Domination: Chapter 5

5. CHIEFDOMS

Why are Chiefdoms Especially Important?

Chiefdoms are especially important to my theory of the emergence of institutions of domination. In Paleolithic non-storing hunter-gathering societies there were no formal chiefs or institutions of domination. We have seen that chiefs developed early, perhaps even near the end of the Paleolithic, among a very few hunter-gatherer-fisher societies that lived in lush environments, but chiefship really took hold in human populations with the advent of plant and animal domestication.
In the early Neolithic, then, chiefship became a way of life for many farming and herding communities and, for the first time in history, statecraft was born. Chiefship is important because it became the foundation of all political institutions that followed in evolutionary history – kingdoms, empires and nation states. And again, with chiefs and élite managers came statecraft, authority structures, jurisdiction and much of what we associate with rule by leaders. It was a momentous shift in the history of human existence. It was the advent of state control and the beginning of the decline in individual freedom.

What are Chiefdoms?

I believe that chiefdoms arose when there were opportunities for men to begin to exploit others in society at large. The question is: what caused those opportunities to arise? Why did stratification and economic inequality get a foothold, when throughout previous eons humans had lived in relative equality and cooperated with each other? How did some men come to dominate others in society on such a scale, since chiefs usually organize large numbers of non-kinsmen at a regional level, often thousands or tens of thousands of people? We will explore several optional answers to this question, all of which have been correct in some part of the world at some point in time, as chiefdoms are very widespread around the globe.
Chiefship is an intermediate stage between more egalitarian societies with no formalized leaders and those polities we call kingdoms, which demonstrate a high degree of centralization and well-entrenched monarchs. It is a political system that organizes centrally a regionally organized population in the thousands. Simple chiefdoms, loosely governed by little or titular chiefs, are smaller and have less economic stratification and heritable social ranking than the more complex and developed chiefdoms. Complex chiefdoms may entail governance of tens of thousands of people with at least two levels of hierarchy above the level of village organization and have emergent stratification.
A lineage headman or a cult leader controls one segment of society. Chiefs manage multiple segments. Once chiefs gained control of these various segments of society, they had a larger resource base that provided greater opportunities to manipulate technology, goods, exchange, military campaigns, marriages and labor – in short: they controlled production, reproduction and destruction.
Paleolithic foragers did not have chiefs, but storagers did and certainly they quickly evolved once plants and animals were domesticated. Marshall Sahlins (1972) says that chiefs brought into existence a public economy greater than the sum of its household parts. This occurred as chiefs organized the political economy to benefit themselves and their followers, but always under the guise of altruism.
We have noted that with domestication, society became segmented, having different kinds of corporate groups, mostly based on kinship, but some segments were formed as associational collectives e.g., secret societies and cults. Chiefs usually arose out of a senior kin group or an especially enterprising one. As an aggrandizer, the chief attempted to set himself up as a manager of resources common to all segments of the group, kin-based or associational.
Obviously, there was tension between segments and the elevation of a chiefly segment did not necessarily elevate that strain. More often than not, the chief had to continually renew his elevated status through symbolic means, military conquests and materializations in order to stay in power. He did that by various means, which I will shortly discuss, but as shorthand we can say that he created a script and repeated it in time and space.

Box 5.1. Traits of Chiefdoms
Trait Individualizing Chiefdoms Group-oriented Chiefdoms
Aggrandizement Individual Corporate group
Leadership Chief Council of chiefs
Organizational
method Networking Group solidarity
Funding Wealth finance Staple finance
Script Support chief & cadre Support chiefly lineage
Strategy Control prestige goods Control staple goods
Economic type Trade Agriculture
Production focus Less interested More interested
Stratification More Less
Factionalism More Less
Competition More Less
Competitors Other aggrandizers Other chiefly lineages
Size Smaller Larger
Regional hegemony Undeveloped Developed
Debt dependence In debt to chief In debt to group or society
Complexity Low High
Materialization Script Script + monuments
Ritual Enhance chief Enhance society
Stability Less stable More stable
Threats Competition from rivals; scripting failure Environmental decay; crop failure; population decline; scripting failure; regional conflict (war, breakdown of alliances)
Outlook Inward; non-expansionist Outward; expansionist
Chiefly power level Little chiefs & small chiefdoms Regional chiefdoms to empires

