The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (25 page)

FIGURE 20.
   Early men’s houses in Peru were often painted white, had decorative wall niches, and featured sitting or sleeping benches around a sunken floor with a hearth. Above we see a seven-by-nine-foot men’s house from La Galgada. Below we see three men’s houses from Kotosh, the largest measuring 30 feet on a side.

Left behind on the floors of some ritual houses were the downy feathers of white, green, and orange tropical birds, obtained in trade and probably used in costumes or body decoration. Among the burnt offerings found in the central hearths were carbonized chile peppers. This discovery leads us to hope that those attending the ritual did not inhale.

Once each ritual house fell into disuse it was burned and then used as the final resting place for the bundled remains of men, women, and children. Many of the corpses were wrapped in cotton textiles or sleeping mats, and a few were supplied with cotton bags bearing the designs of birds and snakes. Some burials were provided with gourd bowls or stone cups, and others were ornamented with bone pins inlaid with turquoise. Each abandoned ritual house was then deliberately filled with earth to the height of its surviving walls.

Do the diverse burials in the ritual houses at La Galgada imply that both men and women used these buildings? Might they have been analogous to the kivas of Pueblo Indian societies? Not necessarily. For all we know, the women and children buried there might simply have been family members of male lineage heads. Many features of the La Galgada buildings—the benches, the sunken floors, and the pearly white plaster—strike us as being similar to those of men’s houses elsewhere. The deliberate post-abandonment filling with earth reminds us of the ritual buildings at Göbekli Tepe, and the bundled human remains remind us of the charnel rooms at Abu Hureyra and Çayönü.

Ritual houses similar to those of La Galgada have been found 9,000 feet above sea level at Huaricoto, on a different tributary of the Santa River. At Huaricoto, archaeologists Richard Burger and Lucy Salazar-Burger found small ritual chambers that also had sitting or sleeping benches, central fire pits, and ventilator shafts below the floor to provide oxygen for burnt offerings.

Traveling east from Huaricoto, one would cross the crest of the Andes and begin a long descent toward the Amazon basin. Some 6,500 feet above sea level one would reach the Higueras River, still in the highlands but only 25 miles from the tropical slopes of the eastern Andes. Three miles from the Peruvian city of Huánuco, on a terrace of the Higueras, lies an early village with ritual buildings that could be men’s houses.

The site of Kotosh, excavated by Seiichi Izumi and Toshihiko Sono, was founded 4,000 years ago. Like La Galgada, it had more than one ritual house in use at a time. The ritual buildings at Kotosh were rectangular and somewhat larger than those at La Galgada. Built of stone masonry plastered over with clay, they had the same central fireplace with an underground ventilator shaft, the same sunken floor surrounded by sitting or sleeping benches, and similar niches decorating the walls.

The oldest ritual house at Kotosh, which we will call the White Building, had an earlier and later version sitting side by side (
Figure 20, bottom
). Upslope from the White Building and connected to it by a narrow, twisting stairway was a second ritual house. This cobble masonry building was square with rounded corners and roughly 30 feet on a side; it was large enough to have been a dormitory-style men’s house. Its wall decoration included rows of ornamental niches, as well as a clay frieze depicting a pair of crossed human forearms. This unusual frieze gave the structure its nickname, the Building of the Crossed Hands.

Now consider the wide altitude range covered by the societies to which these three villages belonged. La Galgada grew cotton and received shipments of fish from the nearby coast. The region of Huaricoto was too high and cold for cotton production, but it could have received cotton textiles from lower-altitude villages analogous to La Galgada. Villages founded near the tropical forest, such as Kotosh, could have provided villages like Huaricoto and La Galgada with the feathers of tropical birds. Such was the network of interactions among early village societies in the Andes.

Roughly 3,500 years ago, the ritual houses at Kotosh and La Galgada were replaced by actual temples. The main temple atop the North Mound at La Galgada, reached by a long, narrow stairway, took the form of a giant U. Much larger than La Galgada’s earlier ritual houses, it could have accommodated 50 people. This architectural change, to paraphrase Michael Moseley, reflects a shift from small, private rituals to larger, more public performances. It is a change seen also in Mexico and the Near East, and we will consider its more universal implications later in this book.

