The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (15 page)

It is likely that Tlingit feasts, like those of the Nootka, escalated after the colonial suppression of warfare. Once, in the eighteenth century, the Tlingit had made 60-foot war canoes and went on raids with spears, daggers, war clubs, and bows and arrows. They wore body armor made from wooden slats and peeked out through slits in protective helmets. The Tlingit took scalps or heads from male enemies and brought women and children back as slaves.

The distinction between achieved prestige and hereditary nobility is an important one. We will refer to it again in the context of agricultural societies, especially those of Southeast Asia and New Guinea. Achieving renown by hosting a feast builds on egalitarian society’s long-standing love of generosity. Turning debtors into servants or slaves builds on society’s long-standing dislike of failure to reciprocate gifts or repay loans. Making the master-servant relationship hereditary dilutes the “personal freedom” of Rousseau’s hypothetical State of Nature. For a slave, that freedom is erased entirely.

The Impact of the Tlingit on Their Egalitarian Neighbors

The Tlingit had two kinds of neighbors. On the coast to the south were the Haida and Tsimshian, who also had hereditary nobles. To the east, beyond a snowcapped cordillera, were foragers speaking Athapaskan languages.

Trade among the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian began as exchanges of gifts. First came gifts between clans of the same moiety, then gifts between opposing moieties, and eventually exchanges with more distant societies. The Tlingit sought native copper from the interior, dentalium from the south, walrus ivory from the north, decorative porcupine quills from the boreal forest, animal furs from the Athapaskans, and slaves wherever they could get them.

The Tlingit understood exactly how to deal with the Haida and Tsimshian because those groups also had nobles, commoners, and slaves. The farther east the Tlingit traveled, however, the more often they encountered egalitarian hunting-and-fishing societies. Their challenge then became the incorporation of egalitarian trading partners into the hierarchical society of the Tlingit. This incorporation changed some Athapaskans dramatically. In the remainder of this chapter we look at three of those Athapaskan groups: the Tutchone, the Tagish, and the Teslin.

The Tutchone of the interior Yukon were the least affected by the Tlingit, and they probably give us our best glimpse of what an unmodified Athapaskan foraging society might have looked like. Tutchone families belonged to clans who reckoned descent in the mother’s line. These clans, in turn, were grouped into opposing moieties. Headmen tended to be skilled hunters and traders who attracted followers but led by example rather than real authority. Despite the fact that sons belonged to their mother’s clan, a headman’s son could succeed his father if everyone agreed.

Two aspects of Tutchone society strike us as noteworthy. First, their system of clans, moieties, bride service, and polygamous headmen reminds us of other foragers with clans, like the Aborigines of central Australia. Second, the fact that the Tutchone held funeral feasts and reckoned descent in the mother’s line suggests that those behaviors may already have been present in the Pacific Northwest before the escalation of inequality.

The Tagish lived in the alpine forests and meadows of the southern Yukon, where they fished in the lakes and rivers, hunted caribou with game drive fences, and trapped fur-bearing animals. Their ancient society, like that of the Tutchone, featured opposing moieties with Athapaskan names, each made up of clans with matrilineal descent. The Tagish were one of the Athapaskan groups to whom the Tlingit sent trading parties.

By the eighteenth century, Euro-American fur traders had reached the coastal Tlingit. One of their first targets was the sea otter, whose fur had long been used to trim the garments of Tlingit nobles. Euro-American trade goods made the Tlingit wealthier, but sea-otter populations were declining by the end of the century. Fortunately, the Tlingit knew that their Tagish and Teslin trading partners had access to the river otter, beaver, mink, fox, marten, and wolverine. It would be key for the Tlingit, however, to prevent the Europeans and Americans from getting at those furs directly.

The Tlingit, therefore, began blocking the trade routes through the cordillera with parties of up to 300 warriors. By the 1850s they controlled all traffic between the Alaskan coast and the Yukon. Tlingit trade partners came into the territory of the Tagish, some taking Tagish wives and others having their daughters marry Tagish men. The bride-price paid to the Tagish included Euro-American trade goods. The bride-price paid to the Tlingit included furs.

