of destiny they envisaged for themselves, but rather the unstoppable force of an invisible army of Neolithic Old World microbes. We like to tell ourselves that Europeans introduced the Americas not just to these agents of destruction but also to modern industrial democracy, ingredients for which were nowhere to be found there, not even in embryo. All this supposedly came as a single cultural package: advanced metallurgy, animal-powered vehicles, alphabetic writing systems and a certain penchant for freethinking that is seen as necessary for technological progress. ‘Natives’, in contrast, are assumed to have existed in some sort of alternative, quasi-mystical universe.
Such myths don’t merely inform what people say: to an even greater extent, they ensure certain things go unnoticed. Some of the key early sources on Tlaxcala have never even appeared in translation, and new data emerging in recent years has not really been noticed outside specialist circles.
Cervantes de Salazar (already some way into his manuscript) won a further grant, which was specifically intended to support a period of fieldwork. He must have visited Tlaxcala and its environs during that time in order to obtain valuable historical evidence directly from local caciques who lived through the conquista, and from their immediate descendants. Cervantes de Salazar saw Martín Cortés and many of his other close associates variously imprisoned, tortured or exiled as rebels against the Spanish Crown. Cervantes de Salazar made sufficient compromises to escape such a fate; but his reputation suffered, and to this day he is often regarded as a minor academic source
Of special interest to us are those extended sections of the Crónica that deal directly with the governing council of Tlaxcala, and its deliberations over whether to ally with the Spanish invaders. What Salazar describes in these remarkable passages is evidently not the workings of a royal court but of a mature urban parliament, which sought consensus for its decisions through reasoned argument and lengthy deliberations – carrying on, when necessary, for weeks at a time.
After many welcomes and much kissing of hands, a lord named Maxixcatzin – well known for his ‘great prudence and affable conversation’ – gets the ball rolling with an eloquent appeal for the Tlaxcalteca to follow his lead (indeed, to follow what the gods and ancestors ordained), and ally with Cortés to rise up against their common Aztec oppressors. His reasoning is widely accepted in the council, until that is, Xicotencatl the Elder – by then over 100 years old and almost blind – intervenes. A chapter follows, detailing ‘the brave speech that Xicotencatl made, contradicting Maxixcatzin’. Nothing, he reminds the council, is harder to resist than an ‘enemy within’, which is what the newcomers will likely become if welcomed into town. Why, asks Xicotencatl, … does Maxixcatzin deem these people gods, who seem more like ravenous monsters thrown up by the intemperate sea to blight us, gorging themselves on gold, silver, stones, and pearls; sleeping in their own clothes; and generally acting in the manner of those who would one day make cruel masters … There are barely enough chickens, rabbits, or corn-fields in the entire land to feed their bottomless appetites, or those of their ravenous ‘deer’ [the Spanish horses]. Why would we – who live without servitude, and never acknowledged a king – spill our blood, only to make ourselves into slaves?
On those rare occasions when the Crónica is considered by scholars today, it is mostly as a contribution to the literary genre of early Catholic humanism rather than as a source of historical information about indigenous forms of government
Motolinía confirms Cortés’s original observation: that Tlaxcala was indeed an indigenous republic governed not by a king, nor even by rotating office holders (as at Cholula), but by a council of elected officials (teuctli) answerable to the citizenry as a whole. They were required to subordinate themselves to the people of the city. To ensure that this subordination was no mere show, each was subject to trials, starting with mandatory exposure to public abuse, regarded as the proper reward of ambition, and then – with one’s ego in tatters – a long period of seclusion, in which the aspiring politician suffered ordeals of fasting, sleep deprivation, bloodletting and a strict regime of moral instruction. The initiation ended with a ‘coming out’ of the newly constituted public servant, amid feasting and celebration.
Clearly, taking up office in this indigenous democracy required personality traits very different to those we take for granted in modern electoral politics.
It is worth recalling that ancient Greek writers were well aware of the tendency for elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. This is why they considered elections an aristocratic mode of political appointment, quite at odds with democratic principles; and why for much of European history the truly democratic way of filling offices was assumed to be by lottery.
If all we had to go on were written sources, there would always be room for doubt; but archaeologists confirm that by the 14th century AD the city of Tlaxcala was, in fact, already organized on an entirely different basis to Tenochtitlan. There is no sign of a palace or central temple, and no major ball-court (an important setting, recall, for royal ritual in other Mesoamerican cities). Instead, archaeological survey reveals a cityscape given over almost entirely to the well-appointed residences of its citizens, constructed to uniformly high standards around more than twenty district plazas.
WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OF ‘THE STATE’?
The quest for the ‘origins of the state’ is almost as long-standing, and hotly contested, as the pursuit of the ‘origins of social inequality’ – and in many ways, it is just as much of a fool’s errand. It is generally accepted that, today, pretty much everyone in the world lives under the authority of a state; likewise, a broad feeling exists that past polities such as Pharaonic Egypt, Shang China, the Inca Empire or the kingdom of Benin qualify as states, or at least as ‘early states’. However, with no consensus among social theorists about what a state actually is, the problem is how to come up with a definition that includes all these cases but isn’t so broad as to be absolutely meaningless. This has proved surprisingly hard to do.
Perhaps the first to attempt a systematic definition was a German philosopher named Rudolf von Ihering, who, in the late 19th century, proposed that a state should be defined as any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory (this definition has since come to be identified with the sociologist Max Weber). On this definition, a government is a ‘state’ if it lays claim to a certain stretch of land and insists that, within its borders, it is the only institution whose agents can kill people, beat them up, cut off parts of their body or lock them in cages; Von Ihering’s definition worked fairly well for modern states. However, it soon became clear that for most of human history, rulers either didn’t make such grandiose claims – or, if they did, their claims to a monopoly on coercive force held about the same status as their claims to control the tides or the weather.
Marxists suggested that states make their first appearance in history to protect the power of an emerging ruling class. As soon as one has a group of people living routinely off the labor of another, the argument ran, they will necessarily create an apparatus of rule, officially to protect their property rights, in reality to preserve their advantage (a line of thinking very much in the tradition of Rousseau).
For much of the 20th century, social scientists preferred to define a state in more purely functional terms. As society became more complex, they argued, it was increasingly necessary for people to create top-down structures of command in order to co-ordinate everything. Basically, all it says is that, since states are complicated, any complicated social arrangement must therefore be a state.
Or was it because any society that produced a material surplus, then there would also, necessarily, be people who managed to grab hold of a disproportionate share? These assumptions don’t hold up particularly well for the earliest cities. Early Uruk, for example, does not appear to have been a ‘state’ in any meaningful sense of the word; what’s more, when top-down rule does emerge in the region of ancient Mesopotamia, it’s not in the ‘complex’ metropolises of the lowland river valleys, but among the small, ‘heroic’ societies of the surrounding foothills, which were averse to the very principle of administration and, as a result, don’t seem to qualify as ‘states’ either. If there is a good ethnographic parallel for these latter groups it might be the societies of the Northwest Coast, since there too political leadership lay in the hands of a boastful and vainglorious warrior aristocracy, competing in extravagant contests over titles, treasures, the allegiance of commoners and the ownership of slaves.
One might then argue that ‘states’ first emerged when the two forms of governance (bureaucratic and heroic) merged together. A case could be made. But equally we might ask if this is really such a significant issue in the first place? If it is possible to have monarchs, aristocracies, slavery and extreme forms of patriarchal domination, even without a state (as it evidently was); and if it’s equally possible to maintain complex irrigation systems, or develop science and abstract philosophy without a state (as it also appears to be), then what do we actually learn about human history by establishing that one political entity is what we would like to describe as a ‘state’ and another isn’t?
