Timothy Earle wrote:
PROLOGUE
In this book I argue that studying chiefdoms is essential to understand the role of elemental powers in social evolution. Anthropological archaeology is a social science able to study comparatively the natural experiments of long-term historical processes. To illustrate this point, I look at chiefs and their power strategies in historically independent prehistoric and traditional societies and discuss how they continue to exist as powerful actors within states.
Who are chiefs? They are political operatives holding titles of leadership over groups larger than intimate kin-based communities. They rule with some consent of their group, but they are all about building personal power and respect. They are inherently highly variable. Sometimes I refer to chiefs as chieftains. Although these terms are largely interchangeable, I use the terms somewhat differently to designate relative variations in institutional versus personal power. Chieftains are more self-made leaders and chiefs are more institutional leaders, but all chief-like leaders come to power and perpetuate power as conjoined political processes. …
ARCHAEOLOGY IS A SOCIAL SCIENCE
Archaeology is a social science able to discover long-term principles and consequences of human actions. With a sweeping increase in archaeology’s capabilities to describe social systems in action, we are able to use large data sets to uncover alternative pathways by which humans have organized themselves and the outcomes of those natural experiments. No longer is archaeology simply the recovery of the oldest this or the origin of that. It has the potential for systematic scientific understanding of human societies as a means to help fashion future policy directions. To match our increasing methodological capability, we need sophisticated theory to guide our research. Linking theoretically to political economy, recent archaeological work considers political ecology, meaning simply the ways in which human societies create anthropogenic environments—some destined for degradation and collapse while others are sustainable over the long haul.
To enable an archaeology relevant to modern problems of change and stability, we should continue the work archaeologists have always done—finding, excavating, and analyzing material evidence and its changing patterning in the past. We must take the past as fundamentally knowable, developing new ways of recovery and conceptualization of historical conditions. Have leaders helped solve human challenges or have they been an emerging problem channeling resources to their personal benefits? These are fundamental questions that archaeology is well equipped to investigate with the study of chiefdoms and their leadership institutions. ….
CHAPTER 3 CHIEFDOMS AND EVOLUTION
Evolution offers a means to understand selection processes that diversify human societies. Although anthropology’s ethnographic corpus continues to inform us about the many ways that human societies operate, only the historical database of archaeology offers diachronic and comparative data to study the diverging and parallel lines of long-term social change. Archaeology can contribute significantly to a social science of historical anthropology. …
TOP-DOWN APPROACHES: POWER TO THE CHIEFS
To understand chiefdoms requires an assessment of how chiefly powers are exerted over regional-scale polities. As I describe in How Chiefs Come To Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory, leaders can seek three elemental powers: the economy, warrior might, and religious ideology. Each source of power has its own institutional contexts and characteristics determining the political strategies that chiefs employ.
Controlling Economic Flows
Economic power provides the flows of resources and labor that are inherently controllable—at least in part—because of their material makeup, such that surpluses generated from the economy support power specialists and their institutions. But exacting tribute is not easy given the friction of distance and the option for families to escape control by “voting with their feet.” The naked force of warriors can seize and control productive resources and labor, asserting the right of the chiefs to surpluses; however, warriors can take things into their own hands, kill the chief, and usurp sovereignty. Ideology is a system of beliefs that chiefs develop to legitimize their rule, but why should commoners believe the chiefly myths of divine rule? Key to chiefly power strategies is always to weave together by material flows the sources of power and thus create an effective political machine.
All power is inherently distributive, meaning simply that it tends to spread out broadly across society’s members. In traditional economies freeholder farmers, fishermen, and traders act independently to manage their subsistence and entrepreneurial adventures. Each farmer, fisherman, or trader can be his own warrior defending farm, boats, and other possessions. An individual can believe as he or she wants except when challenged by others. For much of human history, individuals joined or exited social groups according to their perceived interests and associations. Communities had leaders but also—typically with the consent of their group—limits to specific situations, such as the settlement of disputes to keep groups from fragmenting. In the largely egalitarian societies that existed prior to the emergence of strong chiefs, individuals had fairly open (or at least corporately sanctioned) access to all power to retain their daily independence. The revolutionary ideology of America stresses similar principles.