Over time, the Tagish changed the names of their moieties to Crow (the inland equivalent of Raven) and Wolf. The most prolific Tagish trappers gave themselves Tlingit names, and their funeral feasts came to resemble potlatches.

Of all their trading partners, however, the people the Tlingit affected the most were the Teslin. Originally the Teslin had lived on the Taku River, a tributary of the Yukon, but they moved to the Yukon headwaters to take advantage of the fur trade. Emulating their trading partners, they learned Tlingit and gave coastal names to their clans and moieties. Some families began claiming high rank as a result of descent from the daughters of Tlingit traders. They fought among themselves over which family had the right to Wolf or Crow/Raven crests. They adopted songs and myths that featured coastal animals never seen in the Yukon. Their funeral feasts became potlatches. They began to keep slaves. Their cosmos became an amalgam of Athapaskan spirits and Tlingit supernaturals. In the words of anthropologist Catherine McClellan, these Athapaskans had become “Inland Tlingit.” The Teslin show us that when egalitarian foragers were ready to adopt rank, they just might model that rank on trading partners who already displayed it.

Such transformations from egalitarian to ranked were based on a first principle of social logic: our trading partners are honorary kinsmen. This is the principle that allows them to enter our territory with impunity. The principle is reinforced when I marry my trading partner’s daughter. Trade, which began as reciprocal exchanges of gifts, then expands to include bride-price transactions. I am now free to emulate my wealthier relatives and even borrow from them in emergencies.

The Inland Tlingit show us that some forms of social inequality, once established in a region, can spread through emulation. We must not, however, forget that the Inland Tlingit do not represent a pristine case. Their economy was partly a product of the fur trade, which was an intrusion of Western culture into the Native American economy.

Nor should we forget that the Tlingit carried on equally intense trade with their coastal neighbors, the Haida and Tsimshian, who were just as highly ranked as the Tlingit. The Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian actually absorbed each other’s shrinking lineages into their own clans and borrowed each other’s heraldic crests on a regular basis. They created a network of circulating luxury goods, for which we will find analogies in the ancient rank societies of Mexico and Peru.

THE LIMITS OF INEQUALITY AMONG FORAGERS

Clanless foragers usually displayed the “personal and anarchic freedom” of which Rousseau wrote. Some foragers with clans, however, eventually came up with ways to take away the freedom of others.

Such is the nature of wild resources that people in one area may be getting enough, while people in a neighboring area are not. Clanless foragers created meat-sharing partnerships, hxaro partnerships, namesake relatives, and other strategies to forge a safety net. The moieties, clans, and lineages of larger-scale foraging societies provided an even larger network of mutual aid. As they grew and divided, however, these social segments sometimes used the principle “We were here first” to distinguish senior and junior lineages.

Just as senior Aranda men were taken more seriously than junior Aranda men, senior lineages tended to be taken more seriously than junior lineages. Just as senior Andaman Islanders could reciprocate with lesser gifts to junior men, the playing field between senior and junior lineages was not always level.

Archaeologists suspect that on the Santa Barbara coast and the Channel Islands and Vancouver Island and the panhandle of Alaska, lineages who could no longer repay their debts were forced to accept a permanently subordinate position. Two routes they could use to curry favor with their patrons were craft production and bravery in combat.

For their part, superior lineages modified their cosmology to attribute their privileges to their ancestors. In the Pacific Northwest they bequeathed those privileges to their children at public feasts, lavishing presents on the guests who witnessed the event. They had, in Rousseau’s words, forced their poor relations to sign a contract accepting inequality in return for food, shelter, and occasional gifts.

How often might hereditary inequality have arisen among prehistoric hunters and gatherers? To answer this question, archaeologists must be able to distinguish between achieved prestige and inherited nobility. As we saw among the Tlingit, both forms of inequality were sometimes on display at the same feast. Prestige accrues to the generous host. Nobility belongs to the child who inherits his father’s titles, crests, and sumptuary heirlooms. As a result, archaeologists pay special attention to children buried with what appear to be symbols of nobility.

