The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (23 page)

FIGURE 18.
   The Terrazzo Building at Çayönü, Turkey, measured 40 by 30 feet. It was rectangular, and its corners faced the cardinal directions. This ritual building, where traces of human hemoglobin were found on a heavy circular basin, dates to 8,700 years ago. It may fall near the transition from men’s houses to temples.

Foragers in highland Mexico had an immediate-return strategy. Rainy summers and dry winters forced them to move their camps often. During lean seasons they dispersed into family-size bands of four to six persons. In seasons of abundance families came together to form camps of 25 to 30 persons.

Since pottery had yet to be invented, Mexican foragers used bottle gourds to transport water. Their familiarity with gourds led them to recognize their relatives, the wild squashes, as potentially cultivable plants. Soon they were growing squash for its protein-rich seeds and its useful, gourd-like rind. (Wild squashes have no edible flesh, and some species even have a bad odor.)

It is at this point that we can see major differences between the Natufians of the Near East and the so-called Archaic hunter-gatherers of highland Mexico. Wild wheat, barley, and goat-face grass grew so densely, and provided so much carbohydrate, that they could sometimes support life in villages. Squash and gourds could not support such a sedentary lifestyle.

Little by little, however, the nomadic foragers of highland Mexico began increasing their cultivation of plants. Some 8,000 years ago they added beans, tomatoes, and chile peppers. Most of their domesticates were weedy, resilient plants that could be grown in floodplains or humid canyons. We believe that they were also tending wild fruit trees such as the avocado, whose seeds appear in Archaic archaeological sites.

Two sites in the Valley of Oaxaca, 250 miles south of Mexico City, provide us with evidence that Archaic rituals were held mainly during seasons of abundance, when numerous families camped together. Gheo-Shih was a camp made by an estimated 25 to 30 persons during the summer rainy season, when gourds and squash could be planted and mesquite pods and hackberry fruits could be harvested. It lay on a river floodplain at an elevation of 5,400 feet above sea level. At the base of a cliff a mile and a half to the north, at an elevation of 6,400 feet, lay the small cave of Guilá Naquitz. A family of four to six people camped there during the early dry season, when acorns and piñons were ready for harvest. Both sites were occupied 8,600 years ago.

No evidence of ritual showed up in the cave. Gheo-Shih, however, appears to have been one more example of a camp where foragers arranged their shelters around an open area devoted to ritual. In this open area excavator Frank Hole found a rectangular space 65 feet long and 23 feet wide, delimited by two parallel rows of boulders (
Figure 19, top
). This ritual feature, resembling a small dance ground, had been kept virtually clean; to either side lay abundant debris from Archaic shelters. It is therefore likely that certain rituals were held on an ad hoc basis, whenever enough people lived together to make it worthwhile.

Archaic foragers may already have been performing some of the blood sacrifice for which later societies in Mexico became famous. Our best evidence for such sacrifice comes not from Oaxaca but from Coxcatlán Cave in the Tehuacán Valley, roughly 100 miles northwest of Gheo-Shih. In Level XIV of that cave, the remains of a camp occupied 7,000 years ago, archaeologist Richard MacNeish found two sacrificed and cannibalized children. One decapitated child was wrapped in a blanket and net, its skull lying in a basket nearby. A second decapitated child, also wrapped in a blanket and net, had its skull placed beside it. This skull had been burned or roasted, scraped to remove the flesh, and broken open so that the brains could be eaten. These children were accompanied by nine to ten baskets containing the desiccated remains of plants. This hints that child sacrifice may have accompanied rituals of thanks for a good harvest.

FIGURE 19.
   During the long transition from foraging to agriculture, societies of highland Mexico displayed a number of behaviors in common with societies of the early Near East. One was the practice of arranging huts or shelters around an open area devoted to ritual. Another was the building of men’s houses. Above we see traces of a 65-foot-long ritual area from Gheo-Shih, Mexico, defined by two parallel lines of boulders. Below we see the ruins of a men’s house from San José Mogote, Mexico, with a sitting bench and a pit holding powdered lime. Such buildings averaged 20 by 13 feet.

