The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (20 page)

Oliver watched a Big Man named Kuiaka create his own kaposo in the late 1930s. It took 85 men 3,600 man-hours to build it, and Kuiaka paid for it with 18 pigs, masses of steamed taro, and the milk of 2,000 coconuts. In olden days such a men’s house would have been consecrated by beheading a man from an enemy community and keeping his skull in the clubhouse.

Critical features of the Siuai men’s house were its nine to ten wooden slit-gongs, ranging from three feet long and one foot in diameter to 15 feet long and five feet in diameter. Each gong, hollowed out of a tree trunk, was given a different name and produced a different tone. The largest gongs weighed many tons, and their procurement was a feat equivalent to the stone-pulling of the Naga.

Oliver witnessed the delivery of one immense tree trunk, a task in which 200 men participated (
Figure 13
). They cut a 25-foot-wide trail through the forest, destroying valuable coconut palms for which they would have to pay. Men from several hamlets, using ropes and sledges, struggled for days to transport the giant log across rivers and swamps. They were paid with pork and coconut milk, but only after the demon had drunk deeply.

The death of any mumi was attributed to witchcraft. For him there was no burial in a place of honor, as there was for an Angami Naga holy man. Because of his close association with the demon, the mumi was seen as brimming with black magic. He could pass on neither his wealth nor his prestige to his son. He and his accumulated shell valuables would be cremated, out of fear that contact with them would cause illness.

ACHIEVED INEQUALITY AND THE MEN’S HOUSE

In each of the three societies we have examined, the relationship of the men’s house to the sources of achieved inequality was different. The arichu of the Ao Naga was open to every boy; sleeping there conferred no prestige. A man began his pursuit of renown only later, after he had married and moved out and could use his wives’ labor to accumulate wealth for a feast. At this point, however, he could count on the support of current and former members of his men’s house.

Among the Mountain Ok, on the other hand, simply being allowed into the katiam was a source of prestige. It meant that one had been initiated into a small group of ritual leaders, an honor afforded to only one in five men. Ok men’s houses were smaller than those of the Naga, and owing to their different ritual functions there could be as many as four in use at a time.

Finally, among the Siuai, the kaposo was strongly associated with the Big Man who paid to have it built, just as an Angami Naga stone monument was associated with the man who paid to have it set up. Inside the kaposo lived a demon that drank pig’s blood and protected its favorite Big Man with black magic, magic so powerful that even a deceased mumi’s shell valuables had to be burned. The mumi’s reputation reflected a premise that we also see in societies with hereditary nobles: Our leader has a closer relationship to the supernatural world than the rest of us.

Let us close with the limitations of leadership in this chapter’s three societies. Their leaders had prestige but no actual political power. They could pay people to build men’s houses but not order them to do so. Most importantly, they could not pass on their prestige to their sons. The latter were forced to earn it on their own.

EIGHT

The Prehistory of the Ritual House

At the start of the twentieth century, village societies with achievement-based leadership were among the most common in the world. They were remarkably stable societies, made up of descent groups that exchanged brides and gifts, honored their ancestors, considered everyone equal at birth, yet threw their support behind gifted kinsmen who sought to achieve renown.

Such societies were also widespread in prehistory; we probably all have ancestors who lived in one. Once you know what to look for, you can identify them in the archaeological records of the Near East, Egypt, Central and South America, North America, and Africa. Achievement-based societies became common as soon as each of those regions had adopted agriculture and village life.

When did the first achievement-based village societies appear? Perhaps 10,000 years ago in the Near East, 4,500 years ago in the Andes, and 3,500 years ago in Mexico. No two of these regions were exactly alike, but all three had a series of recognizable behaviors in common. One of those behaviors was the building of ritual venues, some of which were almost certainly men’s houses.