NINE

Prestige and Equality in Four Native American Societies

The early village societies of Mexico, Peru, and the Near East went on to develop hereditary rank and never looked back.

Not every society with achievement-based leadership, however, underwent such a transformation. Many agricultural village societies resisted every attempt to increase inequality. They found a way to let talented people rise to positions of prominence while still preventing the establishment of a hereditary elite. The balance they struck between personal ambition and the public good allowed their way of life to endure for centuries.

Some of the best known of these societies were the Tewa, Hopi, Mandan, and Hidatsa of North America. In this chapter we look at their prehistoric origins and reflect on the balance of prestige and equality they were able to achieve.

AGRICULTURE AND VILLAGE LIFE IN THE SOUTHWEST UNITED STATES

We have seen that maize, or Indian corn, passed from group to group for thousands of years as it made its way south from Mexico to Peru. Maize also passed from group to group on its way north through the sierras of western Mexico, accompanied on its journey by squash and beans.

The Mogollon highlands on the Arizona-New Mexico border proved receptive to these Mexican plants. This is a mountainous region 4,500 to 6,500 feet above sea level, where rocky canyons alternate with woodlands of juniper and piñon. The Native Americans who lived there had a long tradition of harvesting seeds and nuts, a lifeway into which Mexican seed crops were quickly accommodated.

Roughly 2,800 years ago a group of foragers camped at Bat Cave, an opening in a volcanic cliff above New Mexico’s San Augustine Plains. The group harvested piñons, walnuts, juniper berries, prickly pear cactus fruits, and dozens of other local plants. Mixed in among the wild foods were squash seeds, beans, and fragments of corncobs. According to archaeologist W. H. (“Chip”) Wills, these Mexican plants were more than a thousand miles from their native habitats and must, therefore, have been locally grown.

Corn, beans, and squash had reached the Southwest, but owing to the region’s aridity it would take centuries for them to bring about sedentary life. At first, cultivated plants were only a supplement to traditional wild resources such as piñons and jackrabbits. Rockshelters remained popular places to spend the night and store food. Little by little, however, the natives of the Southwest began to create encampments similar to those of the Natufians. They built circular semi-subterranean shelters and created storage pits lined with grass or basketry.

In time these encampments gave way to more permanent villages, featuring semi-subterranean houses lined with stone slabs. Two archaeological sites in western New Mexico, both occupied 1,500 years ago, show us some of the regional diversity. Shabik’eschee Village near Nageezi, New Mexico, had more than 60 semi-subterranean houses. They ranged from circular to rectangular, suggesting that the Southwest was going through a change in house shape similar to that seen in Mexico, Peru, and the Near East. The fact that the storage pits lay outside the houses suggests that harvests had not yet been privatized.

It is significant that Shabik’eschee also had a largely subterranean, one-room building with a bench running around the wall, the Southwest version of an early ritual house. This is circumstantial evidence for the emergence of social units larger than extended families.

The SU (pronounced “Shoe”) site near Reserve, New Mexico, provides a contrast. SU had roughly 40 semi-subterranean houses, some with more than 800 square feet of floor space. These larger houses could easily have accommodated whole families. It also appears that SU families had privatized their harvests by constructing storage pits inside the house. The pits were larger than those at Shabik’eschee and could, on average, have held more than 500 pounds of corn. Wills has calculated that this amount would supply a family of five with enough corn for three months.

What we may see at SU is the same behavior we saw at Çayönü late in its history: families building larger houses, keeping quiet about how much food they were storing, and gearing up to outproduce their less industrious neighbors. SU, like Shabik’eschee, had a ritual building that was larger than most houses.

At this point it appears that the Southwest had developed politically autonomous villages with clans or descent groups, analogous to those we saw in Mexico, Peru, and the Near East. It is no surprise, therefore, that some villages engaged in raiding. Archaeologist Steven LeBlanc describes warfare as “endemic” in the Southwest 1,500 to 1,000 years ago. Some villages relocated to steep defensible ridges or mesas. Others surrounded themselves with palisades of wooden posts.