We have already talked about fundamental, even primary, forms of freedom: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey orders; the freedom to reorganize social relations. Can we speak similarly about elementary forms of domination? The obsession with property rights as the basis of society, and as a foundation of social power, is a peculiarly Western phenomenon.
DEFINITION OF SOCIAL POWER: CONTROL OF VIOLENCE, INFORMATION, AND INDIVIDUAL CHARISMA OR WHY THE STATE HAS NO ORIGIN (CHAPTER 10)
The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral. Usually, all three coexist to some degree. Even in societies where interpersonal violence is rare, one may well find hierarchies based on knowledge. It doesn’t even particularly matter what that knowledge is about: maybe some sort of technical know-how (say, of smelting copper, or using herbal medicines); or maybe something we consider total mumbo jumbo (the names of the 27 hells and 39 heavens, and what creatures one would be likely to meet if one travelled there).
Today, it is quite commonplace – for instance, in parts of Africa and Papua New Guinea – to find initiation ceremonies that are so complex as to require bureaucratic management, where initiates are gradually introduced to higher and higher levels of arcane knowledge, in societies where there are otherwise no formal ranks of any sort. Even where such hierarchies of knowledge do not exist, there will obviously always be individual differences.
The combination of sovereignty with sophisticated administrative techniques for storing and tabulating information introduces all sorts of threats to individual freedom – it makes possible surveillance states and totalitarian regimes – but this danger, we are always assured, is offset by a third principle: democracy.
Yet democracy, in modern states, is conceived very differently to, say, the workings of an assembly in an ancient city, which collectively deliberated on common problems. Rather, democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlookers.
Modern states are, in fact, an amalgam of elements that happen to have come together at a certain point in human history – and, arguably, are now in the process of coming apart again
All these accounts seem to assume that there is only one possible end point to this process: that these various types of domination were somehow bound to come together, sooner or later, in something like the particular form taken by modern nation states in America and France at the end of the 18TH century, a form which was gradually imposed on the rest of the world after both world wars. What if this wasn’t true?
The division of ancient Egyptian history into Old, Middle and New Kingdoms is separated by an ‘intermediate’ period, often described as epochs of ‘chaos and cultural degeneration’. In fact, these were simply periods when there was no single ruler of Egypt. Authority devolved to local factions or, as we will shortly see, changed its nature altogether. Taken together, these intermediate periods span about a third of Egypt’s ancient history.
For the last 5,000 years of human history – i.e. roughly the span of time we will be moving around in, over the course of this chapter – our conventional vision of world history is a chequerboard of cities, empires and kingdoms; but in fact, for most of this period these were exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants, if visible at all to historians’ eyes, are variously described as ‘tribal confederacies’, people who systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority. We know a bit about how such societies worked in parts of Africa, North America, Central or Southeast Asia and other regions where such loose and flexible political associations existed into recent times, but we know frustratingly little of how they operated in periods when these were by far the world’s most common forms of government.
We are considering the possibility that – when looking at those times and places usually taken to mark ‘the birth of the state’ – we may in fact be seeing how very different kinds of power crystallize, each with its own peculiar mix of violence, knowledge and charisma: our three elementary forms of domination.
OLMEC: Elites, not egalitarian.
What can we say about the structure of Olmec society? We know it was in no sense egalitarian; there were clearly marked elites. The pyramids and other monuments suggest that, at least at certain times of year, these elites had extraordinary resources of skill and labor at their disposal. In every other respect, though, ties between center and hinterland appear to have been surprisingly superficial. The collapse of the first great Olmec city at San Lorenzo, for instance, seems to have had very little impact on the wider regional economy.
Any further assessment of Olmec political structure has to reckon with what many consider its signature achievement: a series of absolutely colossal sculpted heads. These remarkable objects are free-standing, carved from tons of basalt, and of a quality comparable with the finest ancient Egyptian stonework. Each must have taken untold hours of grinding to produce. These sculptures appear to be representations of Olmec leaders, but, intriguingly, they are depicted wearing the leather helmets of ball players. All the known examples are sufficiently similar that each seems to reflect some kind of standard ideal of male beauty; but, at the same time, each is also different enough to be seen as a unique portrait of a particular, individual champion. Stone ball-courts were common features of Classic Maya cities, alongside royal residences and pyramid-temples. Some were purely ceremonial; others were actually used for sport. The chief Maya gods were themselves ball players.
The fact that the greatest known Maya epic centers on a ball game gives us a sense of how central the sport was to Maya notions of charisma and authority. So too, in a more visceral way, does an inscribed staircase built at Yaxchilán to mark the accession (in AD 752) of what was probably its most famous king, known as Bird Jaguar the Great. On the central block he appears as a ball player. Flanked by two dwarf attendants, the king prepares to strike a huge rubber ball containing the body of a human captive – bound, broken and bundled – as it tumbles down a flight of stairs. Capturing high-ranking enemies to be held for ransom or, failing payment, to be killed at ball games was a major objective of Maya warfare.
In some parts of the Americas, competitive sports served as a substitute for war. Among the Classic Maya, one was really an extension of the other. Battles and games formed part of an annual cycle of royal competitions, played for life and death. Both are recorded on Maya monuments as key events in the lives of rulers. Most likely, these elite games were also mass spectacles, cultivating a particular sort of urban public – the sort that relishes gladiatorial contests, and thereby comes to understand politics in terms of opposition. Centuries later, Spanish conquistadors described Aztec versions of the ball game played at Tenochtitlan, where players confronted each other amid racks of human skulls. They reported how reckless commoners, carried away in the competitive fervor of the tournament, would sometimes lose all they had or even gamble themselves into slavery.
The stakes were so high that, should a player actually send a ball through one of the stone hoops adorning the side of the court (these were made so small as to render it nearly impossible; normally the game was won in other ways), the contest ended immediately, and the player who performed the miracle received all the goods wagered, as well as any others he might care to pillage from the onlookers.
There is little evidence that the Olmec themselves ever created an infrastructure for dominating a large population. So far as anyone knows, their rulers did not command a stable military or administrative apparatus that might have allowed them to extend their power throughout a wider hinterland. Instead, they presided over a remarkable spread of cultural influence radiating from ceremonial centers, which may only have been densely occupied on specific occasions (such as ritual ball games) scheduled in concert with the demands of the agricultural calendar and largely empty at other times of the year.
In other words, if these were ‘states’ in any sense at all, then they are probably best defined as seasonal versions of what Clifford Geertz once called ‘theatre states’, where organized power was realized only periodically, in grand but fleeting spectacles. Anything we might consider ‘statecraft’, from diplomacy to the stockpiling of resources, existed in order to facilitate the rituals, rather than the other way around.
Before the Inca, a whole series of other societies are identified tentatively by scholars as ‘states’ or ‘empires’. All these societies occur within the area later controlled by the Inca: the Peruvian Andes and adjacent coastal drainages. None used writing, at least in any form we can recognize. Still, from AD 600 onwards many did employ knotted strings for record-keeping, and probably other forms of notation.
The first Europeans to study these civilizations, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, assumed that any city or set of cities with monumental art and architecture, exerting its ‘influence’ over a surrounding region, must be the capitals of states or empires (they also assumed – just as wrongly, it turns out – that all the rulers were male). As with the Olmec, a surprisingly large proportion of that influence seems to have come in the form of images – distributed, in the Andean case, on small ceramic vessels, objects of personal adornment and textiles – rather than in the spread of administrative, military or commercial institutions and their associated technologies.
Was the town of Chavín de Huantar really some kind of ‘Rome of the Peruvian Andes’? In fact, little evidence has emerged since to suggest this. The art of Chavín is not made up of pictures, still less pictorial narratives – at least, not in any intuitively recognizable sense. Neither does it appear to be a pictographic writing system. This is one reason why we can be fairly certain we are not dealing with an actual empire. Real empires tend to favor styles of figural art that are both very large but also very simple, so their meaning can be easily understood by anyone they wish to impress.