This script can be referred to as a strategic discourse or an ideology. The strategic control of ideology contributed to centralization and the consolidation of political power. Just as a playwright writes a script to direct actors, the chief was the director of activities within his chiefdom, always making an effort to see that his “actors” knew their lines and followed his stage direction. As one who wanted to be society’s manager, the chief had to make “truth-claims,” to convince other actors in his world that he had a corner on verity. Chiefs did this by creating and manipulating meaning for others.
An ideology or a worldview is a form of information. Its management provides the controller with the means to organize the social and material worlds of a people. Manufacturing, controlling and disseminating a specific point of view provided chiefs with social power. Michael Mann (1986) has specified four sources of power: economic, political, military and ideological. In chiefdoms, aggrandizers combined these in distinct ways to achieve specific goals.
A script is a system of “shoulds” and “should-nots.” As chiefs and their cadres created a script, it told people how to think and behave in new ways. Presenting a credible ideology was a source of social power that provided the chief the capacity to control and manage labor and group activities. It enabled him to gain access to the benefits of social action.

Why did Chiefdoms Arise?

One explanation for why chiefdoms arose is that they were often associated with intensive horticulture or agriculture, both of which produced a much greater surplus than slash-and-burn horticulture, but both also required much more labor. The role of the chief, under these conditions, was to organize the labor in order to redirect a portion of the surplus into his granaries, to fill his coffers, all the while appearing to be producing benefits for society, some of which he would produce in order to stay in power.
But farming did not create chiefdoms, which also arose in storaging societies that had no farming. What is the common thread between farmers and storaging hunter-gatherers? It is the presence of a storable, stealable surplus. Once this existed, men aspired to become dominant and to monopolize prestige, power and property.
Chiefship was a very widespread answer to management of resources. Men of wit quickly understood that wealth could be invested in bridewealth, ritual feasting and other forms of status-enhancing and power-building exchanges. However, early chiefs did not want to be limited by those strategies. They also often intensified local production of luxury goods, increased involvement in foreign trade (prestige and utilitarian items e.g., weapons), made crucial marriage alliances and made loans to create indebtedness. With neighbors they also raided and took captives and land and they were not adverse, when necessary, to hold their swords above the heads of their own people.
In some parts of the world big men redirected a surplus. Food producers gave a portion of their produce to the big man. He then redistributed this harvest back to the people, not skimming off anything for himself, except the prestige of being the receiver/giver. It may be that such a system over time led to the development of chiefdoms, where the chief was a receiver/giver, but he gave back less than he received. In other words, he extracted something in the form of a tax.
The chief was able to skim off the surplus value of people’s labor because he was able to convince them of his need to manage group affairs e.g., organize irrigation and/or control the group’s defenses or be a mediating force in conflicts between sub-sections of society. This meant that part of society’s wealth was controlled as a chiefly fund. In developing such management the chief was also able to use that fund to gain access to personal wealth and power, as well as enrich his close associates and kin.
Another factor associated with the rise of chiefdoms was population growth and density. The population of chiefdoms often exceeded the carrying capacity of the land and therefore required extraordinary organizational skills to produce a surplus under such densely populated conditions. A chain of command was one form that facilitated organization of an economy. Just as the gerontocracy functions in the lineage-based society, a chiefdom served to organize workers in a highly productive system, which was, of course, in the interest of the chief and his descent group and courtiers because they could live off the labor of others by taking, taxes and tithes from his own people and tribute from conquered neighbors.
Chiefdoms also developed when and where more sophisticated technology allowed greater production. As technology spurred the production of a surplus, the opportunity arose for someone to exploit that surplus. Sometimes this was done in the name of the defense of the community. Certainly a surplus presented a storage problem as well as a security problem. Lots of wealth in one place was a temptation to robbers and raiders. Not only did a harvest have to be protected against mold and insects, it had to be defended against intruders, violators from beyond who wished to steal the fruits of a community’s labor. The need for the defense of a community gave opportunists the occasion to build political institutions that could become exploitative in time.

