The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (37 page)

The institution of the babakilo is worth examining because it shows us that even the most despotic chief was subject to power sharing. Because the babakilo inherited their position, it was impossible for the chief to replace them with his cronies. Members of this council advised the chief on matters of policy. They wore special feather headdresses, paid no tribute, and received elegant funerals. The fact that the chief was merely chosen from among eligible men while his counselors inherited their posts made it easier for the council to steer him away from chiefly abuse.

Another hereditary office was that of military leader. War was very important to the Bemba, because the tsetse fly prevented them from making cattle a source of wealth. They therefore relied on slaves and tribute obtained through conquest. Other sources of wealth were ivory (mainly in the form of elephant tusks), grain, iron, and salt. Richards reveals that, as with so many societies we have examined, war was endemic until stifled by the colonial government.

The Bemba built no impressive temples, but throughout their land they maintained shrines at sacred places. Each shrine was assigned its priests and guardians, who used Luban words in their ceremonies and kept Bemba ritual secret and elitist. This secrecy reinforced the gulf between the Crocodile clan and the lineages of commoners.

The Crocodile clan displayed both a powerful life force that required the maintenance of ritual purity and a commitment to conquest that supported hereditary war leaders. As for the kind of expertise the Polynesians called tohunga, it took several forms among the Bemba. The memorization of Luban words and long lists of past chiefly accomplishments was one skill. Crafts were another, with wood carving, basket weaving, and ironworking being the most important.

Ironworkers had a special role in society, not only because they were the suppliers of weapons and agricultural tools but also because they took iron from the sacred Earth and subjected it to temperatures that no other craftsman could produce. There was therefore something magical about this particular craft.

The Nature of Bemba Inequality

The territory controlled by the chitimukulu would be described by anthropologists as a paramount chiefdom. This term refers to the territory of a rank society with a three-level political hierarchy. At the top level was the paramount chief, who lived in a large permanent village. At the second level of the hierarchy were the mfumus, who commanded entire icalos. At the third level were the subchiefs, who commanded the smaller villages and hamlets that shifted around within each district. Tribute flowed upward from the subchief, to the district chief, to the paramount chief. Orders and policies flowed down the same chain of command.

All paramounts were chosen from a Crocodile clan that could “tear common people apart with their teeth.” The paramount, nevertheless, had to share power with a council of elders, which he could not replace because the elders’ offices were hereditary. Society’s main war leaders also inherited their offices, meaning that they could not be coerced into taking the paramount’s side against the council.

The chief’s authority flowed ultimately from his highly ranked mother. He was expected, however, to demonstrate administrative skill as a district chief before moving up to paramount chief. Although every chitimukulu was a potential despot with the power to mutilate his subjects, even he had to operate within a system of constraints.

Let us consider the differences between the Bemba and the Tikopians. The most highly ranked Tikopian ariki was still only one of four chiefs. Commoners allegorically offered to eat his excrement, but no one was sacrificed at his funeral. He took advice from the elders of commoner lineages and did his best to keep them happy. He could point angrily at a subject or banish a criminal, but he would have been criticized had he used force to mutilate his subjects merely for annoying him.

The paramount chief of the Bemba was the supreme leader of 140,000 people. His potential for the abuse of power was vastly greater than that of a Tikopian ariki. No elder from a commoner clan could have held him in check. Almost certainly for this reason, his society had taken the most important political advisers and war leaders out from under his thumb by making their offices hereditary.

Despite its institutions of power sharing, Bemba society seems to have reached an important threshold. It had so many levels of political hierarchy, and so many categories of personnel who sound like bureaucrats, that we do not believe it would have taken many changes in social logic to transform its chief into a king and its territory from a chiefdom to a kingdom. Later in the book we will see how the Zulu of South Africa, another group of Bantu speakers, did exactly that.

TWELVE

From Ritual House to Temple in the Americas

Some 3,500 years ago, achievement-based societies spread over the highlands of Mexico and Peru. Many of these societies built small ritual structures that resemble the familiar men’s house of the preindustrial world.