As we have seen, men’s houses came in many varieties. They could be built by Big Men, clans, or entire villages. They could be inclusive dormitories or places for an exclusive few. Ancestors’ remains might be kept in them, as well as enemies’ heads, since men’s houses often played a role in turning youths into warriors; this could make the men’s house the target of an enemy attack. Such ritual buildings were typical of societies where prestige was based on leadership in raiding, head-hunting, trade, and exchange, or the underwriting of ritual feasting, stone monument pulling, and public construction.

In this chapter we consider three regions, some of whose early ritual buildings displayed many features of men’s houses: benches for sitting or sleeping, curated skulls and skeletal parts, sunken floors, white plastered surfaces, or other attributes not shared with residences. We begin in the Near East because it provides our oldest examples.

FROM FORAGING TO ACHIEVEMENT-BASED VILLAGE SOCIETY IN THE NEAR EAST

During the peak cold of the Ice Age, 20,000 years ago, many of the higher mountains of the Near East were covered by treeless steppe. The valley of the Jordan River, however, was a warm refuge. One of the landmarks of this valley was the brackish lake called the Sea of Galilee, which lies more than 600 feet below sea level. The slopes surrounding the lake supported a Mediterranean parkland of oak, pistachio, almond, fig, and olive trees.

On the southwest shore of the lake lay a prehistoric camp that Israeli archaeologists have called Ohalo II. The foragers of Ohalo lived in shelters made of branches and thatch, not unlike the conical huts of the Hadza and !Kung. Some shelters included beds of grass, and there were hearths outdoors.

The foragers of 20,000 years ago were harvesting more than 140 varieties of wild plants. In contrast to the bulb and tuber collectors of the Nile embayments, the occupants of this Mediterranean parkland concentrated on high-calorie nuts and sugary fruits. They harvested acorns, almonds, and pistachios, wild olives, and the fruits of the wild fig, grape, and raspberry. At least 20 percent of the plants in their archaeological refuse, however, were the seeds of wild grasses that other hunter-gatherers might have ignored. Half of these seeds were of bromegrass, not the most appetizing of foods. The remaining seeds were of alkali grass, creeping foxtail, and four varieties of wild cereal grasses.

Two of the cereal grasses—wild barley and emmer wheat—were the ancestors of Mesopotamia’s most important future crops. The stage was therefore set for a process analogous to the raising of sago, taro, yams, and plantains in ancient New Guinea: first a period of intense exploitation of wild cereals, and then the cultivation of wheat and barley.

When the Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago, conditions for the growth of cereals were improving over the entire Near East. Rising temperatures allowed oaks, pistachios, and large-seeded grasses to spread to higher altitudes. Glaciers melted, sea levels rose, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the world’s atmosphere increased from 180 to 280 parts per million, a 50 percent increase in just a few thousand years. Since plants grow better at this higher carbon dioxide level, it was a good time to experiment with agriculture.

At least some of the early seed collectors arranged their huts in a circle or oval, like the Basarwa or the Andaman Islanders. One of the clearest examples comes from the site of M’lefaat in northern Iraq. M’lefaat lay 950 feet above sea level on a tributary of the Tigris River, 20 miles from the city of Mosul. Ten thousand years ago, the foragers of M’lefaat cleared an area roughly 300 feet long and 200 feet wide and covered it with hard-packed clay. On this surface they laid out ten huts, surrounding an oval area that could have been used for dances or other ritual activities (
Figure 14, top
). Huts varied in size from 16 to 26 feet in diameter, and there were differences among them in stone tools. These differences suggest that the occupants of each hut—male, female, married, unmarried—varied as widely as those of the Basarwa huts shown in
Figure 2
. The foragers at M’lefaat relied on a wild cereal called goat-face grass, along with smaller amounts of wild barley, wheat, and rye. They also collected pistachios and lentils and hunted gazelles.

Let us now look at the well-studied Natufian people of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, who from 12,000 to 10,000 years ago made the collection of wheat and barley the centerpiece of their economy. To harvest grain, the Natufians made sickles by inserting flint blades into bone or wooden handles. To store it, they wove baskets and created pits waterproofed with lime plaster. To turn the grain into porridge, they ground it in mortars of stone.