Crested eagles curl in on themselves, vanishing into a maze of ornament; human faces grow snake-like fangs, or contort into a feline grimace. No doubt other figures escape our attention altogether. Only after some study do even the most elementary forms reveal themselves to the untrained eye. With due attention, we can eventually begin to tease out recurrent images of tropical forest animals – jaguars, snakes, caimans – but just as the eye attunes to them they slip back from our field of vision, winding in and out of each other’s bodies or merging into complex patterns.
It is the realm of the shape-shifter, where nobody is ever quite stable or complete, and diligent mental training is required to tease out structure from what at first seems to be visual mayhem. One reason why we can say any of this with a degree of confidence is because the arts of Chavín appear to be an early (and monumental) manifestation of a much wider Amerindian tradition, in which images are not meant to illustrate or represent, but instead serve as visual cues for extraordinary feats of memory. Up until recent times, a great many indigenous societies were still using systems of broadly similar kinds to transmit esoteric knowledge of ritual formulae, genealogies or records of shamanic journeys to the world of chthonic spirits and animal familiars.
In the case of Chavín, we actually can be on fairly safe ground in assuming that these images were records of shamanic journeys; not just because of the peculiar nature of the images themselves, but also because of a wealth of circumstantial evidence relating to altered states of consciousness. At Chavín itself, snuff spoons, small ornate mortars and bone pipes have been found; and among its carved images are sculpted male figures with fangs and snake headdresses holding aloft the stalk of the San Pedro cactus. This plant is the basis of Huachuma, a mescaline-based infusion still made in the region today which induces psychoactive visions. Other carved figures, all of them apparently male, are surrounded by images of vilca leaves (Anadenanthera sp.), which contain a powerful hallucinogen. Released when the leaves are ground up and snorted, it induces a gush of mucus from the nose, as faithfully depicted on sculpted heads that line the walls of Chavín’s major temples.
Nothing in Chavín’s monumental landscape really seems concerned with secular government at all. There are no obvious military fortifications or administrative quarters. Almost everything, on the other hand, seems to have something to do with ritual performance and the revelation or concealment of esoteric knowledge. This is exactly what indigenous informants were still telling Spanish soldiers and chroniclers who arrived at the site in the 17th century. For as long as anyone could remember, they said, Chavín had been a place of pilgrimage but also one of supernatural danger, on which the heads of important families converged from different parts of the country to seek visions and oracles: the ‘speech of the stones’. Despite initial skepticism, archaeologists have gradually come round to accepting that they were right.
The temples at Chavín contain stone labyrinths and hanging staircases which seem designed not for communal acts of worship but for individual trials, initiations and vision quests. In Chavín, power over a large and dispersed population was clearly about retaining control over certain kinds of knowledge: something perhaps not that far removed from the idea of ‘state secrets’ found in later bureaucratic regimes, although the content was obviously very different, and there was little in the way of military force to back it up. In the Olmec tradition, power involved certain formalized ways of competing for personal recognition, in an atmosphere of play laced with risk: a prime example of a large-scale, competitive political field, but again in the absence of territorial sovereignty or an administrative apparatus. No doubt there was a certain degree of personal charisma and jockeying at Chavín; no doubt among the Olmec, too, some obtained influence by their command of arcane knowledge; but neither case gives us reason to think anyone was asserting a strong principle of sovereignty.
We’ll refer to these as ‘first-order regimes’ because they seem to be organized around one of the three elementary forms of domination (knowledge-control, for Chavín; charismatic politics for Olmec), to the relative neglect of the other two.
Societies where only one of three principles of sovereignty reigned
[The authors posit there are three aspects of governance by monarchs – the control the knowledge, and/or the right to kill and /or a bureaucracy to enforce their commands ]
Are there examples of the third possible variant — cases of societies which grant an individual or small group a monopoly on the right to use violence with impunity, and take it to extreme lengths, without either an apparatus for controlling knowledge or any sort of competitive political field. In fact, there are quite a lot of examples.
French accounts of the Natchez of southern Louisiana in the 18th century seem to describe exactly the sort of arrangement we are interested in. The Natchez are the only undisputed case of divine kingship north of the Rio Grande. Their ruler enjoyed an absolute power of command that would have satisfied a Sapa Inca or Egyptian pharaoh; but they had a minimal bureaucracy, and nothing like a competitive political field. As far as we know it has never occurred to anyone to refer to this arrangement as a ‘state’.
A French Jesuit, Father Maturin Le Petit, gave an account of the Natchez in the early 18th century, who were nothing like the people Jesuits had encountered in Canada. He was especially struck by their religious practices. These revolved around a settlement called the Great Village, which centered on two great earthen platforms separated by a plaza. On one platform was a temple; on the other a kind of palace, the house of a ruler called the Great Sun, large enough to contain up to 4,000 people, roughly the size of the entire Natchez population at the time.
The temple, in which an eternal fire burned, was dedicated to the founder of the royal dynasty. The current ruler, together with his brother ‘the Tattooed Serpent’ and eldest sister ‘the White Woman’, were treated with something that seemed very much like worship. Anyone who came into their presence was expected to bow and wail, and to retreat backwards. No one, not even the king’s wives, was allowed to share a meal with him; only the most privileged could even see him eat. What this meant in practice was that members of the royal family lived out their lives largely within the confinses of the Great Village, rarely venturing beyond except for major rituals or times of war.
French observers were particularly struck by the arbitrary executions of Natchez subjects, the property confiscations and the way in which, at royal funerals, court retainers would – often, apparently, quite willingly – offer themselves up to be strangled to accompany the Great Sun and his closest family members in death. Those sacrificed on such occasions consisted largely of people who were, up to that point, immediately responsible for the king’s care and his physical needs, including his wives who were always commoners.
Many, according to French accounts, went to their deaths voluntarily, even joyfully. One wife remarked how she dreamed of finally being able to share a meal with her husband in another world.
One paradoxical outcome of these arrangements was that, for most of the year, the Great Village was largely depopulated. As noted by another observer, Father Pierre de Charlevoix, ‘The great Village of the Natchez is at present reduced to a very few Cabins. The Reason which I heard for this is that the Savages, from whom the Great Chief has the Right to take all they have, get as far away from him as they can; and therefore, many Villages of this Nation have been formed at some Distance.
Away from the Great Village, ordinary Natchez appear to have led very different lives, often showing blissful disregard for the wishes of their ostensible rulers. They conducted their own independent commercial and military ventures, and sometimes flatly refused royal commands conveyed by the Great Sun’s emissaries or relatives. Archaeological surveys of the Natchez Bluffs region bear this out, showing that the eighteenth-century ‘kingdom’ in fact comprised semi-autonomous districts, including many settlements that were both larger and wealthier in trade goods than the Great Village.
‘Divine kings’ cannot be judged in human terms; behaving in arbitrarily violent ways to anyone around them is itself proof of their transcendent status. Yet at the same time, they are expected to be creators and enforcers of systems of justice.
The Great Sun was said to be descended from a child of the Sun who came to earth bearing a universal code of laws, among the most prominent of which were proscriptions against theft and murder. Yet the Great Sun himself ostentatiously violated those laws on a regular basis.
The problem with this sort of power from the sovereign’s vantage point, is that it tends to be intensely personal. It is almost impossible to delegate. The king’s sovereignty extends about as far as the king himself can walk, reach, see or be carried. Within that circle it is absolute. Outside it, it attenuates rapidly. As a result, in the absence of an administrative system (and the Natchez king had only a handful of assistants), claims to labor, tribute or obedience could, if considered odious, be simply ignored.
Even if one does develop an administrative apparatus (as they of course did), there is the additional problem of how to get the administrators actually to do what they’re told – and, by the same token, how to get anyone to tell you if they aren’t.
