The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (33 page)

Let us begin with Niaunu, where there were at least four levels of hereditary rank. People of the highest category were known as
wangham
(“great Angs”); those of the second rank were
wangsa
(“small Angs”). People of intermediate rank were called
wangsu.
At the bottom of the hierarchy were
wangpeng
(“commoners”), debt slaves, and captives. Because Niaunu was a thendu village, people of high rank could be recognized immediately by their dress and sumptuary goods. Only elite women could wear their hair long and use red-and-white-striped skirts. Brass earrings, bracelets, and bangles were widespread. Highly ranked men received elaborate facial tattoos, while those in thenkoh villages did not.

It was important for chiefs to preserve the nobility of their line through strategic marriage. Only the union of two people of great Ang rank could produce a future chief. When a great Ang took a bride of lower rank, their son became a small Ang, suitable only to be the subchief at a minor, tribute-paying village. A great Ang named Nyekpong, who ruled Niaunu village in 1962, had two wives of Ang rank and 24 wives of commoner status.

The chief’s roles were to administer a district with the help of his small Ang subchiefs; to direct the affairs of his own village; to receive tribute in rice, pigs, fish, and water buffalo; to punish criminals; to resolve disputes; and to lead raids against enemies. Chiefs were proud and dignified figures who traveled with a large entourage of bodyguards, followers, and servants. Commoners approached the chief bowing, never looking directly at his face. They cleared his rice fields for him and helped him build his house, which could be 360 feet long. Inside the house were halls as elegant as those of the men’s house and a carved bench on which the chief alone could sit.

When thendu, or chiefly villages, cycled into thenkoh mode, it was usually not because of an egalitarian overthrow like those of the Kachin. A chronic problem for the Konyak was that population growth among commoners outpaced that of Angs. Sometimes the chiefly family of a village literally died out. When this happened, the village either had to settle for a lower-ranked leader or switch its allegiance to a thendu community that could supply it with a new Ang. If no Ang family was available, the rank structure might collapse, returning the village to a more democratic, achievement-based society.

Even when a village obtained a new Ang, that leader might fail to gain the loyalty of his new subjects. In such cases, the unpopular Ang might be ousted with the aid of a rival village. It was prohibited to kill a member of one’s own chiefly lineage, but “hit men” from another group could be paid to do it. This was dangerous work, because the Konyak believed that great Angs possessed magical power.

Fürer-Haimendorf noted that even when a village cycled into thenkoh mode, the rank differences among clans did not completely vanish. They were simply not emphasized by dress or behavior, because now the village had to be run by the leaders of the men’s houses. These men’s houses continued to collect the same tribute from satellite villages that had once been paid to the chief. These ongoing tribute payments were justified on the grounds that the satellite villages were using land that had once belonged to the parent village.

Thenkoh villages also revived an institution of autonomous village society: the prestige-building “feast of merit.” Ambitious men sacrificed mithan cattle or water buffalo and supplied their guests with quantities of rice beer. Hosts also paid gangs of men to haul massive slit-gongs to their village, where they were kept in a special shed.

Villages with a great Ang chief did not need feasts of merit, because everyone’s rank was determined at birth. The chief himself did host spectacular feasts, but their purpose was simply to reaffirm his greatness. An Ang might arrange for the hauling of a massive slit-gong, but it was delivered to his house rather than to a public shed.

What we see in the thendu-thenkoh cycle, therefore, is an interesting mix of institutions from achievement-based and rank societies: chiefs, sumptuary goods, and tribute payments sometimes coexisted with men’s houses and feasts of merit. Slit-gongs would be hauled to a public shed or to a chief’s house, depending on a village’s stage in the cycle. Villages without a great Ang might ask their neighbors for one, only to hire hit men if he did not work out. As we will see in subsequent chapters, the archaeological record provides evidence for similar mixtures of institutions during periods of transition.

Head-Hunting and Territorial Expansion

Like all the other Naga we have examined, the Konyak went on head-hunting trips. Every man owned a machete-like
dao
for clearing brush, slaughtering cattle, and beheading enemies. The Konyak went to war with five-foot spears, skull-cracking clubs, and shields of water buffalo hide. Human heads had powerful magic that enhanced the fertility of crops and the prosperity of the village. Men who had taken heads received special tattoos and were allowed to wear a brass pendant in the form of a trophy head (
Figure 26
).

Unlike the Marind headhunters of New Guinea, who spared young women, the Konyak had only one rule: As long as the victim was old enough to possess teeth, his or her head was fair game. People were thus beheaded regardless of sex, age, or rank. Warriors returning to the village with enemy heads were greeted enthusiastically, bathed, and honored with dances. The heads were put in a basket near the slit-gong, so that they could be “fed” rice and beer at all feasts. Eventually they were hung from posts in the men’s house.

Because of the frequency of raids, the Konyak often placed their villages on defensible ridges with a reliable water supply. Some were enclosed by a palisade with a gate and had a bamboo lookout tower. In hilltop settings, residential wards might be separated by deep ravines. Panjis, or sharpened bamboo spikes, were used to mine the approaches to the village.

The villages, which varied from 50 to 250 houses in size, had carefully locked granaries of rice and millet. The villagers built circular dance platforms and erected stone monuments near the men’s houses. Outside the village was the cemetery, where rotting corpses were exposed on platforms and bleached skulls were piled in sandstone basins. These skulls had been wrenched from the body after six days of decomposition in the tropical heat, cleaned and emptied, and kept where they could be given their usual share of rice and beer for three more years. Konyak treatment of ancestors’ skulls recalls the behavior of villagers at ancient Near Eastern sites such as Jericho, Ain Ghazal, and Çayönü.

