The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (18 page)

Prisoners were often beheaded, but they were rarely tortured. An exception was made for a Lhota warrior named Chakarimo, who was captured by the Angami after he had speared 30 of them. The Angami war leader had Chakarimo tied to a tree and let young boys cut small pieces off him. He reportedly died after piece 312.

A pioneering account of the Angami was written by
John
H. Hutton, who lived among them prior to World War I. Hutton discovered that the Angami cosmos was filled with spirits, the most important of whom was Kepenopfü. The creator of all living beings, Kepenopfü dwelt in the sky, where most successful people would go after death. There were spirits of fertility, spirits who delivered game to the hunter, and malevolent spirits who brought death. Individual humans were protected by lesser spirits.

The Angami believed that they were descended from two brothers who had emerged from the earth. These brothers gave rise to two groups of human descendants, who sound like opposing moieties. Because Thevo, the older brother, emerged first, his descendants were allowed to begin eating before the descendants of Thekrono, the younger brother. This myth provided justification for a principle with which we are already familiar: whenever a clan or lineage splits in two, one division is considered senior, the other junior.

Angami men, like their New Guinea counterparts, had two pathways to renown. Both paths were related to the acquisition of life force. One could become a
pehuma,
or war leader, by supplying one’s village with life force in the form of enemy heads. Before colonial rule, this path produced legendary pehumas whose names were widely remembered, and some of these leaders managed to pass on their positions to their first-born sons.

An alternative pathway was to become a
kemovo,
a kind of “holy man” or “ritual sponsor,” of which there might be two or more in each village. One became a kemovo by first amassing wealth and then distributing it through a series of lavish ritual feasts, each more impressive than the one before it. The message sent by these feasts was that the would-be kemovo had acquired a surplus of life force that he was willing to share.

Each ritual feast had its own Angami name, but all could be lumped under the borrowed Assamese term
genna.
The keys to a genna were (1) dances and music that created an emotional response; (2) abundant meat from the host’s sacrificial pigs and cattle; and (3) unlimited quantities of
zu,
or rice beer, which enhanced the awe-inspiring ritual experience.

The entire sequence of gennas could take years. First and easiest was the
kreghagi
feast, which could be held by anyone who had a surplus of rice. The host was blessed by a ritual expert, then fed his guests by sacrificing a cow. Afterward the host was entitled to adopt a special hairstyle.

More challenging were later feasts like the
thesa,
at which hundreds of pounds of rice were converted to beer, and the guests were fed the meat of four bulls and two pigs. This ceremony entitled the host to decorate his house in a special way. At the even grander
lesü
feast, the host needed to amass three times as much rice as for the thesa; in addition, he had to sacrifice ten bulls and five pigs. Afterward he could decorate his house with special wooden horns and assume the title of “house-horn-bearer.”

Only a man who had performed lesü was entitled to move on to
chisü,
or “stone pulling,” the month-long feast that would make him a kemovo. For this ritual he provided twelve bulls, eight pigs, and four times the quantity of rice, most of it converted to beer. The climax of the chisü involved hauling a huge stone to the host’s village and setting it up as a monolith to commemorate his climactic genna.

For this spectacle the host turned to all the young men of his clan, all the alumni of his men’s house, and perhaps even his entire village. It was not unusual for 50 clansmen to turn out for this task, and when an entire village was involved, the crew could grow to several hundred men. All stone pullers had to be in ceremonial dress, which could include dyed cotton kilts, huge necklaces of conch shell beads, armbands of brass and elephant ivory, and the plumes of a tropical bird called the hornbill.

To be of value the monument had to come from a distant quarry. The Lhota Naga placed the stone on a heavy litter of wooden poles that could be carried by six rows of men, 12 per row. The Angami, who hauled even larger stones, levered the monument onto a sledge of heavy logs. Wooden rollers were placed in the path of the sledge and hundreds of men, using strong ropes made of tropical vines, pulled it along jungle trails for hours while singing aloud. All knew that at the end of their journey they would be welcomed with gallons of rice beer.

At the host’s village, participants dug a hole and tilted the sledge until the base of the stone slid into it. Once the monument was upright, it became the abode of important spirits and would keep alive the memory of the host’s chisü (see
Figure 10
). He could now call himself a holy man.

Instead of receiving an ordinary citizen’s burial, the kemovo would now be buried in his village’s
tehuba,
or sitting circle. This was a waist-high platform 30 to 45 feet in diameter, built over the grave of the village’s first kemovo and including the burials of most later kemovos.

The chisü ritual took an earlier premise—that rocky landmarks were the abode of spirits—and added the premise that a host who created such a landmark within his village had demonstrated exceptional life force. Through the circularity of Naga logic, a host’s good relationship with the spirit world also explained his ability to accumulate the food necessary for a chisü.

Like the linear ritual complexes of Mt. Hagen, the stone monuments of the Naga provide a cautionary tale for archaeologists. Many of the chisü stones overlap in weight with the carved monuments of Mexico’s Olmec, Colombia’s San Agustín culture, and even the ancient Maya—three societies thought to have very powerful hereditary elites. Naga monuments thus warn us not to underestimate societies whose leadership was based solely on achievement.