The Natufians soon learned that wild cereals ripen in different months at different altitudes. At sea level they ripen in late April; at 2,000 to 2,500 feet they mature in mid-May; at 4,500 feet they ripen in early June. By starting their harvest at sea level and moving steadily higher, foragers could lengthen the season of availability. The most permanent-looking Natufian settlements were at lower elevations, where their refuse included the remains of waterfowl that winter in the Near East. In the higher mountains they sometimes occupied caves. Let us follow them through a series of camps.

In the cliffs of Mt. Carmel, only two miles from the Mediterranean Sea, lies the Cave of el-Wad. Here the Natufians built shelters in the mouth of the cave and terraced the slope below it so that more could be added. In addition to having portable grinding stones, they hollowed seed-grinding basins into the living rock of the cliff. They harvested grain with sickles, used bows and arrows to hunt gazelles and deer, made bone harpoons for fishing, and whittled gorgets to snare unsuspecting waterfowl. Like the mammoth hunters of the Ice Age Ukraine, the Natufians also kept domestic dogs.

FIGURE 14.
   As the Ice Age drew to a close, permanent-looking settlements of circular huts began to spread over the whole area from the Mediterranean Sea to the headwaters of the Tigris River. In many cases the huts were arranged around an oval or circular area devoted to ritual activities. Some settlements had buildings that appear to be men’s houses with sitting benches, lime plaster, or carved monoliths. Above we see the archaeological site of M’lefaat, Iraq, where ten huts were laid out on an oval clay floor 300 feet long (dashed line). Below is a probable men’s house from the site of Wadi Hammeh 27, Jordan, which featured a bench and a carved monolith; it was 46 feet in diameter.

The foragers of el-Wad were fond of ornamentation, carving pendants from gazelle bones and producing strands of cowrie shells. Their favorite ornament, however, was dentalium, a tubular seashell that they wore in such quantity that it brings to mind the strings of bride-price beads worn by the Hadza.

There were more than 50 Natufians buried at el-Wad, many of them wearing dentalium. Inside the mouth of the cave were men, women, and children, buried fully extended. Outside on the terraced slope were more men, women, and children, some with their limbs so tightly bent that their kinsmen must have tied them or wrapped their bodies in bundles. Some of these bodies were complete, but others were the partial skeletons of people who had been buried earlier, exhumed, and added to their relatives’ graves.

Under the traces of a poorly preserved shelter were two reburied individuals, one with a head covering, bracelet, and garter of dentalium. Not far away was an adult, likely male, with seven rows of shells around his head; two exhumed and reburied individuals accompanied him. Another man had an elaborate head covering and a garter of dentalium, as well as a necklace of bone and shell beads; he was accompanied by another adult and a child, apparently reburials.

Now let us move higher, up to 800 feet above sea level in the wooded hills of Galilee. Here another group of Natufians camped in the Cave of Hayonim, just eight miles from the sea. Much as they had done at the Cave of el-Wad, the Natufians modified both the chamber of the cave and the slope below.

In the case of Hayonim, the Natufians built more substantial shelters. The floors were sunk into the earth, the lower walls were of stones fitted together without mortar, and the roofs were framed with branches. Five of these circular huts, most of them with hearths, formed a cluster inside the cave. On the terraced slope outside the cave was a structure that may have been used for the storage of grain.

Three generations of Israeli archaeologists, including Ofer Bar-Yosef and Anna Belfer-Cohen, have excavated burials inside and outside the cave. The remains tell an interesting story. An analysis of 17 of the skeletons by anthropologist Patricia Smith revealed that eight, or nearly half, were congenitally lacking the third molar, or wisdom tooth. Such a high frequency of this genetic anomaly suggests that the people of Hayonim were mating within a small gene pool.