Chiefly power depended on controls that arose by intertwining the power sources to create limited access to each. Control was not something inherent in social conditions; rather, chiefs worked with technological and ecological conditions to increase personal power. Most basic was control over the economy to mobilize surpluses to further chiefly ambitions. Key to understanding control of the economy is potential bottlenecks in the flow of goods through the hands of chiefs. A bottleneck is a constriction point in material flows by which chiefs mobilized surpluses for political uses. Sometimes such constrictions are geographic, such as limited fertile soil or major river routes or mountain passes, but chiefs typically created bottlenecks by building facilities. In all cases a chief must find a means to assert some form of property rights over the bottleneck. The medieval example is the castle placed above a river route, where a “robber baron” sat proudly to collect fees for safe passage. The most common bottlenecks in prehistory were probably ownership rights in productive lands and animals. For the Hawaiian case (see Chapter 6), intensification of land by chiefly management of irrigation systems and fishponds created chiefly rights to surpluses from those facilities. As described by Michael Mann, landscape intensifications like irrigation tethered people to facilities that were hard (costly) to leave.
Building ruling regional institutions by chiefs required a means to support their institutions of power and integration. Terence D’Altroy and I outline how governing institutions required top-down channeling of commodities as a means of finance. We identified two means of resource channeling—staple finance and wealth finance. Staple finance involved mobilization of food goods used to support those working for the chiefs. Staple finance relied on corvée labor, in which commoners were obligated to work for their overlords, building facilities and producing goods that supported the elites. Wealth finance, by contrast, involved the amassing and distribution of special goods (prestige objects, weapons, and ritual objects) made by craft specialists attached to the chiefs or obtained from distances. For the Panamanian chiefdoms, wealth finance represented Jonathan Friedman and Michael Rowlands’s prestige goods exchange (see Chapter 1). These special commodities were obtained outside the subsistence sphere and were not dependent on commoner labor.
Warfare and Religious Ideology
As depicted by Robert Carneiro, warfare was central to many—if not most—chiefdoms. Chieftaincies included highly trained and ruthless warriors who sought to enrich themselves in service to chiefs. As seen in the Hawaiian case, surpluses mobilized by chiefs supported conquest warfare of productive land and their dependent populations (see Chapter 6). Alternatively, warriors could be used to seize and dominate trade routes; accompany trading ventures to protect goods in transport; and raid for precious goods, including metal for weapons and slaves (see Chapter 7). Nikolay Kradin describes how the super-complex chiefdoms of central Asia used wealth obtained from raiding and conquest to galvanize imperial polities across massive areas. By controlling the distribution of wealth, chiefs were able to keep warriors loyal and bound to their chieftaincy.
Similarly, surpluses could serve to support priests, feasts, and elaborate ceremonies that expressed ideologically religious worth of chiefs. Provisioning ritual occasions legitimized rights and obligations to rule. As I argue in Chapter 4, the support of religious ceremonies by chiefs may have been one of the earliest means to establish legitimacy of centralized power and the right to mobilize surpluses. This is immediately relevant to cases of chiefdoms with dramatic, monument ritual architecture as implying centralized ceremonies and the obligations of a population to support its political and religious leaders. In some cases chiefdoms were essentially theocracies, but generally chiefs held divinely sanctioned rights of rule.
Power Strategies
As discussed in the ethnographic cases (see Chapter 1), understanding chiefly mobilization of surpluses in labor and commodities focuses us on power strategies, mixing points of control and compliance. Relations between chiefs and between chiefs and non-chiefs in their chieftaincies and confederacies are political, contingent, and negotiated. They involve finance to build and maintain loyalty and service. The degree of formal political institutional development in chiefdoms is limited and unstable, creating a near-constant cycling of the political structures that characterize segmentary societies. Although chiefs would love to consider themselves as centers of stable and persistent polities, the reality is structural instability. The weakness of chieftaincies as institutions, however, is part of their strength because they adjust rapidly to changing political and economic realities.