Parts of the Third World continued to build men’s houses well into the twentieth century—but not so in Mexico and Peru. In those two countries there came a time when achievement-based society gave way to hereditary rank. Once that happened, society’s leaders began to have temples built. Temples and small ritual houses coexisted for a while, but the latter eventually disappeared.

To be sure, the temples of early rank societies were not like the standardized churches, mosques, and synagogues built by today’s industrialized nations. Some early temples were so nonstandardized that it can be difficult to identify them. In the pages that follow we look at some archaeological examples.

FROM MEN’S HOUSE TO TEMPLE IN OAXACA, MEXICO

The period from 3,200 to 2,900 years ago was one of significant change in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley. More than a dozen lines of evidence indicate the emergence of hereditary rank, comparable to that among the Konyak Naga or the Kachin. This change took place during a period of striking population growth. The number of villages in the valley nearly doubled, from 19 to 40, and the estimated population nearly tripled, from 700 to 2000. In addition, 50 percent of the valley’s population lived in one large village, San José Mogote, which consisted of multiple residential wards scattered over 150 acres.

Privileged families at San José Mogote engaged in several behaviors seen in rank societies elsewhere. They artificially deformed their children’s heads to make their aristocratic ancestry clear and buried sumptuary goods with elite children. Among those goods were pottery vessels with carved motifs of Earth or Sky. Recall that chiefly Kachin families claimed a special relationship with the supreme earth spirit Shadip and the supreme sky spirit Madai. Oaxaca villagers seem to have had a comparable Earth/Sky dichotomy. They depicted both of these celestial spirits in their most dramatic or “angry” forms—Earth as Earthquake and Sky as Lightning. Such carved vessels were also buried with elite adult men, but not with adult women. This fact makes it likely that the children buried with Earth or Sky vessels were the sons of highly ranked parents.

Sumptuary goods included mirrors of polished iron ore. Most iron came from outcrops within a day’s walk of San José Mogote, and the bulk of its conversion into mirrors was done by craftspeople living in one residential ward. Although most mirrors were worn by (or buried with) local men and women, iron objects from Oaxaca were also traded to chiefly centers in neighboring regions.

While iron-ore mirrors seem to have been restricted to chiefly families, other valuables such as jadeite/serpentinite, mica, and marine shell were not. This situation may be analogous to the pattern in Colombia’s Cauca Valley, where gold was accumulated not only by “nobles by blood” but also by “nobles by command” and “nobles by wealth.” The elite at San José Mogote wore more jadeite/serpentinite and mother-of-pearl ornaments than anyone else, but smaller amounts were worn by people of lesser rank.

A cemetery discovered at Santo Domingo Tomaltepec, a three-acre village southeast of San José Mogote, reveals the way elite and nonelite men were treated at death. There were more than 60 graves in the cemetery, and because some held more than one person, the number of skeletons was close to 80. There were many paired burials of men and women, indicating that some couples were laid to rest as husband and wife rather than as individuals. In the case of one couple, the man had a bowl carved with Lightning motifs and the woman had an iron-ore mirror. There were also complete skeletons accompanied by the incomplete remains of others, suggesting that some of the deceased had been exhumed and reburied with a spouse or relative.

A group of six middle-aged men in the cemetery stood out as different. All were so tightly flexed that we suspect they had been wrapped in bundles. These men represented only 12.7 percent of the cemetery but were buried with 50 percent of the pottery bearing Lightning motifs and 88 percent of the jadeite/serpentinite beads. Most of the exhumed and reburied skeletal parts had been added to the graves of these six men, suggesting that several of them may have had more than one wife. Almost certainly these were the leaders of the village, whose tightly bundled remains had been kept around for a time, honored, and perhaps even dried or smoked in some way before their burial.