French observers were not entirely off the mark: the Natchez court really could be considered a sort of hyper-concentrated version of Versailles. On the one hand, the Great Sun’s power in his immediate presence was even more absolute (Louis could not actually snap his fingers and order someone executed on the spot); while on the other, his ability to extend that power was even more restricted (Louis did, after all, have an administration at his disposal, though a fairly limited one compared to modern nation states). Natchez sovereignty was, effectively, bottled up.
The Natchez case illustrates, with unusual clarity, a more general principle whereby the containment of kings becomes one of the keys to their ritual power. Sovereignty always represents itself as a symbolic break with the moral order; this is why kings so often commit some kind of outrage to establish themselves, massacring their brothers, marrying their sisters, desecrating the bones of their ancestors or, in some documented cases, literally standing outside their palace and gunning down random passers-by. Yet that very act establishes the king as potential lawmaker and high tribunal, in much the same way that ‘High Gods’ are so often represented as both throwing random bolts of lightning, and standing in judgment over the moral acts of human beings.
For most of history, this was the internal dynamic of sovereignty. Rulers would try to establish the arbitrary nature of their power; their subjects, insofar as they were not simply avoiding the kings entirely, would try to surround the godlike personages of those rulers with an endless maze of ritual restrictions, so elaborate that the rulers ended up, effectively, imprisoned in their palaces.
So far, then, we have seen how each of the three principles we began with – violence, knowledge and charisma – could, in first-order regimes, become the basis for political structures which, in some ways, resemble what we think of as a state, but in others clearly don’t. None could in any sense be described as ‘egalitarian’ societies – they were all organized around a very clearly demarcated elite – but at the same time, it’s not at all clear how far the existence of such elites restricted the basic freedoms we described in earlier chapters.
There is little reason to believe, for instance, that such regimes did much to impair freedom of movement: Natchez subjects seemed to have faced little opposition if they chose simply to move away from the proximity of the Great Sun, which they generally did. Neither do we find any clear sense of the giving or taking of orders, except in the sovereign’s immediate (and decidedly limited) ambit.
For some readers, the idea of a dead monarch sent off to the afterlife amid the corpses of his retainers might evoke images of early pharaohs. Some of Egypt’s earliest known kings, those of the First Dynasty around 3000 BC (who, in fact, were not yet referred to as ‘pharaoh’), were indeed buried in this way. But Egypt is not alone in this respect. Burials of kings surrounded by dozens, hundreds, on some occasions even thousands of human victims killed specially for the occasion can be found in almost every part of the world where monarchies did eventually establish themselves, from the early dynastic city-state of Ur in Mesopotamia to the Kerma polity in Nubia to Shang China. There are also credible literary descriptions from Korea, Tibet, Japan and the Russian steppes. Something similar seems to have occurred as well in the Moche and Wari societies of South America, and the Mississippian city of Cahokia.
We might do well to think a bit more about these mass killings, because most archaeologists now treat them as one of the more reliable indications that a process of ‘state formation’ was indeed under way. They follow a surprisingly consistent pattern. Almost invariably, they mark the first few generations of the founding of a new empire or kingdom, often being imitated by rivals in other elite households; then the practice gradually fades away (though sometimes surviving in very attenuated versions, as in sati or widow-suicide among largely kshatriya – warrior-caste – families in much of South Asia). In the initial moment, the practice of ritual killing around a royal burial tends to be spectacular: almost as if the death of a ruler meant a brief moment when sovereignty broke free of its ritual fetters, triggering a kind of political supernova that annihilates everything in its path, including some of the highest and mightiest individuals in the kingdom.
What preceded the First Dynasty, then, was not so much a lack of sovereign power as a superfluity of it: a surfeit of tiny kingdoms and miniature courts, always with a core of blood relatives and a motley collection of henchmen, wives, servants and assorted hangers-on. Some of these courts appear to have been quite magnificent in their own way, leaving behind large tombs and the bodies of sacrificed retainers. The most spectacular, at Hierakonpolis, includes not only a male dwarf (they seem to have become a fixture of courtly society very early on), but a significant number of teenage girls, and what seem to be the remains of a private zoo: a menagerie of exotic animals including two baboons and an African elephant. These kings give every sign of making grandiose, absolute, cosmological claims; but little sign of maintaining administrative or military control over their respective territories.
In summary, The Natchez Sun, as the monarch was known, inhabited a village in which he appeared to wield unlimited power. His every movement was greeted by elaborate rituals of deference, bowing and scraping; he could order arbitrary executions, help himself to any of his subjects’ possessions, do pretty much anything he liked. Still, this power was strictly limited by his own physical presence, which in turn was largely confined to the royal village itself.
Most Natchez did not live in the royal village, indeed, most tended to avoid the place, for obvious reasons. Outside it, royal representatives were not treated seriously. If subjects weren’t inclined to obey these representatives’ orders, they simply laughed at them. So while the court of the Natchez Sun was not pure empty theatre – those executed by the Great Sun were most definitely dead – neither was it the court of Suleiman the Magnificent or Aurangzeb.
Did wheat farming start in order to feed the dead?
Do ancestors get hungry? And if so, what exactly do they eat? For whatever reasons, the answer that gained traction across the Nile valley around 3500 BC was that ancestors do indeed get hungry, and what they required was something which, at that time, can only have been considered a rather exotic and perhaps luxurious form of food: leavened bread and fermented wheat beer, the pot-containers for which now start to become standard fixtures of well-appointed grave assemblages. It is no coincidence that arable wheat-farming – though long familiar in the valley and delta of the Nile – was only refined and intensified around this time, at least partly in response to the new demands of the dead.
The two processes – agronomic and ceremonial – were mutually reinforcing, and the social effects epochal. In effect, they led to the creation of what might be considered the world’s first peasantry.
The periodic flooding of the Nile had at first made permanent division of lands difficult; quite likely, it was not ecological circumstances but the social requirement to provide bread and beer on ceremonial occasions that allowed such divisions to become entrenched. This was not just a matter of access to sufficient quantities of arable land, but also the means to maintain ploughs and oxen – another introduction of the late fourth millennium BC. Families who found themselves unable to command such resources had to obtain beer and loaves elsewhere, creating networks of obligation and debt. Hence important class distinctions and dependencies did, in fact, begin to emerge, as a sizeable sector of Egypt’s population found itself deprived of the means to care independently for ancestors.
By the time of the Spanish conquest, maize was a ritual necessity for rich and poor alike. Gods and royal mummies dined on it; armies marched on it; and those too poor to grow it – or who lived too high up on the altiplano – had to find other ways of obtaining it, often ending up in debt to the royal estate as a result.
The kingdom of Egypt and the Inca Empire demonstrate what can happen when the principle of sovereignty arms itself with a bureaucracy and manages to extend itself uniformly across a territory. As a result, they are very often invoked as primordial examples of state formation, even though they are dramatically separated in time and space. Almost none of the other canonical ‘early states’ appear to have taken this approach.
Just to be utterly clear about what we are saying here, when we speak of an absence of charismatic politics we are talking about the absence of a ‘star system’ or ‘hall of fame’, with institutionalized rivalries between knights, warlords, politicians and so on. We are most certainly not speaking about an absence of individual personalities. It’s just that in a pure monarchy there is only one person, or at best a handful of individuals, who really matter. Indeed, if we are trying to understand the appeal of monarchy as a form of government – and it cannot be denied that for much of recorded human history it was a very popular one – then likely it has something to do with its ability to mobilize sentiments of a caring nature and abject terror at the same time. The king is both the ultimate individual, his quirks and fancies always to be indulged like a spoilt baby, and at the same time the ultimate abstraction, since his powers over mass violence, and often (as in Egypt) mass production, can render everyone the same.