Although power in chiefdoms arises from particular economic modalities, the emphasis on one versus other sources of power gave particular flavor to regional institutional formations. This variation is articulated by Colin Renfrew in his contrasting of European Neolithic and Bronze Age political organizations as group-oriented versus individualizing chiefdoms. His two models of chiefdoms emphasize quite different means to mobilize resources and materialize social distinction. This variation is linked to the ways in which the political economy generates surpluses that are used to finance institutions with varying mixtures of power sources.
Archaeologically, the contrast between group-oriented (corporate) and individualizing (house) chiefdoms rested on distinct economic modalities that created different material signatures, which have confounded attempts to generate a simple trait list for a chiefdom type. Individualizing chiefdoms marked chiefly distinctions in wealth found in elite burials or houses; they were display (consumer) oriented. By contrast, corporate chiefdoms represented chiefly status by landscape construction that showed control over labor; these chiefs often did not display status by symbolic objects of distinction. When wealth was clearly stratified in burials, most would accept the presence of a chiefly hierarchy; but where wealth objects were little used, some denied that chiefs existed. This is a critical misunderstanding of the variability of chiefdoms documented by ethnographies.
Success of ruling chiefs depended on balancing powers and interests, dealing with circumstances that could change by the moment. Chieftaincies were highly adaptive, distinguished by specific economic formations and types of leadership; these “types” of intermediate-level societies, however, obscured their common regional and political nature. Hierarchy of chiefs was either of two levels (villages and the region) ruling a few thousand, or of three levels (villages, districts, and the macro-region) ruling tens of thousands. In either case the political bonds of the chieftaincies were highly personal, the local leaders at the village and region being closely bound through fealty to their ruling chief. Multiple hierarchies could exist in parallel within a society and power within the hierarchies was contingent and contested.
BOTTOM-UP APPROACHES: POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Although most archaeologists—who follow a political economy approach—have emphasized top-down attempts by leaders to control groups, bringing in bottom-up approaches is essential. Choices made by people in market-oriented, democratic societies have been theorized as a basic selection mechanism. This is the “invisible hand” of free markets that guides production and consumption decisions. Democratic “will of the people” shapes political institutions by enabling, restricting, co-opting, or evading centralized power. It is reasonable to expect that such agency would have existed to some measure in all societies. Perspectives of non-elite agency have emerged from different theoretical strands of archaeological research. The popularity of household archaeology, for example, considers the extent to which families and their communities act independently of the ruling elite to solve most problems of everyday life. To account for the dynamics of social systems requires situating bottom-up political agency and top-down processes in a dialectical relationship, interdependent and potentially antagonistic.
I draw on several bottom-up tactics that apply to chiefdoms: anarchism, house society, and collective action theory …
Collective Action Theory
Collective action theory is another, complementary approach in political economy that has grown out of Marxism to incorporate strong bottom-up processes. Foundational to collective action theory is Margaret Levi’s predatory theory of rule, by which all rulers wish to maximize revenues to consolidate power, but in reality their ability to do so is conditional on counteracting the power of non-elite segments. Levi argues that elites, chiefs in our case, design their political strategies in accordance with non-elite roles in revenue (surplus) generation. Revenue from local populations—similar to staple finance—requires elites to provide services, such as building irrigation systems or temples, to guarantee compliance of farmers; however, when revenues are derived from foreign sources (wealth finance), no such reciprocity is required and elites act with less concern for those they govern. Richard Blanton and his collaborators describe contrasting relationships between elites and commoners that represent what they call corporate (staple-financed) versus exclusionary (wealth-financed) strategies. In a remarkable comparative study of thirty pre-modern states documented by the Human Relations Area Files, Blanton and Lane Fargher then show that the extent to which public goods were provided by elites correlated with local versus foreign revenue sources. An emerging theoretical consensus is that state formation is a process involving rational social action on the part of taxpayers as well as rulers.