FIGURE 10.
   One hundred years ago the Angami Naga of Assam had several routes to achieving renown. For example, one could become a
kemovo,
or “holy man,” by amassing the surplus necessary to sponsor a series of increasingly lavish rituals. The final ritual in the sequence was a month-long celebration culminating in
chisü,
or “stone pulling.” As many as 50 to 100 men were rewarded for hauling a multiton stone from a distant quarry to the host’s village, where it served both as the abode of important spirits and a monument to the host’s achievements. Here we see a chisü stone erected by the village of Maram.

THE GOALS AND LIMITS OF ACHIEVED RENOWN

The societies discussed in this chapter allowed ambitious men to achieve inequality in prestige but limited their actual authority. War leaders commanded respect until enemies took
their
heads, increasing the life force of a rival village. A Big Man commanded respect until someone gave him a gift he could not match. The kemovo became a holy man, but sooner or later someone would come along to haul a bigger stone, sacrifice more bulls, and provide more beer.

It is significant that leaders in achievement-based societies wanted very much for their sons to succeed them. As role models, of course, they had shown their sons how to achieve renown. They could not, however, do what Tlingit and Nootka chiefs did regularly—confer titles and privileges on their offspring. Moreover, surrounding every man of achievement were ambitious young rivals who were determined to become Big Men, war leaders, or holy men themselves.

Achievement-based societies became very common once agriculture had arisen. To demonstrate this we will focus our attention on one of achievement-based society’s most widespread institutions: the men’s house, or clan house. We will look first at the ritual houses of several living societies. We will then show that similar houses were built by ancient societies in Mexico, Peru, and the Near East. By so doing, we are following a principle we spoke of earlier: when one sees people doing the same thing at 8000
B.C.
and
A.D.
1900, one probably has identified a behavior that arose repeatedly in world history.

SEVEN

The Ritual Buildings of Achievement-Based Societies

Foragers often create ritual space by arranging their shelters in an oval. The enclosed area can then be used for feasting or dancing, sometimes around a communal hearth.

Farming villages, for their part, often formalize ritual space by creating a building to house it. In aboriginal North America that building could be a sweat house, a kiva, or a ceremonial lodge. We will see examples of those buildings in the chapters that follow. In other regions the ritual building might be a men’s house.

The ground plans of men’s houses vary considerably. Some are circular, and others are rectangular. Some have benches on which men can sit and some have beds or platforms on which they can sleep. Architectural diversity can be present even within the same ethnic group.
Figure 11
shows us the ground plans of Rengma Naga men’s houses from early twentieth-century Assam. Note that the men’s house of the eastern Rengma had large communal sleeping platforms, while that of the western Rengma had rows of beds. As we will see later, many prehistoric men’s houses had sitting or sleeping benches.

In this chapter we look at three different types of men’s houses used by Old World societies. Each of these buildings reflects a slightly different route to achieved inequality. Each type of men’s house is also potentially identifiable in the archaeological record. Its presence can therefore provide a date for some of the world’s first achievement-based societies.

The three societies we look at are representative of, but do not exhaust, the variation in men’s houses. One society, the Ao Naga of Assam, had a dormitory-style men’s house in which every young man slept while he learned the rules of Ao society. Once he embarked on his campaign of self-promotion, a prominent Ao man could count on the support of the residents and alumni of his men’s house.

The second society we examine is that of the Mountain Ok of New Guinea. Rather than one large men’s house that was open to all, the Ok built a cluster of smaller houses accessible only to initiated men. One had to earn his right to enter, a process that weeded out “rubbish men.” In our opinion societies with exclusionary men’s houses had the potential to create greater differences in social inequality. They had, after all, already allowed a small number of men to monopolize key ritual information.

FIGURE 11.
   One hundred years ago, the Rengma Naga of Assam built men’s houses in which all the village’s young men slept during their formative years. The men’s house of the eastern Rengma, seen above, was 14 by 20 feet (excluding the porch) and had large sleeping platforms. The men’s house of the western Rengma, seen below, was 30 feet long (excluding the porch) and had rows of beds.

Finally we look at the Siuai of Bougainville, the largest of the Solomon Islands. Among the Siuai the men’s house was built by a Big Man who had allegedly been chosen for prominence by a demon. The Big Man provided blood to the demon, who both protected him and was nourished by him. Such a men’s house, in our opinion, had the greatest potential for being converted to an actual temple. Unlike the typical men’s house, where initiates sat around on benches and celebrated their ancestors, the Siuai men’s house was considered the favored venue of a powerful supernatural being.

What makes the latter possibility exciting to archaeologists is that in many regions of the world—the Near East, Mexico, and Peru, to name only three—there came a moment when the men’s house gave way to the temple. And that moment was often accompanied by evidence for hereditary inequality.

THE ARICHU OF THE AO NAGA

Like their Angami neighbors, the Ao Naga had an achievement-based society. An ambitious man could rise to prominence by sponsoring a series of increasingly expensive ritual feasts. His clan, as well as the alumni of his men’s house, contributed to these feasts and basked in the reflected glory. For weeks preceding each ritual event, the women of his clan ground the rice that would be turned into beer.