If the ancient Egyptian regime is often held out as the first true state and a paradigm for all future ones, it is largely because it was capable of synthesizing absolute sovereignty – the monarch’s ability to stand apart from human society and engage in arbitrary violence with impunity – with an administrative apparatus which, at certain moments at least, could reduce almost everyone to cogs in a single great machine.
But there was, of course, a great exception to this which comes precisely in those periods when central authority broke down, the supposed ‘dark ages’, beginning with the First Intermediate period (c. 2181–2055 BC). Already towards the end of the Old Kingdom, ‘monarchs’ or local governors had made themselves into de facto dynasties. When the central government split between rival centers at Herakleopolis and Thebes, such local leaders began to take over most functions of government. Often referred to as ‘warlords’, they were nothing like the petty kings of the Predynastic period. At least in their own monuments, they represent themselves as something closer to popular heroes, even saints.
No doubt charismatic local leaders had always existed in Egypt; but with the breakdown of the patrimonial state, such figures could begin to make open claims of authority based on their personal achievements and attributes (bravery, generosity, oratorical and strategic skills) and – crucially – redefine social authority itself as based on qualities of public service and piety to the gods of their local town, and the popular support those qualities inspired.
So whenever state sovereignty broke down, heroic politics returned – with charismatic figures just as vainglorious and competitive, perhaps, as those we know from ancient epics, but far less bloodthirsty.
For example, here’s how El-Mo’alla of Thebes celebrates his social achievements: I gave bread to the hungry and clothing to the naked; I anointed those who had no cosmetic oil; I gave sandals to the barefooted; I gave a wife to him who had no wife. I took care of the towns of Hefat [El-Mo’alla] and Hor-mer in every [crisis, when] the sky was clouded and the earth [was parched and people died] of hunger on this sandbank of Apophis. The south came with its people and the north with its children; they brought finest oil in exchange for barley which was given to them … All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger and people were eating their children, but I did not allow anybody to die of hunger in this nome … never did I allow anybody in need to leave. I am the hero without equal.
The transition from Old Kingdom to First Intermediate period was not so much a shift from ‘order’ to ‘chaos’ – as Egyptological orthodoxy once had it – as a swing from ‘sovereignty’ to ‘charismatic politics’ as different ways of framing the exercise of power. With that came a shift in emphasis, from the people’s care of god-like rulers to the care of the people as a legitimate path to authority.
SO WHAT? WE ENDED UP WITH PATRIARCHY, AGRICULTURE – IT WAS INEVITABLE
Chapter 11 Full Circle: on the historical foundations of the indigenous critique
You may object: perhaps much of human history was more complicated than we usually admit, but surely what matters is how things ended up. For at least 2,000 years, most of the world’s population have been living under kings or emperors of one sort or another. Even in places where monarchy did not exist – much of Africa or Oceania, for example – we find that (at the very least) patriarchy, and often violent domination of other sorts, have been widespread. Once established, such institutions are very hard to get rid of. So your objection might run: all you’re saying is that the inevitable took a little longer to happen. That doesn’t make it any less inevitable.
Similarly, with farming. True, your objection might run: agriculture might not have transformed everything overnight, but surely it laid the groundwork for later systems of domination? Wasn’t it really just a matter of time? Did not the very possibility of piling up large surpluses of grain, in effect, lay a trap? Wasn’t it inevitable that, sooner or later, some warrior-prince like Narmer of Egypt would begin amassing stockpiles for his henchmen? And once he did, surely the game was over. Rival kingdoms and empires would quickly come into being. Some would find the means to expand; they would insist on their subjects producing more and more grain, and those subjects would grow in number, even as the number of remaining free peoples tended to remain stable. Once again, was it not just a matter of time before one of those kingdoms came up with a successful formula for world conquest – just the right combination of guns, germs, and steel – and imposed its system on everybody else?
JAMES SCOTT: Against the Grain
James Scott – a renowned political scientist who has devoted much of his career to understanding the role of states (and those who succeed in evading them) in human history – has a compelling description of how this agricultural trap works. The Neolithic began with flood-retreat agriculture, which was easy work and encouraged redistribution; the largest populations were, indeed, concentrated in deltaic environments, but the first states in the Middle East (he concentrates largely on these; and China) developed upriver, in areas with an especially strong focus on cereal agriculture – wheat, barley, millet – and relatively limited access to a range of other staples. The key to the importance of grain, Scott notes, is that it was durable, portable, easily divisible and quantifiable by bulk, and therefore an ideal medium to serve as a basis for taxation. Growing above ground, unlike tubers or legumes, grains were highly visible and easier to appropriate.
However, Scott also points out that for much of history this process turned out to be a trap for these newfound ‘grain states’, limiting them to areas that favored intensive agriculture, and leaving surrounding highlands, fenlands and marshes largely beyond their reach. What’s more, even within those confines the grain-based kingdoms were fragile, always prone to collapse under the weight of over-population, ecological devastation and the kind of endemic diseases that always resulted when too many humans, domesticated animals and parasites accumulated in one spot.
Ultimately, though, Scott’s focus isn’t on states: it’s about the ‘barbarians’: The groups surrounding the little islands of authoritarian-bureaucratic rule, and which existed in a largely symbiotic relation with them: some ever-shifting mix of raiding, trading and mutual avoidance. Like the hill peoples of Southeast Asia, some of these ‘barbarians’ became, effectively, anarchists: organizing their lives in explicit opposition to the valley societies below, or to prevent the emergence of stratified classes in their own midst. As we’ve seen, such conscious rejection of bureaucratic values – another example of cultural schismogenesis – could also give rise to ‘heroic societies’, a hurly-burly of petty lords whose pre-eminence was founded on dramatic contests of war, feasting, boasting, dueling, games, gifts, and sacrifice. Monarcy may have started that way on the fringes of urban-bureaucratic systems.
These barbarian monarchies remained either small-scale or, if they did expand – as was the case under figures like Alaric, Attila, Genghis or Tamerlane – the expansion was short-lived. Throughout much of history, grain states and barbarians remained ‘dark twins’, locked together in an unresolvable tension, since neither could break out of their ecological niches. When the states had the upper hand, slaves and mercenaries flowed in one direction; when the barbarians were dominant, tribute flowed to appease the most dangerous warlord; or alternatively, some overlord would manage to organize an effective coalition, sweep in on the cities and either lay them to waste or more often attempt to rule them and find himself and his retinue absorbed as a new governing class.
Scott doesn’t draw any particular conclusions. Rather, he simply remarks that while the period from about 3000 BC to AD 1600 was a fairly miserable one for the bulk of the world’s farmers, it was a Golden Age for the barbarians, who reaped all the advantages of their proximity to dynastic states and empires (luxuries to loot and plunder), while themselves living comparatively easy lives. And it was usually possible for at least some of the oppressed to join their ranks. For most of history rebellion typically was defection to join the ranks of nearby barbarians. So while these agrarian kingdoms managed largely to abolish the freedom to ignore orders, they had a much harder time abolishing the freedom to move away. Empires were exceptional and short-lived, and even the most powerful – Roman, Han, Ming, Inca – could not prevent large-scale movements of people into and out of their spheres of control. Until around 1500, much of the world’s population lived beyond the tax collectors or could escape to another place.
One can agree with James Scott that an affinity exists between grain economies and interests of predatory elites imposing their authority through taxation, raiding, and tribute (grain being a very visible, quantifiable, and easily appropriated and storable resource). But Scott never makes the claim that taking up cereal-farming will always produce a state, only that some states forced the production of grain crops while discouraging less controllable forms of subsistence such as seasonal hunting, gathering, herding, or garden cultivation.