Two Strategies to Chiefship

There were different domains in which acquisitive men operated and several pathways to hierarchy and oppression. Real exploitative strategies were pragmatic and situation-bound, put together as power-seekers moved to exploit opportunities presented to them by the historical-material conditions of their time. Nevertheless, anthropologists have identified two broad strategies to chiefship, which can be useful in thinking about individual promotion and selfishness on the part of leaders: (1) network methods and (2) corporate methods (see Box 5.2). The former was competitive and exclusive, while the latter was inclusive and integrated. These strategies were not necessarily mutually exclusive. They did, however, have different scripts, discourses or legitimating ideologies.
In the network strategy, individual aggrandizers reached preeminence by using social ties, which they either tapped into or created themselves. By fostering or developing important relations with others they gained access to information, prestige goods and labor. Anthropologists note that the network strategy often led to what have been called individualizing chiefdoms.
The network strategy also usually resulted in the formation of a prestige-goods system in which aggrandizers controlled the flow of scarce or technologically complex goods. These goods were bankable stores of wealth that could be distributed strategically to establish critical alliances, which helped chiefs centralize their polities.
Luxury goods often served chiefs as important means by which, as gift-givers, they could attract a large cadre of tribute-producing supporters. Chiefs usually attempted to monopolize the flow of such goods to gain political advantage

Box 5.2. Basic Tendencies of the Network & Corporate
Modes (after Feinman 2000)
Network Corporate
Concentrated wealth More even wealth distribution
Individual power Shared power arrangements
Ostentatious consumption More balanced accumulation
Prestige goods Control of knowledge, cognitive codes
Patron/client factions Corporate labor systems
Attached specialization Emphasis on food production
Wealth finance Staple finance
Princely burials Monumental ritual spaces
Power inherited through personal glorification Power embedded in the group
Ostentatious élite adornment Symbols of office
Personal gratification Broad concerns with fertility, rain

over others. This is what D’Altroy and Earle (1985) have called the wealth finance system. This strategy tended to lead to greater stratification than the corporate method. In it there was great factional competition and the chief’s main task was to control this competition. These chiefdoms tended to be small because it was difficult to extend such a system over wide areas and maintain this control.
Throughout history, chiefs showed a keen interest in prestige goods, the exchange of which materialized social relations. Chiefs displayed them and distributed them in the context of give-away rituals, “feasts of merit” and other public rites e.g., court ceremonialism that gave the chief and his men a stage for pomp and pageantry. Acts of public generosity demonstrated the elevated social status and prestige of the chief.
This feasting and ritualism was not exactly like the big man feasts we discussed in chapter three. James Potter (2001) indicates that there were (1) communal feasts and (2) competitive feasts. The former integrated the community and were often used by chiefs and kings, while the latter differentiated individuals and groups from each other e.g., the Potlatch of the Northwest Coasts Amerindians. Both can be seen as public stages upon which chiefs could demonstrate their superiority.
The more indebted the chief could make his subjects through such displays, the stronger his hold over them and the greater the integration of the chiefly society. Even if commoners did not repay the debt, this confirmed the elevated status of the chief, who could maneuver defaulters into even greater acquiescence in the political arena. Chiefs were accumulators and such public demonstrations of their high status were avenues to more prestige, power and property.
The corporate method emphasized the group and its advancement, not that of individuals. Group status was more important than individual status. Refrew (1974) calls them group-oriented polities. They often achieved a high degree of political complexity, with massive public works. Hierarchical graded statuses were defined and organized so that the rise to power by any one individual was limited. The corporate strategy relied on staple finance, which was the production and mobilization of produce, tools and other utilitarian items.
In the corporate mode, aggrandizers worked more collectively within the group to advance the community by using the extracted surplus to build spaces and monuments for communal solidarity-building ceremonies. Corporate leadership supported technological improvements in production. These chiefdoms tended to expand over larger areas than network chiefdoms, but failed if staple food production failed. Nevertheless, if there was no limits to production, these systems tended to be stable and developed an elaborate script or doctrine promoting social solidarity and transcendent themes i.e., world renewal. In expanding, they often incorporated other chiefdoms and peoples and in some instances became great empires.
Of the corporate/network dimension, Feinman says it:

is defined as continuous because these organizational strategies may coexist in particular spatiotemporal contexts. Nevertheless, in certain ways these modes are antagonistic, and so in many situations one strategy or the other will have a tendency to predominate. That is, in a given social field, the ways that power can be implemented or people and resources put together may be limited and constrained. However, the relative predominance of a particular strategy can shift in a specific region or societal context over time with changes in the larger socio-environmental setting (2000:216).

In chapter 7 we will see this shift in the Kuba Kingdom, as early chiefs competed with each other, with one emerging as nyim, King. He ruled supreme over the patricians or titleholders, but in time an apparent need arose to move toward the corporate end of the spectrum and the innovator King, Shyaam, began a process of creating an elaborate bureaucracy and hierarchy of chiefs. This unified corporate structure held for a while, but eventually the kingdom went into decline and broke up into its constituent chiefdoms.
Also, in the American Southwest, Neitzel (2003) notes that hierarchy existed for a while in Pueblo Bonito, but over time a shift occurred. The network-based strategy that created a ranked society gave way to a corporate strategy, presaging the collective ethos more commonly known to modern day researchers.
Aggrandizers in both modes strategized to attain supremacy and may have achieved it, but holding on to prestige, power and property was difficult. Feinman says:
In discussions of the corporate/network continuum, we refer to strategies or the aims and practices of social actors. Social actors (people) implement these political-economic strategies based on their particular roles or positions. Our argument is that in a particular social field, these strategies are shaped and constrained by the specific role or status of the actors and that they may vary from highly corporate to highly network in character. In a specific spatiotemporal context, different or competing strategies may be employed simultaneously; sometimes the adoption of a new pathway to power becomes a way to challenge the existing leadership structure. Likewise, specific political-economic strategies are historical phenomena in themselves and so in certain contexts may fall between the extreme poles of the corporate/network continuum (despite the elements of antagonism between these two strategies) (2000:220).

Of course, one of the constant problems a hegemon has is provincial governors, peripheral chiefs and other “wannabe monarchs.” While the hegemon may be operating a corporate strategy, rivals may be scheming along network lines to replace him. In some of the cases we will explore in this book, we will see that, from time to time, the leader has to reprimand, exile or kill such upstarts.