Warfare in the Southwest seems to have involved both ambushes and direct confrontations. Some groups of burials, according to LeBlanc, suggest that male victims had their skulls crushed with clubs; the killers may have spared young women, however, much as the Marind of New Guinea did. In other cases, probably ambushes, the women were killed along with the men. In several dry caves occupied 1,500 years ago, archaeologists found men buried with trophies of the enemies they had slain: human scalps, preserved by desiccation in the desert environment.

Sometimes ritual cannibalism was added to the skull cracking and scalping. A 900-year-old village near Mancos, Colorado, provides us with an example. There, biological anthropologist Tim White discovered that nearly 30 men, women, and children had been butchered and cooked, presumably following a massacre. In other words, the evidence from the Southwest is consistent with what we know of achievement-based societies elsewhere in the world, with the exception that scalps were more often collected than heads.

Over time the kind of rectangular, above-ground architecture that we associate with the historic Pueblo villages of the Southwest began to appear in the archaeological record. Between 1,240 and 1,140 years ago, in the region of Dolores, Colorado, semi-subterranean houses had given way to apartment-like blocks of above-ground rooms. In some of these blocks, large residential rooms were lined up in front of even more substantial storage rooms. Virtually the only remaining circular structures appear to have been for ritual; they were forerunners of the kivas built by historic Pueblo clans.

According to archaeologist Stephen Plog, the Southwest reached its maximum prehistoric population about 900 years ago, and then it began to decline. This period of decline, with many villages being abandoned and others accepting refugees, has provided archaeologists with insights into the origins of the historic Pueblo societies. For example, the region of Black Mesa, Arizona, was abandoned 900 years ago and repopulated 250 years later by people who may have been the ancestors of the historic Hopi. Later in this chapter we look at the Hopi village of Old Oraibi.

Old Oraibi was considered one of the Western Pueblos. The Eastern Pueblos are believed to have had separate origins. For example, many archaeologists suspect that when the spectacular cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, Colorado, were abandoned, their former occupants moved south and east toward the headwaters of the Río Grande in northern New Mexico. There, along with other immigrants, they contributed to the creation of the Eastern Pueblos. It is probably no accident that the legendary histories of many Pueblo villages describe the arrival of groups from diverse regions. The order in which various groups arrived often determined their rights and responsibilities.

One of the forerunners of today’s Eastern Pueblos was Arroyo Hondo, near Santa Fe, a site occupied 700 to 600 years ago. Arroyo Hondo grew to 1,200 rooms, arranged in 24 room blocks two stories tall, and had 13 open ritual plazas. After it was destroyed by fire, its population is believed to have helped create one or more of the surviving Río Grande Pueblos. Later in this chapter we look at one of these pueblos, the village of San Juan.

WHAT LEVEL OF INEQUALITY WAS REACHED IN THE SOUTHWEST?

The Pueblo societies visited by anthropologists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were considered both egalitarian (because everyone started out equal at birth) and achievement-based (because certain individuals achieved positions of prominence through initiation into increasingly exclusive ritual societies).

Many archaeologists, however, suspect that there was a time in the prehistory of the Southwest when Native American society experienced greater levels of inequality than those seen in historic Pueblo communities. The period in question was from 1,150 to 880 years ago, and the evidence consists of archaeological sites whose size, burial ritual, and accumulation of valuables stand out from those of their contemporaries.

One of those atypical sites is Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, not far from Shabik’eschee Village. To say that opinions on Pueblo Bonito differ would be putting it mildly. To some archaeologists, familiar mainly with sites in the Southwest, Pueblo Bonito seems as spectacular as the ancient cities of Mexico and Peru. To most archaeologists familiar with Mexico and Peru, Pueblo Bonito just looks like a big village. In this chapter we follow the thoughtful middle ground established by two experts on the region, Stephen Plog and Linda Cordell.

Chaco Canyon is 20 miles long. Within its watershed, it had large expanses of alluvial soil that could be irrigated with canals. There were pine forests on the nearby mountains for fuel and construction materials, and the canyon had unlimited sandstone for masonry walls. Archaeologist Gwinn Vivian once reported masonry dams up to 120 feet long in the region. There were at least ten ancient canals that could be traced for distances of anywhere from 2,000 feet to more than three miles. Many irrigation systems collected and channeled rain runoff, watering fields that received only nine inches of rainfall in a normal year.