Yet today, in our 21st century world, this is obviously no longer the case. Something did go terribly wrong – at least from the point of view of the barbarians. We no longer live in that world. But merely recognizing that it existed for so long allows us to pose a further important question. How inevitable, really, were the type of governments we have today, with their particular fusion of territorial sovereignty, intense administration and competitive politics? Was this really the necessary culmination of human history?
Since the 1950s, a body of neo-evolutionist theory has sought to define a new version of the sequence, based on how efficiently groups harvest energy from their environment. To summarize the older scheme’s basic sequence here:
Band societies: the simplest stage is still assumed to be made up of hunter-gatherers like the !Kung or Hadza, supposedly living in small mobile groups of 20 to 40, without any formal political roles and minimal division of labor. Such societies are thought to be egalitarian, effectively by default.
Tribes: societies like the Nuer, Dayaks or Kayapo. Tribesmen are typically assumed to be ‘horticulturalists’, which is to say they farm but don’t create irrigation works or use heavy equipment like ploughs; they are egalitarian, at least among those of the same age and gender; their leaders have only informal, or at least no coercive, power. ‘Tribes’ are typically arranged into the sort of complex lineage or totemic clan structures beloved of anthropologists. Economically, the central figures are ‘big men’ – such as were typically found in Melanesia – responsible for creating voluntary coalitions of contributors to sponsor rituals and feasts. Ritual or craft specialism is limited and usually part-time; tribes are numerically larger than bands, but settlements tend to be roughly of the same size and importance.
Chiefdoms: while the clans of tribal society are all, ultimately, equivalent, in chiefdoms the kinship system becomes the basis for a system of rank, with aristocrats, commoners and even slaves. The Shilluk, Natchez or Calusa are typically treated as chiefdoms; so are, say, Polynesian kingdoms, or the lords of ancient Gaul. Intensification of production leads to a significant surplus, and classes of full-time craft and ritual specialists emerge, not to mention the chiefly families themselves. There is at least one level of settlement hierarchy (the chief’s residence, and everyone else), and the main economic function of the chief is redistributive: pooling resources, often forcibly, and then doling them out to everyone, usually during spectacular feasts.
States: much as already described, these tend to be characterized by intensive cereal agriculture, a legal monopoly on the use of force, professional administration and a complex division of labor.
As many 20th century anthropologists pointed out at the time, this scheme doesn’t really work. ‘Big men’ seem almost entirely confined to Melanesia. ‘Indian chiefs’ such as Geronimo or Sitting Bull were tribal headmen, whose role was nothing like big men in Papua New Guinea. Most of those labeled ‘chiefs’ in the neo-evolutionist model look suspiciously like what we normally think of as ‘kings’ and may well live in fortified castles, wear ermine robes, support court jesters, have hundreds of wives and harem eunuchs. However, they rarely engage in mass redistribution of resources, at least not systematically.
The evolutionist response to such critiques was not to abandon the scheme but to fine-tune it. Perhaps chiefdoms are more predatory, evolutionists argued, but they are still fundamentally different to states. What’s more, they were divided into ‘simple’ and complex chiefdoms. In simple ones, the chief was just a glorified big man, still working like everyone else, with only minimal administrative assistance. In complex societies he was backed up by at least two levels of administrators and a genuine class structure. Although they tried to create larger empires by attacking rivals, few managed to do so and it all collapsed until the next big man arose to try again.
Everyone treats such schemes as the self-evident basis for discussion, even if most cultural anthropologists don’t take evolutionary seriously. And while most archaeologists only employ terms like ‘tribe’, ‘chiefdom’ or ‘state’, the do so for lack of an alternative terminology.
The reason why these ways of thinking remain in place, no matter how many times people point out their incoherence, is precisely because we find it so difficult to imagine history that isn’t teleological – that is, to organize history in a way which does not imply that current arrangements were inevitable.
The best we can do, when confronted with unique historical events or configurations such as the Persian or Hellenistic empires, is to engage in a project of comparison. This at least can give us an idea of the sort of things that might happen, and at best a sense of the pattern by which one thing is likely to follow another. The problem is that ever since the Iberian invasion of the Americas, and subsequent European colonial empires, we can’t even really do that, because there’s ultimately been just one political-economic system and it is global. If we wish to assess whether the modern nation state, industrial capitalism and the spread of lunatic asylums are necessarily linked, as opposed to separate phenomena that just happen to have come together in one part of the world, there’s simply no basis on which to judge. All three emerged at a time when the planet was effectively a single global system and we have no other planets to compare ourselves to.
The Americas were not in direct or regular communication with Eurasia. They were in no sense part of the same ‘world system’. This is important, because it means we do have one truly independent point of comparison (possibly even two, if we consider North and South America as separate), where it is possible to ask: does history really have to take a certain direction?
In the case of the Americas, we actually can pose questions such as: was the rise of monarchy as the world’s predominant form of government inevitable? Is cereal agriculture really a trap, and can one really say that once the farming of wheat or rice or maize becomes sufficiently widespread, it’s only a matter of time before some enterprising overlord seizes control of the granaries and establishes a regime of bureaucratically administered violence? And once he does, is it inevitable that others will imitate his example?
Judging by the history of pre-Columbian North America, at least, the answer to all these questions is a resounding ‘no’. What actually happened there defies assumptions of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. We’ve already seen how in the western half of the continent there was, if anything, a movement away from agriculture in the centuries before the European invasion; and how Plains societies often seem to have moved back and forth, over the course of any given year, between bands and something that shares at least some of the features we identify with states – in other words, between what should have been opposite ends of the scale of social evolution.
Even more startling in its own way is what happened in the eastern part of the continent. From roughly AD 1050 to 1350 there was, in what’s now East St Louis, a city whose real name has been forgotten, but which is known to history as Cahokia. It appears to have been the capital of what James Scott would term a classic budding ‘grain state’, rising magnificently and seemingly from nowhere, around the time that the Song Dynasty ruled in China and the Abbasid Caliphate in Iraq. Cahokia’s population peaked at something in the order of 15,000 people; then it abruptly dissolved.
Whatever Cahokia represented in the eyes of those under its sway, it seems to have ended up being overwhelmingly and resoundingly rejected by the vast majority of its people.
What had happened? Were the rulers of Cahokia and other Mississippian cities overthrown by popular uprisings, undermined by mass defection, victims of ecological catastrophe, or (more likely) some intricate mix of all three? Archaeology may one day supply more definitive answers. Until such time, what we can say with some confidence is that the societies encountered by European invaders from the sixteenth century onwards were the product of centuries of political conflict and self-conscious debate. They were, in many cases, societies in which the ability to engage in self-conscious political debate was itself considered one of the highest human values.
Much though later European authors liked to imagine them as innocent children of nature, the indigenous populations of North America were in fact heirs to their own, long intellectual and political history – one that had taken them in a very different direction to Eurasian philosophers and which, arguably, ended up having a profound influence on conceptions of freedom and equality, not just in Europe but everywhere else as well.
Evolutionary theory as we know it today was largely created so as to entrench such dismissive attitudes: to make them seem natural or obvious. If the indigenous peoples of North America aren’t being imagined as living in a separate time, or as vestiges of some earlier stage of human history, then they’re imagined as living in an entirely separate reality, a mythic consciousness fundamentally different from our own. If nothing else, it is assumed that any intellectual tradition similar to that which produced Plotinus, Shankara or Zhuang Zu can only be the product of a literary tradition in which knowledge becomes cumulative. And since North America did not produce a written tradition – or at least not the sort we are used to recognizing as such – any knowledge it generated, political or otherwise, was necessarily of a different kind. Any similarity we might see to debates or positions familiar from our own intellectual tradition is typically written off as some sort of naive projection of Western categories.
