The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (35 page)

The Limits of Inequality in Tikopia

Goldman considered Tikopia a “traditional” or fairly modest rank society. Leadership was based largely on religious authority and genealogical credentials, with little or no use of force. In addition to keeping a series of commoner lineages happy, each chief had three other arikis’ opinions to consider. He resorted to war only to fight off invaders from other islands.

Although it had clear hereditary chiefs, Tikopian society still preserved many of the institutions of achievement-based societies. Bachelors’ houses existed side by side with temples. Some individuals might be interred in a Tongan-style burial mound, but others were buried beneath a residence that eventually turned into a charnel house. Commoners had to sit with their heads lower than the ariki, but the ariki was supposed to provide them with generous feasts. Chiefs controlled entire districts and their garden land, but there was no central authority for the island as a whole. The simultaneous presence of four chiefs acted as a system of checks and balances, preventing one ambitious leader from taking over all of Tikopia.

Of Goldman’s three sources of inequality, mana was by far the most important in Tikopia. Toa, or military prowess, came to the fore mainly in response to hostile immigrants.

We have not singled out Tikopia for its craftsmanship, or tohunga. To be sure, the carving of canoes with shell adzes was a highly respected profession, and expertise was needed to maintain permanent garden plots. We see no craft in Tikopia, however, that rose to the level of the goldwork and polychrome pottery produced by the Central American societies we consider next.

We must end on a cautionary note. As we have seen, Kirch and Yen did a wonderful job of adding 3,000 years to Tikopia’s history. At no point in the archaeological sequence, however, could one see exactly when the pattern of four chiefs, arranged in rank order, first appeared. This pattern was apparent in the 1952 ceremony that Firth witnessed but would have been archaeologically invisible. Clearly, some kinds of inequality cannot be detected by archaeology alone.

THE RANK SOCIETIES OF PANAMA AND COLOMBIA

When the Spaniards explored Panama and Colombia in the early 1500s they encountered hundreds of Native American societies led by hereditary chiefs. Many of these explorers kept diaries and sent reports back to Spain. While the authors of these manuscripts were not trained social scientists, they were eyewitnesses to societies never before seen by Western observers. Their writings have therefore become as important to Latin American archaeologists as Julius Caesar’s accounts of the Gauls are to Classical archaeologists.

Panama and Colombia can be discussed in tandem because their chiefly families paid long-distance visits to each other. Colombia’s goldwork and Panama’s polychrome pottery both required high levels of the expertise called tohunga by Polynesians.

The Cauca Valley of western Colombia is 300 miles long and 35 miles wide. It was formed by the Cauca River, which flows north to the Caribbean between rugged mountain ranges. At least 80 different rank societies occupied the valley before the arrival of Europeans. The earliest documents describing these societies began arriving in Spain around 1535 and have since been studied by ethnohistorian Hermann Trimborn and anthropologist Robert Carneiro.

In recent years the Cauca Valley has become famous as the heartland of the Medellín drug cartel, but in ancient times its economy was supported by the growing of corn, manioc, and cotton. The population of the valley on the eve of Spanish contact has been estimated at 500,000 to 750,000.

One important revelation of the Cauca documents is the diversity one finds in a sample of 80 rank societies. The two largest were the Guaca in the north (downstream) and the Popayán in the south (upstream). The Quimbaya of the mid-valley region were intermediate in size. The Catío in the north were unimpressive compared to their Guaca neighbors. They spent most of their time in autonomous villages, uniting under a “war chief” only when threatened. If we knew more about the Catío, we might find that they periodically cycled between egalitarian and ranked modes.

The Quimbaya comprised 80 villages, organized into five separate rank societies. In other words, each Quimbaya chief controlled a district, or chiefdom, averaging 16 villages. The largest villages had more than 1,000 occupants.