It is only with great difficulty that taxpayer-funded governments can be established and maintained . . . so that, in exchange for taxpayer compliance, rulers provide public goods, control the agency of officials (bureaucratization), and relinquish some aspects of their power (principal control) to validate their trustworthy participation in the collective enterprise. (Blanton, Richard E., and Lane F. Fargher. 2008. Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States.)
… Balancing the interests and desires of chiefs and commoners, I recognize dialectical tensions between elite strategies for control and wealth accumulation (Marxist political economy); intermediate compliance, collaboration, and negotiation of reciprocal relationships (collective action theory); and self-organization, resistance, obstruction, and subversion (anarchist theory). The simultaneity of these social processes and agencies creates the tensions representing the selective pressures from different agents and their interest groups that shape the evolution of political formations under different ecological, economic, and historical contexts. For me this is the meaning of historical materialism and sociocultural evolution. ….
[MGH: The following represents Earle’s own approach, and the book contains separate chapters on each of the four ‘modes of production’ summarised below.]
TRIBUTARY MODES OF PRODUCTION:
FINANCING CHIEFLY INSTITUTIONS OF POWER
Chiefdoms are highly variable, but for comparative purposes I rely on their particular socioeconomic formations to help explain variability. In terms of evolutionary processes, selection by top-down and bottom-up approaches can be seen as alternative ways to understand economic modalities, with formations that create specificity in how economic and power relationships become intertwined. In the capitalist mode of production, for example, workers sell their labor to capitalists—whose ownership of factories, transport facilities, and institutions of finance allows them to channel flows of wealth used to realize political and economic power. My premise is that with variables suitable to non-capitalist societies, such an analysis can be applied to prehistory.
All chiefdoms are based on variants of what can be called tributary modes of production. Different modalities create distinguishing archaeological signatures. As illustrated in our case studies, modalities can emphasize alternative sources of power that gave particular flavors to different chiefdoms and a distinction in status marking between reliance on monument construction and wealth goods. I discuss alternative tributary formations to help understand the variability that is possible in chiefly political economies with alternative pathways to complexity. The selective mechanisms operating under different historical contexts route political economies along different paths of development.
Following Eric Wolf, a mode of production is the labor process that extracts, transforms, and distributes resources by means of the society’s tools, skills, organization, and knowledge. The labor process is always socially organized, involving established relationships between working individuals and their groups (a social formation). Flows of commodities create social formations with degrees of stratification and unequal power relationships. …
… While social formations are historically specific to a time and place, a mode of production is a relational and material concept that can be employed to compare historically different societies. Wolf’s tributary mode of production, for example, is a generalized concept that applies to all chiefdoms and archaic states. By definition they rely on the extraction and deployment of surpluses to fuel political machines. Property rights (socially defined economic relationships to resources, technology, landscapes, and places) are key to understanding these different modalities.
The tributary mode includes different ways to mobilize and distribute surpluses. Any social formation typically has nested organizations of production. Thus a chiefdom contains a modality (a tributary mode) geared to surplus extraction, but it also embeds communities and families that operate according to their distinctive logics of house self-sufficiency and community reciprocity. Modes of production should never be thought of as a new typology; rather, they represent specific societal relationships grounded in material conditions that result in alternative political outcomes. They are processes—not types—that specify how individuals obtain resources to support, resist, or partially co-opt governing institutions.
This formulation provides the essence of a Marxist approach to anthropological archaeology. Modes of production represent abstractions of material relationships that model power strategy in political economies in ways that can be compared across prehistoric and historic cases. For discussions of chiefdoms, four tributary modalities are now considered. This list is not meant to be exhaustive or exclusive; instead it illustrates the continuous and changing nature of chiefly political economies and their social formations. Although discussed separately, these processes combined historically to fashion infinitely creative political strategies.