None of Mexico’s earliest domestic plants were sufficiently productive to modify the nomadic lifestyle of Archaic society or support social units larger than the extended family. That situation would change with the domestication of an unassuming wild grass called teosinte. Teosinte looks superficially like maize, or Indian corn, except it has no cob. It has instead a single row of kernels in very hard shells called fruitcases. Anyone attempting to eat teosinte would either have to crush the fruitcases in a mortar or explode the kernels like popcorn.

Geneticists believe that the race of teosinte first cultivated by Archaic foragers was native to the Balsas River drainage in the Mexican state of Guerrero. The founding population of domestic teosinte may have been no more than 600 plants. Its cultivators took note of a mutation that softened the fruitcase, making it easier to get at the kernels. Another mutation doubled the kernel rows, creating a tiny cob the size of a cigarette filter. Still other mutations improved the taste by increasing the starch and protein content of the kernels. By selecting plants with favorable mutations, early cultivators from Guerrero in the west to Oaxaca in the east developed corn out of teosinte.

Some 6,250 years ago a small group of visitors to Guilá Naquitz Cave discarded tiny corncobs bearing two rows of kernels. By saving the best of each harvest to plant, the Indians of central Mexico encouraged the cobs to grow in length and the kernel rows to double, first to four and then to eight. Archaic gardeners at last had a carbohydrate source that could be stored for months, which allowed them to stay longer in their camps.

As corn became increasingly productive, large rainy-season camps in Mexico began to look more like Natufian settlements. On a stream terrace in Atexcala Canyon, which enters the Tehuacán Valley from the west, Archaic campers created a settlement of oval, semi-subterranean houses. One house, reported by Richard MacNeish and Angel García Cook, had been excavated two feet into the terrace and measured 17 by 13 feet. The roof featured a central ridge pole, supported by two vertical posts set in the floor and a series of smaller posts slanting in from the sides. The builders used stone slabs to reinforce the subterranean part of the house and created a shallow hearth in the floor. Scattered around the house were stone mortars and grinding slabs for reducing kernels to cornmeal. The Atexcala Canyon camp was occupied about 4,500 years ago.

As long-term camps grew into villages, families became less likely to disperse during the dry season. While women, children, and the elderly stayed at home, small groups of men went on hunting trips and returned with deer. One such all-male camp was made in Cueva Blanca, a cave in the Oaxaca mountains not far from Guilá Naquitz.

Despite the changes brought about by agriculture, we can see at Cueva Blanca the same weapon-sharing behavior we saw among the Basarwa hunters of the Kalahari Desert. Each hunter at Cueva Blanca seems to have made his own stylistically distinct flint points for the darts launched by his atlatl, or spear-thrower. He then evidently exchanged darts with his hunting partners, much the way the Basarwa exchanged arrows. Within the cave, a variety of distinctive points was found in each hunter’s work space. There were even dart points left behind in Cueva Blanca that appear to have been made in the Tehuacán Valley, which was a journey of four or five days to the north. This evidence suggests that some system of reciprocal exchange, analogous to hxaro among the !Kung of Botswana, existed in the Mexican Archaic.

Some 3,600 years ago highland Mexico experienced a transition similar to the one we saw earlier at Çayönü and Abu Hureyra. Encampments of semi-subterranean oval huts gave way to permanent villages of rectangular houses. These early Mexican houses had a framework of pine posts, a thatched roof, and walls of cane bundles plastered over with clay. Each house measured 10 by 17 feet, sufficient for a nuclear family, and each was surrounded by an outdoor work area with storage pits and earth ovens. Highland village life was supported by a combination of agriculture, wild plant collecting, the hunting of deer and rabbits, and the raising of dogs as an additional meat source. Villagers now made pottery and were active in the circulation of valuables such as mother-of-pearl.

