The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (50 page)

Many Coosa villages were fortified. The King site, farther down the Coosa River in Floyd County, Georgia, may represent the ancient village of Piachi. Etowah, only a one- or two-day trip south of Little Egypt, was greatly reduced in size during the sixteenth century; it may at that time have been a Coosa satellite village named Itaba. One of the most interesting villages in the confederacy was ancient Chiaha, which marked the northern limit of Coosa territory. Chiaha lay on an island in Tennessee’s French Broad River and was defended with a palisade. To the north of the river was a buffer zone 30 miles wide, separating the Coosa from their enemies the Chisca.

The rank societies discussed in this chapter were all impressive. British eyewitnesses, however, suggest that in 1607, the most powerful southeastern rank society may have been the one led by a chief named Powhatan. The village from which he ruled, known as Werowocómoco, lay beside Purtan Bay in Gloucester County, Virginia. Powhatan, his subchiefs, and his allies controlled vast areas west of the Chesapeake Bay, yet the archaeological remains of Werowocómoco are superficially unimpressive. Lacking the platform mounds of sites such as Moundville, Etowah, or Little Egypt, Werowocómoco shows us that archaeologists cannot always rely on a site’s monumentality to reflect its political importance. It is only because of British eyewitnesses that we know how powerful Powhatan was. And the British even threw in the romantic story of Powhatan’s daughter, a maiden named Pocahontas.

THE EXTENT OF INEQUALITY IN THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES

At their peak, many of the chiefly societies in our backyard were on a par with those of Panama and all but the greatest of Colombia’s Cauca Valley. Southeastern chiefs were carried on litters and expected a retinue of subordinates to accompany them to the afterlife. Below them were major and minor nobles, some of whom increased their prestige through achievement. Prowess in war provided upward mobility, and hereditary nobles patronized and rewarded skilled artisans. Like the Bemba of Zambia, the rank societies of the Southeast had male chiefs, although nobility descended in the female line.

Southeastern society shows us two widespread strategies of ambitious nobles. One was the founding of new rank societies in the buffer zones between preexisting chiefdoms. The other was the formation of confederacies to create more powerful societies. Despite their size, it appears that none of these confederacies went on to become kingdoms like those of ancient Mexico and Peru. One obvious reason is that they were decimated by Old World diseases once European colonists began to arrive. Had they been left alone, some southeastern societies might eventually have become kingdoms through the processes described later in this book.

SIXTEEN

How to Turn Rank into Stratification: Tales of the South Pacific

In most of the world’s chiefly societies rank formed a continuum from the chief to the lowliest free citizen. Under the right conditions, however, rank societies sometimes made the transition to stratification. This amounted to drawing an invisible line across the continuum, thereby establishing a sharper break between the rulers and the ruled.

Social strata were usually kept separate by a behavior anthropologists call
class endogamy.
That simply meant that members of each stratum were only supposed to marry their peers. If a man of noble birth took a commoner wife, any children she bore him were less than noble. Frequent consequences of stratification were that (1) nobles began to keep lengthy genealogies; (2) rulers competed to marry the most elite spouses; and (3) society might be willing to ignore the usual incest prohibitions if one of the ruler’s siblings would make the noblest marriage partner.

To be sure, there were gradations of prestige within the noble stratum, just as there are gradations from prince to duke, earl, baron, and marquis within traditional European nobility. Many of these gradations were survivals of the continuum of rank that had preceded stratification.

Let us make clear that the terms
stratum
or
class
used in this book are quite different from the phrases “upper class,” “middle class,” and “lower class” used to describe today’s American society. American society has no stratum of hereditary nobles. We use terms such as upper, middle, and lower class to refer to arbitrary divisions of a continuum of wealth. Genealogy is not the criterion; all it takes to move from one economic class to another is an increase or a decrease in wealth.

THE CATEGORIES OF POLYNESIAN SOCIETY

As we have seen, Irving Goldman divided Pacific Island societies into three categories. In his “traditional,” or least powerful, category the authority of the chief was based mainly on his greater quantities of mana, or life force. “Open” Polynesian societies combined mana with military force. The most powerful, or “stratified,” societies used every source of power in a chief’s arsenal; many drew the aforementioned line across the continuum of rank. Any move to stratification, of course, had to be validated by modifying society’s logic.