Rousseau would have been interested to learn that not all foragers had to adopt agriculture in order to emerge from the State of Nature. Because of a desire to be thought of as superior, some hunter-gatherers manipulated cosmologies, reciprocal exchange, social obligations, wealth transfer, and the subservience of junior lineages to create societies based on hereditary rank.

II

Balancing Prestige and Equality

SIX

Agriculture and Achieved Renown

We can excuse Rousseau for not knowing that some foragers found ways to create hereditary inequality. After all, societies like the Tlingit and Nootka were largely unknown to Europeans in 1753. It is also the case that for most parts of the world, Rousseau was right: not until people had begun to raise crops or animals do we see signs of emerging inequality.

To be sure, even successful agriculture does not always lead to inequality. Many societies remained egalitarian even after thousands of years of farming. Others, as we see in this chapter, allowed modest amounts of achieved renown but still resisted hereditary rank.

Even after rank began to appear, it could not always overcome the widespread desire for a level playing field. There were, as we will see later in this book, societies that oscillated between equality and hereditary rank for decades. To be sure, some of those societies eventually made inequality permanent. They were in the minority when they arose but often, like the Tlingit, had a dramatic impact on their egalitarian neighbors.

WHICH FORAGING SOCIETIES WERE GOOD CANDIDATES FOR AGRICULTURE?

Agriculture is a delayed-return activity, and we suspect that it most often arose among foraging societies with delayed-return economies. By the end of the Ice Age a number of hunter-gatherers were burning wild vegetation to increase its productivity, replanting the excess tubers they had harvested, broadcast-sowing excess seeds, or building fences to drive wild animals into temporary enclosures. Most farming and herding probably began as extensions of those practices. For many foragers, in other words, the first attempts at horticulture may not have felt like a dramatic behavioral change.

On other occasions the introduction of agriculture has been known to trigger significant changes in behavior. In the 1960s the //Gana of the Kalahari region—foragers who lived next door to the !Kung—began raising domestic beans, melons, and goats like their Bantu-speaking neighbors. By the late 1970s anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan had noted the following changes:

  1. The //Gana stopped moving their camps and became virtually sedentary during the rainy season.

  2. Families began to preserve rather than share their meat.

  3. People began to tolerate successful families’ accumulation of food.

  4. Families were allowed to acquire, store, and trade valuables without criticism.

  5. People began to purchase cattle from their Bantu-speaking neighbors.

  6. Polygamous marriage among //Gana men increased to 25 percent, while it remained at 5 percent among their !Kung neighbors.

  7. A man who wanted to marry might have to pay the bride’s family as many as ten goats.

  8. Older men with growing wealth, many of whom had two to three wives, began passing themselves off as “headmen” who spoke for the whole group. Their behavior was tolerated because the former prohibition against accumulating property was beginning to fade.

These behavioral changes show us agriculture’s potential to overcome the egalitarian logic of foragers. We must keep in mind, however, that the //Gana changes took place in the politically altered world of the twentieth century. We must therefore ask whether similar changes followed the adoption of agriculture in the pre-industrial world. For this we turn to the island of New Guinea.

EARLY AGRICULTURE IN NEW GUINEA

We have seen that many foragers of Australia and the Andaman Islands collected wild yams. We now believe that by the end of the Ice Age, some societies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands had begun to encourage yams and other native plants by tending and managing them. Eventually they began to plant them in gardens. This did not happen among the Aborigines of central Australia, who remained hunters and gatherers. It did, however, happen in New Guinea, which had once been connected to Australia by the lowered sea levels of the Ice Age.

New Guinea is the world’s second largest island, covering more than 300,000 square miles. The spine of the island is a snowcapped mountain range flanked by dissected high plateaus. To the north and south of this spine are swampy lowlands covered with tropical forest.

Archaeologists do not agree on the date when the transition from tending to gardening was complete. Nor is it always clear which of the domestic plants were native to New Guinea and which were introduced from mainland Asia by watercraft. Among the key plants were the sago palm, whose pith can be made into flour; taro, a relative of the calla lily, whose starchy root is edible; the Asian yam, another plant with a starchy root; the pandanus or kara nut plant; plantains and bananas; and the familiar coconut palm.