CAHOKIA
Cahokia lies in an extensive floodplain along the Mississippi known as the American Bottom. It was a bounteous and fertile environment, ideal for growing maize, but still a challenging place to build a city since much of it was swampland, foggy and full of shallow pools. Charles Dickens, who once visited called it ‘an unbroken slough of black mud and water’. Cahokia was centered on a processional walkway known as the Rattlesnake Causeway, designed to rise from the surrounding waters and leading towards the surrounding ridge-top tombs (a Path of Souls, or Way of the Dead). So Cahokia was likely a place of pilgrimage, much like some of the Hopewell sites.
Like Hopewell, Cahokia loved games, and invented Chunkey, a complex and highly coordinated affair in which running players tried to throw poles as close as possible to a rolling wheel or ball without actually touching it. The came often become the focus of frenetic gambling, when some would even raise themselves or their families as stakes.
In Cahokia and its hinterland we can chart the rise of social hierarchies through the lens of chunkey, as the game became increasingly monopolized by an exclusive elite. One sign of this is how stone chunkey discs disappear from ordinary burials, just as beautifully crafted versions of them start to appear in the richest graves. Chunkey was becoming a spectator sport, and Cahokia the sponsor of a new regional, Mississippian elite. We are not sure exactly how it happened, but around AD 1050 Cahokia exploded in size, growing from a fairly modest community to a city of over six square miles, including more than 100 earthen mounds built around spacious plazas. Its original population of a few thousand was augmented by perhaps 10,000 more, totaling something in the order of 40,000 in the American Bottom as a whole.
The main part of the city was designed and built according to a master plan in a single burst of activity. Its focus was a huge packed-earth pyramid known today as Monk’s Mound. Some of Cahokia’s pyramids were topped with palaces or temples; others with charnel houses or sweat lodges. A calculated effort was made to resettle foreign populations – or at least their most important, influential representatives – in newly designed thatch houses, arranged in neighborhoods around smaller plazas and earthen pyramids; many had their own craft specializations or ethnic identity.35 From the summit of Monk’s Mound the city’s ruling elite enjoyed powers of surveillance over these planned residential zones.36 At the same time, existing villages and hamlets in Cahokia’s hinterland were disbanded and the rural population dispersed, scattered in homesteads of one or two families.
Along with games and feasts, in the early decades of Cahokia’s expansion there were mass executions and burials, carried out in public. As with fledgling kingdoms in other parts of the world, these large-scale killings were directly associated with the funerary rites of nobility; in this case, a mortuary facility centered on the paired burials of high-status males and females, whose shrouded bodies were placed around a surface built up from some thousands of shell beads. Around them an earthen mound was formed, precisely oriented to an azimuth derived from the southernmost rising point of the moon. Its contents included four mass graves holding the stacked bodies of mainly young women (though one was over 50), who were killed specifically for the occasion.
Genealogies were carefully preserved, and there was a priesthood devoted to maintaining the temples, which contained images of royal ancestors. Lastly, there was a system of titles for heroic achievement in war, which made it possible for commoners to win their way into the nobility, a status symbolized in bird-man imagery, which also invoked the prestige of competing at chunkey tournaments.
During the 11th and 12th centuries, Mississippian sites with links of various kinds to Cahokia appear everywhere from Virginia to Minnesota, often in aggressive conflict with their neighbors. Trade routes spanning the continent were activated, the materials for new treasures pouring into the American Bottom much as they once had to Hopewell.
Very little of this expansion was directly controlled from the center. We are unlikely to be talking about an actual empire so much as an intricate ritual alliance, backed up ultimately by force – and things began to grow increasingly violent, fairly fast. Within a century of the initial urban explosion at Cahokia, in about AD 1150, a giant palisaded wall was built. This marked the beginning of a long and uneven process of war, destruction and depopulation. At first people seem to have fled the metropolis for the hinterlands, then ultimately abandoned the rural bottomlands entirely. This same process can be observed in many of the smaller Mississippian towns. Most appear to have begun as co-operative enterprises before becoming centralized around the cult of some royal line and receiving patronage from Cahokia. Then, over the course of a century or two, they emptied out (in much the same way as the Natchez Great Village was later to do, and possibly for much the same reasons, as subjects sought freer lives elsewhere) until finally being sacked, burned or simply deserted.
Whatever happened in Cahokia, it appears to have left extremely unpleasant memories.
After AD 1400 the entire fertile expanse of the American Bottom (which at the city’s height had contained perhaps as many as 40,000 people), along with the territory from Cahokia up to the Ohio River, became what’s referred to in the literature as the Vacant or Empty Quarter: a haunted wilderness of overgrown pyramids and housing blocks crumbling back into swamp.
Scholars continue to debate the relative importance of ecological and social factors in Cahokia’s collapse, just as they argue about whether or not it should be considered a ‘complex chiefdom’ or a ‘state’. In our own terms what we appear to have in Cahokia is a second-order regime in which two of our three elementary forms of domination – in this case, control over violence and charismatic politics – came together in a powerful, even explosive cocktail. This is the same combination we found in the Classic Maya elite, for whom competitive sports and warfare were similarly fused; and who extended their sovereignty by bringing large populations into their orbit through organized spectacle, or by capture, or other forms of compulsion we can only guess at.
Both in Cahokia and the Classic Maya, managerial activities seem to have focused on the administration of otherworldly matters, notably in the sophistication of their ritual calendars and precise orchestration of sacred space. These, however, had real-world effects, especially in the areas of city-planning, labor mobilization, public surveillance and careful monitoring of the maize cycle. Perhaps we are dealing here with attempts to create ‘third-order’ regimes of domination, albeit of a very different kind to modern nation states, in which control over violence and esoteric knowledge became caught up in the spiraling political competition of rival elites. This may also explain why both Cahokia and the Maya totalitarian projects collapsed suddenly and totally.
Whatever the precise combination of factors at play, by about AD 1350 or 1400 the result was mass defection. Just as the metropolis of Cahokia was founded through its rulers’ ability to bring diverse populations together, often from across long distances, in the end the descendants of those people simply walked away. The Vacant Quarter implies a self-conscious rejection of everything the city of Cahokia stood for.
How did it happen? As we’ll see, the Osage – a Siouan people who appear originally to have inhabited the region of Fort Ancient in the Middle Ohio River valley before abandoning it for the Great Plains – used the expression ‘moving to a new country’ as a synonym for constitutional change. It is important to bear in mind that in this part of North America, populations were relatively sparse. There were extensive stretches of uninhabited territory, so it was not difficult for groups simply to relocate. What we would now call social movements often took the form of quite literal movements.
To get a sense of the kind of ideological conflicts going on, consider the history of the Etowah river valley, part of a region then inhabited by ancestors of the Choctaw, in Georgia and Tennessee. Around the time of Cahokia’s initial take-off between AD 1000 and 1200, this area was emerging from a period of generalized warfare. Post-conflict settlement involved the creation of small towns, each with its temple-pyramids and plaza, and in every case centered on a large council house, designed as a meeting place for the entire adult community. Grave goods of the time show no indications of rank. Around 1200 the Etowah valley was for some reason abandoned; then, around half a century later, people returned to it. A burst of construction ensued, including a palace and charnel house on top of giant mounds – walled off from commoner eyes – and a royal tomb, placed directly atop the ruins of the communal council house. Burials there were accompanied by magnificent bird-man costumes.
Enclosed by a perimeter ditch and substantial palisade wall, the town of Etowah was at this point clearly the capital of some sort of kingdom. In 1375 someone – whether external enemies or internal rebels, we do not know – sacked Etowah and desecrated its holy places; then, after a brief and abortive attempt at reoccupation, Etowah was again entirely abandoned, as were all the towns across the region. During this period the priestly orders seem largely to vanish across much of the Southeast, to be replaced by warrior rulers who occasionally become paramount in a given region, but they lacked either the ritual authority or economic resources to create the kind of urban life that existed before. In about 1500 the Etowah valley fell under the sway of the kingdom of Coosa, by which time most of the original population appears to have left and moved on, leaving behind little more than a museum of earthworks for the Coosa to lord it over.