Tahitians traditionally chanted that the
ari’i nui,
or sacred great chiefs, were direct descendants of the deities Ti’i and Hina. The
manahune,
or commoners, on the other hand, had merely been conjured into being by the gods, so that there would be someone to do the manual labor. This did not result in full stratification, because there remained an intermediate category: the
ra’atira,
who were well-to-do commoners or landed gentry. Tahitian logic explained the ra’atira as the result of intermarriage between nobles and commoners. There were also Tahitians called
ari’i ri’i,
“small chiefs,” whose relationship to the ari’i nui was like that of small Angs to great Angs among the Konyak Naga. Tahiti’s logic explained the ari’i ri’i as the offspring of marriages between great chiefs and ra’atira.

Tahitian society could have been converted from a ranked to a stratified one by eliminating the intermediate category of landed gentry. That, as we will see later in this chapter, is exactly how the later Hawai’ian chiefs created social strata.

HOW WESTERN SAMOA TOOK THE FIRST STEP

Archaeologists believe that the islands of Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji were colonized before the rest of Polynesia. A kind of ancestral Polynesian society then arose on these islands, before canoeloads of colonists sailed farther into the Pacific. The ancestral society is thought to have resembled Goldman’s traditional type, where sacred life force was the main basis for chiefly authority.

Samoa is made up of multiple islands, none covering more than 700 square miles. The larger islands fall into two groups, called Western Samoa (Upolu, Savaii, and Tutuila), and Manu’a, or Eastern Samoa (Ofu, Olosenga, and Tau). Early Samoa was considered a land of plenty, producing up to three crops of taro each year. The Samoans also raised yams, sweet potatoes, plantains, pigs, and chickens and were skilled at fishing.

Prior to
A.D.
1200, all of the archipelago seems to have been occupied by traditional rank societies, led by
ali’i
(the Samoan equivalent of Tahiti’s ari’i and Tikopia’s ariki). Samoa’s chiefly lineages allegedly descended from the sky god Tangaroa, which gave them more mana than anyone else.

Samoans believed that their system of rank had begun on the islands of Eastern Samoa. Its chiefs were considered the first to descend from the Sky God, with all other ali’i branching off as junior lineages. It followed logically, therefore, that the most illustrious of all the chiefs should be Eastern Samoa’s Tui Manu’a—literally, “the lord of Manu’a.” His home village was a kind of capital for Eastern Samoa. Beyond this capital lay a series of semiautonomous villages, each with its own lesser chief, power-sharing council
(fono),
and spokesman/administrator
(tulafale).
Within a village there might live 300 to 500 people, of whom only 10 to 20 were the heads of elite families.

In traditional Samoan society most inter-ali’i competition was over
a’o,
or titles. This competition reminds us of the battles for sacred names in Avatip. It was a process that probably began in the competitive atmosphere of achievement-based society and then found new outlets in rank society.

Let us look for a moment at the Tui Manu’a, the most highly ranked of 15 to 20 sacred chiefs in the Samoan archipelago. His subjects prostrated themselves before him. His glance could wither fruit on the tree. His body, his house, his personal possessions, and even the vessels from which he ate were so charged with mana as to be dangerous. In addition to his councillors and spokesmen, his retinue included stewards, cupbearers, trumpeters, messengers, barbers, and jesters. He made sacrifices to the sky gods, whose temples were tended by
taula,
or priests.

About 800 years ago, according to oral history, something happened that would change Samoan society profoundly. Canoeloads of warriors, having sailed more than 500 miles from the Tongan archipelago, invaded the Western Samoan islands of Upolu, Savaii, and Tutuila. The Tongans managed to dominate those islands for four centuries. Eventually the Samoans were able to expel them by force.

In the course of developing the military prowess needed to overthrow the Tongan invaders, Western Samoa became an open society in Goldman’s terms. War leaders became more important, and a’o titles became the spoils of war. The island of Upolu created a new war conquest title, Tafa’ifa. The man bearing this title became the Western Samoan equivalent of Eastern Samoa’s Tui Manu’a.

According to Goldman the Manu’a island group, never having been invaded by Tongans, developed along more peaceful lines. While chiefs continued to compete, it was along the more traditional routes of sacred life force, persuasion by eloquence, and accumulation of titles.