At the large end of the scale were the Guaca and Popayán, both of whom were expanding when the Spaniards arrived. The Guaca numbered between 48,000 and 60,000 people, united under one paramount chief. Below the paramount were his subchiefs (often his brothers, half brothers, or cousins), who controlled villages subordinate to his. Still lower in the hierarchy were hamlets, which had no members of the chiefly lineage and were subservient to the subchiefs.

The Spaniards described the most powerful Cauca societies as displaying the following ranks. First came the hereditary chief, who was succeeded by his son, or by his sister’s son if he had none of his own. Below him were “nobles by blood,” that is, others of his chiefly lineage. One member of this lineage, often the chief’s younger brother, was named “war chief.” There were also “nobles by command,” men from commoner lineages who had been rewarded for distinguishing themselves in battle. Still lower in the continuum of rank were “nobles by wealth,” essentially commoners who had done well at accumulating food and valuables. It is likely that a certain number of these “nobles by wealth” had risen by expertise at trade or craftsmanship.

On the bottom rungs of the ladder were free commoners and slaves. The commoners were mostly farmers. The slaves were mostly captives, taken during incessant raids by Cauca Valley warriors.

Important members of the larger rank societies included priests, who served in the temples, directed important public rituals, and provided sacred justification for the chief’s authority. Priests did not interfere directly in political decisions, but they did memorize thousands of ritual procedures and direct sacrifices. They also officiated at chiefly funerals.

Let us now look at the relative roles played by war and craftsmanship in the rank societies of the Cauca Valley. Their wars had many underlying causes, two of which were a desire for political expansion and an insatiable need for slaves. Several societies, including upstream groups such as the Jamundí and the Lile, had fought wars of expansion around the time the Spaniards arrived. For example, a Lile chief named Petecuy had defeated five other Lile chiefs and consolidated all their territories into a single chiefdom.

Even in cases where political unification was beyond the reach of a chief, enemy villages were raided to obtain slaves. Some of these slaves were used as forced labor in the gold mines, recovering the ore that Cauca goldworkers would turn into prestige goods. Other slaves became sacrificial victims at chiefly funerals.

The number of warriors a chief could muster, of course, varied with the number of villages he controlled. Even minor battles could involve 200 to 400 warriors, many carrying special cords to bind the wrists of prisoners. The powerful Guaca could produce a force of 12,000 warriors, ordered to spare no one. Villages were burned; men, women and children were killed or taken captive; warriors took trophy heads; and cannibalism was so common that human flesh became a trade commodity. The Lile chiefs, mentioned earlier, were said to have owned 680 drums made from the skin of war captives. Many of these behaviors were considered terror tactics, intended both to show the disdain of chiefs for their enemies and to demoralize anyone who considered resisting.

Many Cauca chiefs owned either gold mines or the streams in which gold could be panned. They had patron-client relationships with the craftsmen who turned the gold into crowns, headbands, ear and nose ornaments, pendants, and scepters for them. It is not surprising that Cauca chiefs adorned themselves with gold; the surprise is that the wearing of gold was not restricted to the chief’s lineage. Nobles by blood, nobles by command, and nobles by wealth were allowed to acquire as much as they could afford, although there were certain items made only for the chief.

The most famous gold-producing societies were those controlled by the five Quimbaya chiefs, whose territories were modest compared to those of the Guaca. The expertise of Quimbaya craftsmen was a source of prestige for the chiefs who supported them.

Ambitious Cauca chiefs were not held in check by a council of elders, although they did pay attention to their military advisers when it came to war tactics. The most powerful chiefs were carried from place to place on litters or hammocks. They lived in wooden houses with thatched roofs, surrounded by servants, slaves, messengers, and interpreters who helped them deal with foreigners. Large crews of commoners tilled their fields.

In addition to his principal residence a chief might have a second house for war trophies, such as the skulls or dried heads of his enemies. At the chief’s death, some Cauca societies preserved his body by smoking or mummifying it, after which it would be kept in the house of his successor. In other societies the chief was buried in a cist or shaft tomb, accompanied by fabulous offerings and sacrificed prisoners and servants.