Ritual Mode of Production
The ritual mode of production involves societies with variable population densities that can be supported by different subsistence economies including foragers, pastoralists, and farmers. Critical is the construction of ceremonial monuments, which represent ritual services provided by chiefs to their followers at the same time they establish ownership. Monuments are chiefly places because chiefs organize and support construction, renovations, and ritual performances. These are corporately organized societies in which chiefs can claim overarching rights to community resources sanctified by their responsibility to gain divine support. Chiefs promote an ideology that these ceremonial places and their rituals, both dependent on chiefly management, are essential for renewal and productive fertility in society. Farming or pastoral families in such modalities retain a high degree of household independence, but they are thought to be dependent on their chiefs’ ideology. The ritual mode of production represents what have been called theocratic chiefdoms and seems to have been the earliest modality to support chiefdoms. Mobilized staples support the labor process and related ceremonies and feasting of corporately owned ritual places. Archaeologically, the ritual mode of production is materialized by monument landscapes. To a variable extent, the circulation of special objects linked to ritual practice provided chiefs with additional leverage. These objects are characteristically associated with ritual hordes, not concentrated in burials.
Corporate Mode of Production
The corporate mode of production involves moderately dense societies—typically horticultural—with intensive regional competition between communities for ownership of farmland or other productive resources like pasturage. Like the ritual mode of production, the corporate mode is based on group ownership of land but it emphasizes chiefly role in defense of property. This is the proposed bottleneck-bottleneck in political economy. Ritual is less vital in this modality but these corporate chiefdoms represent a spectrum in terms of sources of power. Through staple mobilization chiefs organize and support construction of defensive work to protect land and people. Farmers retain personal labor power, however, and so chiefs are typically restricted to war-related actions. War chiefs are constrained and little marked materially. The corporate mode of production is materialized archaeologically by defensive works, which represent what I refer to as hillfort chiefdoms.
Asiatic Mode of Production
The Asiatic mode of production involves dense human populations dependent on intensified agricultural production. Chiefs assert overarching ownership of productive facilities for which they manage construction and maintenance. Chiefly ownership of engineered landscapes is the primary bottleneck. Warriors are critical to maintain chiefly property rights and seize these rights through conquest. Commoner populations (primarily farmers) retain labor power as the only means to realize surpluses from agricultural facilities. In return for their labor, they retain guarantees to subsistence security in a “moral economy” and receive special services including efficient agricultural facilities and rituals that “guarantee” divine favor. The Asiatic mode of production typifies staple finance with mobilization from intensive agriculture, especially irrigated and drain-field systems. These chiefdoms represent a spectrum with the other modes.
Predatory Mode of Production
The predatory mode of production involves lower-density societies linked to interregional and international flows of wealth goods. Most often they are part of a developing world economy, fringing agrarian states and to some degree controlling wealth flows destined for those states. Such economic modalities have various bottlenecks, including ownership of boats or animals used for raiding and transport; points of constricted flows in major transport routes; and knowledge in the productive process of special commodities, like metal. Farmers and fishermen have considerable personal freedom (agency). The labor process often involves slavery to intensify agricultural production supporting chiefs. Warriors are critical for raiding, protecting trading parties, and controlling constriction points. Ritual is also important to create significance of special objects that express status and meaning. The predatory mode of production typified wealth finance (prestige goods exchange) in exclusionary strategies of chiefly dominance.
CHAPTER 6: ASIATIC MODE OF PRODUCTION
… The oldest agrarian chiefdoms and subsequent states have been documented archaeologically in the Middle East. Here we must consider briefly a possible typological contrast between chiefdoms and early city-states. Norman Yoffee, a formidable archaeologist and historian of the Middle East, argues that states developed sui generis and that chiefdoms were really an evolutionary side branch—a dead end actually—that did not underlay primary state formation. For him state formation is based on city-states that characterized early phases in the Middle Eastern and Aegean sequences.