The Western Samoan case shows us one possible way that a rank society based on sacred authority can become more militaristic. Toa, or prowess in battle, allowed lesser chiefs to rise by conquest, weakening the mana of sacred chiefs. Because of the overall richness of the Samoan environment, the battles rarely focused on resources; they were all about accumulating prestigious titles.

Eventually some chiefs sought to conquer all the islands of Samoa. An eighteenth-century noble named Tamafainga claimed to have done that, but he was soon assassinated. A later chief named Malietoa Vaiinupo did succeed in subduing the entire archipelago. True to tradition, however, his goal was to seize all of Samoa’s four major titles rather than its resources. Later in this chapter, we will see that his Hawai’ian counterparts were far more interested in garden land.

Converted to a more militaristic society by the Tongan invasion, the Samoans became legendary warriors. No one who follows American professional football will be surprised by this fact. Picture a war canoe paddled by Manu Tuiasosopo (6'3" and 255 pounds), Tiaina “Junior” Seau (6'3" and 250 pounds), Edwin Mulitalo (6'3" and 340 pounds), Chris Fuamatu-Ma’afala (5'11" and 252 pounds), and Joe Salave’a (6'3" and 290 pounds). At the rear are the smaller, but no less menacing, Mosi Tatupu and Troy Polamalu. Now run for your life.

STONE MONUMENTS, BURIAL MOUNDS, AND DESPOTIC POWER: CHIEFLY CYCLING ON TONGA

We have now learned that both Tikopia and Samoa were invaded by Tongan warriors. In fact, at one time or another, the islands of Tikopia, Samoa, Futuna, Rotuma, and ‘Uvea all paid tribute (we might call it “protection money”) to Tongan chiefs. It is estimated that a quarter to a third of the population of Tonga’s six main islands were warriors. Who were these Tongans, and how had they become so aggressively expansionist?

Tonga, an archipelago of more than 100 islands, was part of the Samoa-Tonga-Fiji homeland. Tongan society undoubtedly began as Goldman’s traditional type, but over time it moved closer and closer to his stratified type. By the time they were first seen by Europeans, Tongan chiefs were as politically powerful as those of Colombia’s Guaca and Popayán. Tonga stood, in other words, at the threshold of becoming a kingdom.

The three largest islands of the archipelago were Tongatapu, Vava’u, and ‘Eua. At its peak, the population of these three islands may have approached 25,000. Tongatapu, the largest, is 25 miles long and has a superb lagoon. It was on this lagoon that Lapaha, the greatest of the Tongan chiefly centers, was established.

Tongatapu supported plantations of yams, taro, and sweet potatoes; there were also groves of coconut trees, plantains, bananas, and breadfruit. The islanders raised pigs and chickens and hunted native pigeons. They built fishing dams in channel outlets.

Happily, from our perspective, Tongatapu is another of those places where social anthropology and archaeology have worked hand in hand. In our brief look at Tongan society we rely on studies such as those of social anthropologist Edward Gifford and archaeologist W. C. McKern, as well as overviews by social anthropologist Irving Goldman and archaeologist Patrick Kirch.

According to Kirch, colonists reached Tongatapu more than 3,000 years ago. For many centuries their settlements hugged the shores of the lagoon, moving inland only in response to gradual population growth. Not until
A.D.
900 or 1000 did Tongan society show signs of the monumental earthworks for which Tongatapu is famous.

Archaeologists believe that some of these earthworks are early examples of
langis,
or burial mounds for high chiefs and their relatives. Langis came in several shapes and consisted of earthen fill held in place by walls of coral limestone. There were also
fa’itokas,
or communal burial mounds for members of lower-ranking social segments. (This is the type of mound that the Tikopians began to build, following the arrival of Tongan visitors.)

Oral history in Tongatapu takes us back to
A.D.
950, about the same time that langis began to show up in the archaeological record. Prior to the tenth century, the legends claim, Tongatapu was led by men called “worm rulers.” Finally, the Sky God began mating with mortal women to produce a semidivine elite. The Sky God’s favored son, Ahoeitu, was named the first Tui Tonga, or “lord of Tonga.” His half brothers, angry at having been relegated to the status of lesser chiefs, assassinated Ahoeitu while he was still in the sky. He was resurrected before reaching Earth, where he replaced the last worm ruler.