In his discussion of the sixteenth-century documents, Carneiro points to the following differences in strategy between the rank societies of the Cauca Valley and the achievement-based societies in the neighboring regions of South America:

  1. Like the Siuai of Bougainville, many achievement-based societies destroyed a prominent man’s property at his death. Cauca societies let the son inherit his father’s property, allowing it to grow generation by generation.

  2. Achievement-based societies brought captives home to torture or kill. Cauca societies considered prisoners a commodity, to be kept (or traded) as slaves.

  3. Achievement-based societies (and even modest rank societies like Tikopia) tended to expel criminals. The rank societies of the Cauca Valley added criminals to the slave population, increasing their labor force.

To Carneiro’s points we can add a fourth. While Cauca chiefs were not without aristocratic and moral authority, they made greater use of war and crafts than did the chiefs of Tikopia. They aggressively increased the number of villages under their control and thought nothing of making mincemeat out of neighboring chiefs. They sponsored and protected craftsmen such as the goldworkers of Quimbaya, using their products as a source of tribute, adornment, inheritable wealth, and chiefly gift-giving.

Rank Societies in Panama

When the Spaniards arrived in Panama, they discovered some three dozen districts under the control of hereditary chiefs. None of the Panamanian chiefs, however, were as powerful as those of the Guaca and Popayán.

Panamanian commoners practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, which required them to move their hamlets as fields were left fallow and new areas of tropical forest were cleared. Men slashed the trees and burned them, but the actual planting and harvesting was done by women. Panamanian agriculture relied on a mixture of Mexican plants such as corn and South American plants such as manioc and sweet potatoes. Some corn was converted to beer, another South American custom. While the women farmed, the men hunted deer and peccaries, which were smoked and salted to preserve the flesh. Villagers ate fish, sea turtles, manatees, crabs, and shellfish, along with iguanas and many species of tropical birds.

While the shifting settlements of the commoners featured circular houses with cane walls, clay daub, and conical thatched roofs, the houses of the chiefs were more permanent. Since they did not have to move around, clearing new land the way commoners did, chiefs could build substantial residential compounds called
bohíos.
One chief named Comogre lived with his servants and bodyguards in a bohío measuring 150 by 80 yards. Its various buildings had timber beams and were strengthened with stone walls. The compound had impressive carved ceilings, decorated floors, storehouses, cellars, and rooms for the burials or mummies of previous chiefs.

In her reading of the eyewitness accounts of the sixteenth-century Spaniards, anthropologist Mary Helms detects at least five social ranks in Panamanian society. The principles on which these ranks were based seem remarkably similar to those used by Cauca societies (with whom the Panamanians were in contact) and even those used by Pacific Island societies (who came up with the principles independently).

The highest Panamanian rank was
queví,
the category to which both the chief and his principal wife belonged. Below this category came lower-ranking members of the chiefly lineage, known as
sacos,
the equivalent of the Cauca Valley’s “nobles by blood.” Still lower in rank were
çabras,
commoners whose prowess in war had given them a status equivalent to the Cauca Valley’s “nobles by command.” These prominent warriors were rewarded with women and slaves, and their sons could inherit their titles if they fought ferociously for their chief. Lacking the genealogical credentials, however, çabras could not rise to be sacos.

Even commoners who did not become çabras could achieve a measure of renown through expertise at goldworking and the production of polychrome pottery. Archaeologist Richard Cooke and his colleagues have argued that Panama had too much gold of its own to need inputs from Colombia. Despite their self-sufficiency, however, Panamanian chiefs-in-training were encouraged to lead expeditions to Colombia to set up trading partnerships before they took office. Almost certainly this was done because the foreign relations themselves were more important than the commodities traded.

At the bottom of the social hierarchy were slaves called
pacos,
who were mostly war captives. One front tooth of each slave would be knocked out (to indicate his slave status), and his face would be tattooed in such a way as to identify his owner. This was not the only context in which the Panamanians used body markings. All the warriors who fought for a particular chief painted their faces and bodies in a way that identified their overlord.