The Germanic Model: Loot and Reciprocity

Perhaps very early chiefdoms were based on the chief as protector, but some chiefs also went on the warpath. The bounty-giving, loot-sharing chieftains of the Germanic tribes and the Vikings were examples of chiefs that established and maintained a following of warriors who were loyal as long as the chieftain was victorious over those with wealth to be divided among the victors. While the chief might have taken the “lion’s share” of the pillage, he was also expected to be the most generous in throwing feasts and sharing in his bounty.
This form of chiefship has come to us in romanticized form in the epic poem Beowulf. In it, a fifth century chieftain leads a Germanic band of warriors against settlements in Denmark and comes across as a classic redistributor chief, maintaining his charismatic leadership by raiding and sharing the plunder. We also saw this model of chiefship in the case of Odysseus in my introductory chapter.
Such chiefs operated in a gift economy wherein coinage or currency was not used. In this system exchange was “in kind” and based on the principle of give-and-take. If a household head was expected to be a redistributor, the chief was the household head of the whole fighting unit, not dissimilar from the early chieftains of the Highland Scots we will encounter in chapter 6. The pattern of usurpation of the good will of followers we will see in the Highlands must have been repeated countless times without being recorded. We see instances of it in the rise of the Merovingian kings and later the Carolingian monarchs, both of whom fabricated monarchy over and above the claims of sovereignty made by smaller polities and rural lords. Surely, throughout the lost histories of chiefdoms, some kings rose above the people and fell back, with their domains devolving into petty hoards ruled by local redistributor warrior-chiefs, as we will see in the Etowah case below.

The Instability of Chiefdoms

All in all, chiefdoms and kingdoms tend to be unstable polities. They have a penchant to form, undergo transformations, collapse and reform. The causes of this cycling between levels of political complexity and stability vary e.g., environmental deterioration, population change, success or failure to project a doctrine effectively, factional competition and regional interaction (threat, warfare & alliance). In other words, opportunists who wish to be chiefs are not always successful in maintaining a hegemonic hold on their people.
Thus individual chiefs or councils of chiefs, in countless historical instances, have had to struggle to maintain political unity. To do this, all chiefdoms developed an ideology to help maintain control of competitors and factions. Force was not the main way in which chiefs kept the people in line, but rather it was through the use of persuasion and mystification, which usually occurred in the context of ritual.
The Amerindians living at the pre-contact site of Etowah in the northwestern Georgia show the ups and downs of a group-oriented chieftaincy. The archaeological site demonstrates that early residents were group-oriented and had little ranking, most likely living in an agglomeration of kin groups. Two chiefdoms emerged in this society. It appears that competition arose and individualizing chiefs likely were stimulated to be competitive out of a desire to access trade goods. When trade goods began to flow through the region, competition became fierce and Etowah seems to have suffered collapse and became devoid of population.
Adam King (2003) also notes that depopulation in Etowah could have occurred as residents were lured away to join “impressive, supernaturally-charged, powerful leaders emerging in the surrounding region.” Although archaeological evidence is unclear on exactly why collapse occurred, there could have been environmental issues as well e.g., soil erosion, overpopulation, etc.
However, the site was repopulated at a later date and evolved into an impressive capital of a complex chiefdom. This was based on trade in élite goods as indicated in aristocratic burial sites filled with such prestige items. Leadership was based on network and individualizing strategies, which brought Etowah again to a strategic position in a regional exchange system. Chiefs manipulated supernatural symbolism, prestige goods and materialized their power through mound construction. Also warfare was used to maintain control of trade routes.
Yet this polity again went into decline and collapsed at the same time that other regional political centers did the same. King indicates that, it is likely that the stimuli of this widespread collapse had their roots in the nature of competitive network strategies. The warfare and competition brought on by such strategies likely led to the demise of Etowah.
At this time, Etowah was reoccupied by a simple chiefdom that was subject to the Coosa paramount chiefdom. Contact with Europeans stimulated the aggrandizers once again. Spanish explorers entered the region and left records indicating that chiefs switched back to an individualizing strategy to corner trade and that there was a great deal of inter-polity competition as a result. Strong centers, such as the Coosa paramount chiefdom, tried to control lesser sites like Etowah, of which there were many and provincials attempted to break away and gain independent access to trade goods.