During this period the people of San José Mogote were building both men’s houses and temples. This was, in other words, a period of transition from one type of ritual building to another, reminiscent of the situation we saw on Tikopia.

Men’s houses remained simple one-room buildings, plastered with lime. Because San José Mogote had grown so large and was so clearly divided into residential wards, it was easier than before to see that each ward built its own men’s house.

The main locus for women’s ritual remained the household. There, women performed a traditional Zapotec form of divination, casting beans or corn kernels into shallow, water-filled basins and reading the floating seeds the way fortune-tellers read tea leaves. Women also made hundreds of small ceramic figurines of the ancestors, providing a tangible venue to which ancestral spirits could return. These figurines were sometimes arranged in scenes, presumably to be addressed, ritually “fed,” and asked to intercede with higher spirits on behalf of their descendants.

The figurines also seem to reflect social rank. A minority depict men seated in what appear to be positions of authority. These seated men were sometimes shown with cranial deformation, filed teeth, jadeite ear spools, and other ornaments. Archaeologists have also recovered miniature versions of the kinds of four-legged stools on which men of chiefly descent probably sat. A much larger number of figurines, however, showed people in postures of deference or obeisance, standing with arms folded across their chests. In one figurine scene, a seated male authority figure was placed atop three obeisant figures. The scene reminds us of some Panamanian graves, where the chief was buried in a seated position above a layer of subordinates.

One of the innovations of this time period was the temple. This building was raised above the level of the village on a pyramidal earthen platform, unlike anything associated with a men’s house. The outer casing of each platform was a masonry wall of stones, carefully fitted together without mortar. The internal structure consisted of earthen fill reinforced with adobe walls. The temple itself was a perishable building of pine posts, cane walls coated with clay daub, a thatched roof, and a burnished clay floor. The first temples were nonstandardized, and the stairs ascending the platforms were narrow and single-file.

An unexpected clue to the size of the territory controlled by the chiefs of San José Mogote was found among the stones of one temple platform. Bedrock at the site was volcanic tuff, and most of the stones were of that raw material. A number of stones, however, were boulders of limestone or travertine, types of rock available near villages three to five miles away. It would seem that the leaders of San José Mogote could now call upon the manpower of neighboring villages for the construction of their temples. This was not true of any of the men’s houses, which were likely built by smaller units such as descent groups.

How big a territory might the chief of San José Mogote have controlled? An archaeological survey shows that 12 to 14 smaller villages surrounded San José Mogote, like three-to-five-acre satellites caught in the gravitational pull of a 150-acre sun. The distances involved suggest that the chief’s authority extended outward at least a half-day’s travel.

Chiefly Cycling in Oaxaca

As happened in so many parts of the world, chiefly societies in the Valley of Oaxaca went through cycles of expansion and contraction. Roughly 2,900 years ago, no other village in the valley rivaled San José Mogote in population, number of satellite communities, or size of temples. Over the next two centuries, however, San José Mogote began to experience competition from rival villages. One of these was Huitzo, a community ten miles to the north, which had built its own impressive temple. Another was San Martín Tilcajete, some 20 miles to the south.

It is difficult to assess the extent to which these emerging chiefly centers affected San José Mogote’s control of its resources and satellite villages. One clue can be found in the dwindling amounts of iron ore that were now reaching San José Mogote; it appears that Huitzo denied access to the northernmost iron-ore source, while Tilcajete denied access to the southernmost.

The temple built at Huitzo some 2,800 years ago was as impressive as any at San José Mogote (
Figure 27
). Its underlying pyramidal mound was six feet high and more than 50 feet on a side. Its outer face was of boulders or cobbles set in hard clay, and its interior consisted of earthen fill strengthened with adobe walls. Above this was the temple itself, a building whose thick cane and clay walls rested on an adobe platform. The latter was four feet high and at least 37 feet long, and the temple was reached by a staircase 25 feet wide. This broad staircase would have permitted greater public access than the narrow, single-file stairways seen on earlier buildings.