Like many New Guinea societies, these early villages kept men’s and women’s rituals separate. The household was the woman’s ritual venue. There she made small ceramic figurines of the ancestors that could be arranged in ritual scenes. These figurines probably provided a physical body to which the spirits of the deceased could return, while they were ritually offered sustenance and petitioned for favors. The venue for the men’s ritual was separate from the residences and in some villages included what appear to be men’s houses.

San José Mogote, on the Atoyac River in the Valley of Oaxaca, was a village estimated at 150 to 200 persons. There was a palisade of pine posts on the western edge of the village, and several buildings showed signs of having been burned. This evidence for intervillage raiding suggests a society featuring clans or descent groups and Kelly’s principle of social substitutability.

The men’s houses at San José Mogote averaged 20 by 13 feet, seemingly too small to serve as dormitories; they were more likely to have been restricted to the fully initiated. These ritual venues typically contained two to three times as many posts as ordinary residences. Each was built on a low platform into which its floor was recessed. While the walls were built of cane bundles daubed with clay, the builders had coated the floors and walls with lime plaster. In cases where the walls were preserved to a sufficient height, one could see that some had sitting benches running along them (
Figure 19, bottom
). Each men’s house was given the same orientation, eight degrees north of east, undoubtedly an alignment with ritual significance. Fragments of ceramic masks, presumably parts of ritual costumes, were found in and around the buildings.

Built into the center of the floor was a storage pit filled with finely powdered lime. Based on what we know about later Indian societies in Oaxaca, we suspect that this powdered lime was for mixing with a ritual plant such as wild tobacco, jimson weed, or morning glory. Wild tobacco, finely ground and mixed with powdered lime, was believed to increase men’s physical strength, making it an appropriate drug to use before raids.

During this period most people were buried in the fully extended position. Three burials, however, received different treatment. All were middle-aged men buried in a seated position, their limbs so tightly bent as to suggest that the corpse may have been placed in a bundle and kept around for a time before burial. Two of these seated men were buried near a men’s house. This pattern suggests that, just as in so many achievement-based societies, certain men had earned the right to be treated differently in death.

Because it required so many genetic changes to convert teosinte into truly productive maize, highland Mexico took longer than the Near East to produce sedentary, achievement-based villages with clans or descent groups. Once that type of society had arisen in Mexico, however, it displayed many of the same social institutions as the Near East: men’s houses, ancestor ritual, intervillage raiding, interregional exchanges of shell valuables, and ways of recognizing prominent individuals after death.

Achievement-based societies characterized highland Mexico until roughly 3,150 years ago. At that point the archaeological record begins to show signs of hereditary social inequality. Not long after that, men’s houses were replaced by temples with evidence of blood sacrifice. The implications of this social transformation will be discussed in a later chapter.

FROM FORAGING TO ACHIEVEMENT-BASED VILLAGE SOCIETY IN THE CENTRAL ANDES

Over the years archaeologists have come up with countless theories that use the natural environment to explain the rise and fall of ancient societies. Peru is the graveyard for all those theories.

Peru’s desert coast, where half an inch of rainfall would be considered a wet year, gave birth to precociously complex societies. The same is true of the frozen tundra of Peru’s altiplano, 12,500 feet above sea level. Spectacular sites can be found in canyons so narrow that when visitors stretch out their arms, they fully expect to touch the cliffs on either side. They can also be found on the tropical eastern slopes of the Andes, where rivers carrying the water from melting glaciers descend to the Amazon jungle.

By the time the Ice Age ended, Peru’s Archaic foragers had created several alternative lifeways. Societies on the desert coast took advantage of the Humboldt current, an upwelling of nutrient-rich water that supports one of the world’s great fisheries. So abundant were fish and shellfish that some parts of the coast could support encampments as impressive as those of the Natufians. Many of the campers left behind enormous heaps of mollusk shells, fish and sea lion bones, crab claws, and sea urchins.