When a great Ang died, his corpse was allowed to decompose in a wooden coffin rather than the usual bamboo bier. After cleaning, his skull had its orbits filled with white tree pith to resemble eyes. A craftsman then painted the skull with the same tattoos the great Ang had worn in life and glued some of his hair to the skull with resin. The remains of mighty warrior chiefs were always buried with their weapons. They would need them because while en route to Yimbu, the land of the dead, they would have to confront the spirits of the men they had killed.

FIGURE 26.
   During the 1930s the Konyak Naga of Assam cycled between (1) egalitarian society with achievement-based leadership and (2) rank society with hereditary chiefs. When the village of Longkhai was in its
thendu,
or rank mode, it featured both inherited and achieved prestige. On the left we see a Longkhai hereditary chief dancing in ceremonial costume, brandishing a spear and a machete-like
dao.
On the right we see a Longkhai commoner whose prowess in battle had won him the right to wear special tattoos and a pendant in the form of a trophy head.

Konyak warfare owed its origins to head-hunting. Hereditary rank, however, provided raiding with another goal: territorial expansion. Fürer-Haimendorf reports that 12 generations before his 1962 visit, the thendu village of Niaunu was founded by a great Ang chief named Maipupa. Maipupa then declared Niaunu the “parent” of four other villages, each of which would in the future be ruled by men of his chiefly lineage.

One of the four villages that Maipupa claimed as a satellite was Mintong, a community ruled by a rival Ang lineage. Maipupa sent a force of Niaunu warriors to raid Mintong. They wiped out the chief’s family (including the children who were his heirs), slaughtered most other members of highly ranked clans, and killed at least half the commoners. Maipupa then installed a new chief, drawn from the junior branch of his own lineage.

The use of raiding for the increase of chiefly territory became a strategy of societies with hereditary rank, virtually whenever and wherever they arose. Once seen only as a means to obtain enemy heads and settle scores, raiding had been turned into a tool of political expansion. Warfare would never be the same again.

THE CREATION OF HEREDITARY RANK

There is no substitute for eyewitness accounts of inequality in the making. The struggles of the Manambu, Kachin, and Konyak Naga put a human face on the creation of rank.

Those struggles show us that hereditary inequality is not something that appears spontaneously once population has increased, or agriculture has produced a surplus, or people have accumulated lots of shells and pigs. Inequality is orchestrated. At the same time, it is not enough for one segment of society to demand privileges for itself and its heirs. Would-be nobles need leverage, an advantage of some kind, or their privileges will be taken back by the rest of society. That is presumably why so many societies remained achievement-based for thousands of years.

When did evidence of hereditary rank first appear in prehistoric farming societies? This is a difficult question for archaeologists to answer, since they rely on inference rather than direct observation. Making their task more difficult is the fact that many prehistoric societies combined both inherited and achieved inequality. This fact forces archaeologists to ask whether the unequal treatment they detect could have resulted from a lifetime of accomplishment or was more likely someone’s birthright.

That said, we believe that we can see signs of hereditary rank in Mesopotamia between 7,300 and 7,000 years ago, and in Peru and Mexico between 3,200 and 3,000 years ago. We shall present the evidence later in this book.

We have used the building of men’s houses as an indicator of village societies where leadership was based on achievement. This enables us to use the decline of the men’s house and the rise of the temple as an indicator of societies with some degree of hereditary leadership. In the societies we have examined, the transition from the men’s house to the temple seems to have been associated with the decreasing importance of ordinary people’s ancestors and the increasing importance of the celestial spirits in the chief’s genealogy.

ELEVEN

Three Sources of Power in Chiefly Societies

We have seen that agricultural villagers do not surrender their equality without a fight. No sooner does one social segment achieve elite status than its privilege is challenged, forcing it to resume its quest for supremacy. Cycling between ranked and unranked was probably common in the preindustrial world. Eventually, however, the leadership roles in some societies became hereditary in perpetuity.

One part of the world where hereditary rank flourished was the South Pacific. To be sure, most Polynesian islands were colonized by people from places that already featured some degree of inequality. On a number of archipelagoes, however, the level of inequality continued to escalate after the first canoes arrived.

Anthropologist Irving Goldman once took a close look at 18 Polynesian societies. He succeeded in identifying three widely shared sources of chiefly power. All Goldman intended to do was break down hereditary Polynesian leadership into its component parts. Afterward, by recombining those parts in different ways, he hoped to account for the variety in Polynesian societies. As it turned out, however, Goldman gave us a way of comparing rank societies worldwide.

The central concept of chiefly power was a life force the Polynesians called
mana.
Goldman defines mana as an odorless, colorless, invisible, supernatural energy that pervades people and things. To be sure, all the societies we have examined so far believed in a life force and had ways of accumulating or losing it. In Polynesia, however, people of high rank were automatically born with more mana.

The person with the largest supply of mana was the chief. He had so much life force that he was described as
tapu,
a term from which we get the English word “taboo.” Anyone or anything tapu was approached with extreme caution. Some Polynesian chiefs had so much mana that by touching them inappropriately, one could receive a jolt akin to being Tasered.

A second source of power in Polynesia was
tohunga,
a term usually translated as “expertise.” Tohunga could refer to administrative or diplomatic skill, ritual skill, or craftsmanship. While innate talent was certainly involved, individuals could increase their expertise through education, training, or apprenticeship. Sometimes a chief would provide incentives to the craftsmen who produced his sumptuary goods.