Yoffe’s argument, however, is really a typological conundrum—determining what to call the polities antecedent to states. In their thoughtful chapter looking at early Middle Eastern polities, Steven Falconer and Stephen Savage conclude that early “central places [in the Middle East] are frequently not cities and the entities themselves are not typically states” (Steven Falconer and Charles Redman eds. Polities and Power: Archeological Perspectives on Early States, 2009, p. 131). My view is that the city-states found in the Middle East are best compared with chiefdoms based on the Asiatic mode of production. ….
[MGH: from final pages]
CODA: WHERE HAVE ALL THE CHIEFS GONE?
To understand how states operate today, we can consider how ancient states developed from chiefdoms and eventually formed modern state societies. With the evolution of states, chiefs did not disappear; to the contrary, they adapted creatively to state governance, retaining many previous power dynamics. A true understanding of states must consider how chief-like actors became substate agents.
Medieval Europe documents the formation of states by forceful incorporation of chiefly actors and eventual restructuring of political economies. At the collapse of the western Roman Empire, the integration of administration and military systems crumbled throughout Europe and the political economy returned to staple-based feudal estates. These were chiefdom-like units like the hillfort chiefdoms that Rome had conquered, but with a historical tradition of social stratification. Local chiefs (“lords”) lived in castles and attracted warriors able to assert ownership over agrarian estates worked by peasant serfs. In return for access to subsistence plots, serfs provided labor to support their lords. …
Taming Chiefs in Modern States
Within modern states chiefs act with anarchistic powers that challenge, subvert, and sometimes replace existing states. Forming a stable and functioning modern state depends on balancing interests and power of constituent agents, much as earlier chiefdoms and archaic states had to do at lower levels of integration. For a modern state to operate requires the taming of chiefs. Chieftaincies reach up to the state to corrupt legal structures, but the state also reaches down to use its embedded chieftains to outsource state responsibility (as was seen dramatically in the recent reactions to the pandemic). Mafia dons, drug lords, oligarchs, and local political figures within states morph their identity and power in negotiation with state institutions.
The goal of sub-state chieftains is to create freedom to operate with minimum oversight. The goal of the state is to tame and sometimes co-opt the aggressive and creative initiative of chiefs, whose ability to maneuver quickly around restraining actions is legendary. Truly effective modern states would appear to require two things: first, recognizing the inherent power of substate actors to operate only in their interests; and second, maintaining a strong rule of law to tame chiefs to act also for the broad societal good.
Business and government leaders in modern states operate much like chiefs, largely outside state objectives … Oligarchs amass great wealth, use their wealth to corrupt government officials, create favorable laws, and hire a cadre of lawyers (modern warriors) to defend their wealth and power. Even presidents act more like chiefs than presidents, using personal loyalty to circumvent established laws. Perhaps you have noticed.
Functions within the state are difficult for the state to manage or control directly. These are given over to chief-like entrepreneurs who can govern outside state laws. Administering the patchwork of regions and localities within a state proves to be almost impossible. Modern states include expanding spheres of dense urban cores, surrounding rural areas, and distant regions, in which the state is often only symbolic or irregular. Modern chiefs, each with distinctive characteristics, operate within these spheres of the state: corrupt government officials within the core, weakly controlled regional governors, and distantly allied operatives. These chiefs—like their prehistoric forebears—hold opportunistic, personal, and non-bureaucratic power. For a comparative anthropological archaeologist, these patterns are both expected and understandable. Archaeologists studying chiefdoms provide critical insight into studying political actors. We have a limitless number of natural experiments (our regional chronologies) that show the long-term implications of different political configuration.
SUPPLEMENTAL: DEFINITIONS
The Source:
Timothy Earle, A Primer on Chiefs and Chiefdoms, Eliot Werner Publications, 2021
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.