In a society of thousands of people it’s impossible for everyone to know everyone else or to hold face-to-face discussions that include everybody. As a result, chiefdoms confront two new problems that bands or tribes did not. First, strangers in a chiefdom must be able to meet each other, to recognize each other as fellow but individually unfamiliar members of the same chiefdom, and to avoid bristling at territorial trespass and getting into a fight. Hence chiefdoms develop shared ideologies and political and religious identities often derived from the supposedly divine status of the chief. Second, there is now a recognized leader, the chief, who makes decisions, possesses recognized authority, claims a monopoly on the right to use force against his society’s members if necessary, and thereby ensures that strangers within the same chiefdom don’t fight each other. The chief is assisted by non- specialized all-purpose officials (proto-bureaucrats) who collect tribute and settle disputes and carry out other administrative tasks, instead of there being separate tax collectors, judges, and restaurant inspectors as in a state. (A source of confusion here is that some traditional societies that have chiefs and are correctly described as chiefdoms in the scientific literature and in this book are nevertheless referred to as “tribes” in most popular writing: for instance, Indian “tribes” of eastern North America, which really consisted of chiefdoms.)
An economic innovation of chiefdoms is termed a redistributive economy: instead of just direct exchanges between individuals, the chief collects tribute of food and labor, much of which is redistributed to warriors, priests, and craftsmen who serve the chief. Redistribution is thus the earliest form of a system of taxation to support new institutions. Some of the food tribute is returned to the commoners, whom the chief has a moral responsibility to support in times of famine, and who work for the chief at activities like constructing monuments and irrigation systems. In addition to these political and economic innovations beyond the practices of bands and tribes, chiefdoms pioneered the social innovation of institutionalized inequality. While some tribes already have separate lineages, a chiefdom’s lineages are ranked hereditarily, with the chief and his family being at the top, commoners or slaves at the bottom, and (in the case of Polynesian Hawaii) as many as eight ranked castes in between. For members of higher-ranked lineages or castes, the tribute collected by the chief funds a better lifestyle in terms of food, housing, and special clothing and adornments.
Hence past chiefdoms can be recognized archaeologically by (sometimes) monumental construction, and by signs such as unequal distribution of grave goods in cemeteries: some bodies (those of chiefs and their relatives and bureaucrats) were buried in large tombs filled with luxury goods such as turquoise and sacrificed horses, contrasting with small unadorned graves of commoners. Based on such evidence, archaeologists infer that chiefdoms began to arise locally by around 5500 BC. In modern times, just before the recent nearly universal imposition of state government control around the world, chiefdoms were still widespread in Polynesia, much of sub-Saharan Africa, and the more productive areas of eastern and southwestern North America, Central America, and South America outside the areas controlled by the Mexican and Andean states. Chiefdoms that will be discussed in this book include the Mailu Islanders and Trobriand Islanders of the New Guinea region, and the Calusa and Chumash Indians of North America. From chiefdoms, states emerged (from about 3400 BC onwards) by conquest or amalgamation under pressure, resulting in larger populations, often ethnically diverse populations, specialized spheres and layers of bureaucrats, standing armies, much greater economic specialization, urbanization, and other changes, to produce the types of societies that blanket the modern world.
Thus, if social scientists equipped with a time machine could have surveyed the world at any time before about 9000 BC, they would have found everybody everywhere subsisting as hunter-gatherers, living in bands and possibly already in some tribes, without metal tools, writing, centralized government, or economic specialization. If those social scientists could have returned in the 1400s, at the time when the expansion of Europeans to other continents was just beginning, they now would have found Australia to be the sole continent still occupied entirely by hunter-gatherers, still living mostly in bands and possibly in some tribes. But, by then, states occupied most of Eurasia, northern Africa, the largest islands of western Indonesia, most of the Andes, and parts of Mexico and West Africa. There were still many bands, tribes, and chiefdoms surviving in South America outside the Andes, in all of North America, New Guinea, and the Arctic, and on Pacific islands. Today, the whole world except Antarctica is divided at least nominally into states, although state government remains ineffective in some parts of the world. The world regions that preserved the largest numbers of societies beyond effective state control into the 20th century were New Guinea and the Amazon.
The continuum of increase in population size, political organization, and intensity of food production that stretches from bands to states is paralleled by other trends, such as increases in dependence on metal tools, sophistication of technology, economic specialization and inequality of individuals, and writing, plus changes in warfare and religion that I’ll discuss in Chapters 3 and 4 and in Chapter 9 respectively. (Remember again: the developments from bands to states were neither ubiquitous, nor irreversible, nor linear.) Those trends, especially the large populations and political centralization and improved technology and weapons of states with respect to simpler societies, are what have enabled states to conquer those traditional types of societies and to subjugate, enslave, incorporate, drive out, or exterminate their inhabitants on lands coveted by states. That has left bands and tribes in modern times confined to areas unattractive or poorly accessible to state settlers (such as the Kalahari Desert inhabited by the !Kung, the African equatorial forests of the Pygmies, the remote areas of the Amazon Basin left to Native Americans, and New Guinea left to New Guineans).
Why, as of the year of Columbus’s first trans-Atlantic voyage of 1492, did people live in different types of societies in different parts of the world? At that time, some peoples (especially Eurasians) were already living under state governments with writing, metal tools, intensive agriculture, and standing armies. Many other peoples then lacked those hallmarks of civilization, and Aboriginal Australian and !Kung and African Pygmies then still preserved many ways of life that had characterized all of the world until 9000 BC. How can we account for such striking geographic differences?
A formerly prevalent belief, still held by many individuals today, is that those regionally different outcomes reflect innate differences in human intelligence, biological modernity, and work ethic. Supposedly, according to that belief, Europeans are more intelligent, biologically advanced, and hard-working, while Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans and other modern band and tribal peoples are less intelligent, more primitive, and less ambitious. However, there is no evidence of those postulated biological differences, except for the circular reasoning that modern band and tribal peoples did continue to use more primitive technologies, political organizations, and subsistence modes and were therefore assumed to be biologically more primitive.
Instead, the explanation for the differences in types of societies coexisting in the modern world depends on environmental differences. Increases in political centralization and social stratification were driven by increases in human population densities, driven in turn by the rise and intensification of food production (agriculture and herding). But surprisingly few wild plant and animal species are suitable for domestication to become crops and livestock. Those few wild species were concentrated in only about a dozen small areas of the world, whose human societies consequently enjoyed a decisive head start in developing food production, food surpluses, expanding populations, advanced technology, and state government. As I discussed in detail in my earlier book
Approaches, causes, and sources
In the preceding section we discussed differences among traditional societies that we can relate systematically to differences in population size and population density, means of obtaining food, and the environment. While the general trends that we discussed do exist, it would be folly to imagine that everything about a society can be predicted from material conditions. Just think, for example, about the cultural and political differences between French and German people, not obviously related to the differences between France’s and Germany’s environments, which are in any case modest by the standards of worldwide environmental variation.