Some of those who walked away concentrated around the new capitals. In 1540, a member of Hernando De Soto’s expedition described the ruler of Coosa and his core as follows: He came out to welcome him in a carrying chair borne on the shoulders of his principal men, seated on a cushion, and covered with a robe of marten skins of the form and size of a woman’s shawl. He wore a crown of feathers on his head; and around him were many Indians playing and singing. The land was very populous and had many large towns and planted fields which reached from one town to the other. It was a charming and fertile land, with good cultivated fields stretching along the rivers.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, petty kingdoms of this sort appear to have been the dominant political form in much of the Southeast. Their rulers were treated with reverence and received tribute, but their rule was brittle and unstable, afraid of subordinate lords who might rise up and tried to keep them under constant surveillance. Shortly after de Soto’s departure several of them did just that, causing the kingdom of Coosa to collapse. Meanwhile, outside the central towns much more egalitarian forms of communal life were taking form.
By the early 18th century these petty kingdoms, and the very practice of building mounds and pyramids, had almost entirely vanished from the American South and Midwest. At the edge of the prairies, for example, people living in scattered homesteads began migrating seasonally, leaving the very young and old behind in the earthwork towns and taking to extended hunting and fishing in the surrounding uplands, before finally relocating entirely. In other areas, the towns would be reduced to ceremonial centers or Natchez-style hollow courts, where the ruler continued to be paid magnificent tokens of respect but held almost no actual power. Then finally, when those rulers were definitively gone, people would begin descending back into the valleys, but this time in communities organized on very different principles: small towns of a few hundred people, or at most 2,000 with egalitarian clan structures and communal houses.
Today historians seem inclined to see these developments as in large part a reaction to the shock of war, slavery, conquest and disease introduced by European settlers. However, they appear to have been the logical culmination of processes that had been going on for centuries before that.
North American societies were usually marked by low birth rates and population densities, making it easy for agriculturalists to shift back to subsistence modes of hunting, fishing, foraging or relocating entirely. Meanwhile women – who in one of Scott’s ‘grain states’ would typically be viewed by the (male) authorities as little more than baby-making machines, and when not pregnant or nursing to be engaged in industrial tasks like spinning and weaving – took on stronger political roles.
Often rulers were reduced to being facilitators of political discussions where men argued and debated while smoking tobacco and drinking caffeinated beverages, drugs formerly ingested by shamans, now doled out in carefully measured portions to everyone. The Jesuits reported the same in the North East: ‘They believe that there is nothing so suitable as Tobacco to appease the passions; that is why they never attend a council without a pipe or calumet in their mouths. The smoke, they say, gives them intelligence, and enables them to see clearly through the most intricate matters.’
Now, if all this sounds suspiciously reminiscent of an Enlightenment coffee-house it isn’t a total coincidence. Tobacco, for example, was adopted around this period by settlers then taken back and popularized in Europe itself, and it was indeed promoted in Europe as a drug to be taken in small doses to focus the mind. Obviously, there is no direct cultural translation here. There never is. But as we have seen, indigenous North American ideas – from the advocacy of individual liberties to skepticism of revealed religion – certainly had an impact on the European Enlightenment, even though, like pipe-smoking, such ideas underwent many transformations in the process. No doubt it would be too much to suggest that the Enlightenment itself had its first stirrings in 17th century North America.
Clearly, evolutionist categories only confuse the issue here. Arguing about whether Hopewellians were ‘bands’, ‘tribes’ or ‘chiefdoms’, or indeed whether Cahokia was a ‘complex chiefdom’ or a ‘state’, tells us virtually nothing. Insofar as we can speak of ‘states’ and ‘chiefdoms’ at all, in the case of Native North America the state-making project seems to come first, virtually out of nowhere, and the chiefdoms observed by de Soto and his successors appear to be little more than the rubble left behind by its downfall.
There must be more interesting and useful questions to ask of the past, and the categories we’ve been developing in this book suggest what some of these might be.
Does the kind of esoteric knowledge we encounter at Chavín, often founded in hallucinogenic experience, really have anything in common with the accounting methods of the later Inca? It seems highly unlikely – until, that is, we recall that even in much more recent times, qualifications to enter bureaucracies are typically based on some form of knowledge that has virtually nothing to do with actual administration.
THE OSAGE
Let us begin with a map of a typical Osage summer village. Osage communities typically moved between three seasonal locations: permanent villages of multi-family lodge houses made up of perhaps 2,000 people; summer camps; and camps for the annual midwinter bison hunts. The basic village pattern was a circle divided into two exogamous moieties, sky and earth, with 24 clans in all, each of which had to be represented in any settlement or camp, just as at least one representative of each had to be present for any major ritual. Their history is difficult to piece together because it is distributed among the clans, and each clan had its own history and stock of secret knowledge, whereby the true meaning of certain aspects of the story is revealed over the course of seven levels of initiation.
The real story then can be said to be broken into 168 pieces – arguably 336, since each revelation contained two parts: a political history and an accompanying philosophical reflection on what that history reveals about the forces responsible for dynamic aspects of the visible world that caused the stars to move, plants to grow, and so forth. The Osage concluded that this force was ultimately unknowable and gave it the name Wakonda, which could alternately be translated as ‘God’ or ‘Mystery’. Through lengthy investigation, La Flesche notes, elders determined that life and motion was produced by the interaction of two principles – sky and earth – and therefore they divided their own society in the same way, arranging it so that men from one division could only take wives from the other. A village was a model of the universe, and as such a form of ‘supplication’ to its animating power.
Initiation through the levels of understanding required a substantial investment of time and wealth, and most Osage only attained the first or second tier. Those who reached the top were known collectively as the Nohozhinga or ‘Little Old Men’ (though some were women). While every Osage was expected to spend an hour after sunrise in prayerful reflection, the Little-Old-Men carried out daily deliberations on questions of natural philosophy and their specific relevance to political issues of the day. They also kept a history of the most important discussions.
Periodically, particularly perplexing questions would come up: either about the nature of the visible universe, or about the application of these understandings to human affairs. At this point it was customary for two elders to retreat to a secluded spot in the wilderness and carry out a vigil for four to seven days, to ‘search their minds’, before returning with a report on their conclusions.
The Nohozhinga were the body that met daily to discuss affairs of state. While larger assemblies could be called to ratify decisions, they were the effective government. In this sense one could say that the Osage were a theocracy, though it would be more accurate, perhaps, to say there was no difference between officials, priests and philosophers. All were title-bearing officials, including the ‘soldiers’ assigned to help chiefs enforce their decisions, while ‘Protectors of the Land’ assigned to hunt down and kill outsiders who poached game were also religious figures.
[Then there are several pages of the mythology of these tribes and how they arranged their affairs accordingly, which shows that they self-consciously create their own institutional arrangements long before the Enlightenment with their philosophies and discussions.]
Two elements of the story (which I left out) deserve emphasis. The first is that the narrative sets off from the neutralization of arbitrary power: the taming of the Isolated Earth People’s leader – the chief sorcerer, who abuses his deadly knowledge – by according him some central position in a new system of alliances. This is a common story among the descendants of groups that had formerly come under the influence of Mississippian civilization. In the process of co-opting their leader, the destructive ritual knowledge once held by the Isolated Earth People was, eventually, distributed to everyone, along with elaborate checks and balances concerning its use. The second is that even the Osage, who ascribed key roles to sacred knowledge in their political affairs, in no sense saw their social structure as something given from on high but rather as a series of legal and intellectual discoveries – even breakthroughs.
This last point is critical, because – as outlined earlier – we are used to imagining that the very notion of a people self-consciously creating their own institutional arrangements is largely a product of the Enlightenment.