Out of this competition arose other paramount chieftaincies, as described by Hernando de Soto who passed through the area. The Spanish chronicles note that these strong chiefs were imposing their will on smaller chiefdoms through the strategies of alliance, attack and extortion based on the threat of attack. These large chiefdoms waxed and waned as powerful war chiefs rose to stardom and were killed, died or lost power. At this point, Etowah was a subject population to such strong men.
Another shift was in the wind: individual to corporate. It seems that both warfare and European diseases had decimated these Amerindians and the corporate strategy was a perfect way to form polities out of remnant populations of different peoples. Communitarianism was on the rise again. As the Amerindians struggled to cope with change, confederacies formed out of the remnants of previous chiefdoms. They are known to history as the Cherokees and Creeks.
Aggrandizement, then, can be seen at two levels in the chiefdoms of Georgia. At times aggrandizers pooled resources and the corporate group cooperated internally to compete externally. In this political environment, competition was between groups struggling to maintain their own social solidarity. Rituals and materializations of power were group-oriented. At other times, powerful aggrandizers arose as war chiefs attempting to access trade goods and dominate weaker groups forming large polities and regional alliances under the suzerainty of a paramount chief.
In another example, a Maya paramount chief of the now defunct settlement of Copán in Honduras established a small chiefdom, seemingly as an in-migrant stranger setting himself up as ruler over dispersed farmers. This chiefdom flourished between AD 400 and AD 800 and then went into sharp decline. It is possible that the founder, K’inich Yax K’uk Mo' (r. AD 426-435), came from Teotihuacán, as pottery, green obsidian and art links Copán to that great city in Mexico.
Archeologists have found authority materializations in monumental architecture, sculpture, hieroglyphic writing, wall art, elaborate royal tombs, temples, a great plaza, smaller courtyards in élite households, a ball court, an acropolis, council house, altars, stelæ and royal residences.
The royal art and hieroglyphs depict the paramount as a warrior, although few weapons have been found and there is little evidence of warfare. The art also concerns the themes of death and royal sacrifice, presumably to ensure the wellbeing of the community. The monarch is also depicted as associated with patron deities.
The chief ruled from the core of buildings near the great plaza and lived with the royal family in the élite residences nearby. At the edge of the core other élites lived in large households with multi-courtyards. There is some evidence that they were sub-chiefs or at least in competition with the paramount for poleconomic control of Copán. No doubt the Copán chief had to cope with competitors and naysayers in this élite class as countless other monarchs have had to do so in the course of history.
In Copán commoner houses were nearby and dispersed throughout the farmland. In spite of the glorification of the supreme leader, it seems that Copán monarchs were not autocrats and had to share power with the nobles, who were perhaps members of strong families that predated the coming of the paramount chief to Copán. They may have actually installed the chief and used him as a figurehead for their class control of the political economy. This is evident in the fact that some nobles even had households with trappings equivalent to the paramount chief e.g., façade sculpture, carved benches, public altars and emblem glyphs. Some of the royal art also depicts a Personage A, who held the title of holy lord. He is seated next to the king and could have been either a powerful and priestly noble or a Deity. Professor Viel notes:

The internal structure of Maya governing elites has been much debated over the last decade. In the perspective of that debate, I propose a model of political organization at Copán at the end of the Late Classic (A.D. 750-800) based on a reinterpretation of two monuments that depict members of the governing elite, each one wearing a pectoral. The analysis of the pectorals leads to the identification of two functional groups, priests and warriors. Sovereignty incorporates both functions and is embodied in a diarchy where a co-ruler is adjoined to the ruler. Rulers and co-rulers come from the two opposing groups who, with each succession to power, exchange these roles. The executive branch, which comprises the ruler and his co-ruler, four ministers and four war captains, is counterbalanced by a council of nine lords. Furthermore, there are some indications that each functional group was a corporate descent group that had its own territory in the valley and its own traditions. The relations between the two groups conditioned the history of the royal dynasty, from its foundation in A.D. 426 until its collapse in A.D. 822 (2000:27).

There were sixteen rulers before collapse and the state seemed to live in peace except for one incident: The 13th monarch, 18 Rabbit, ruled between A.D. 695-738 and was likely the most powerful of Copán’s main rulers. The ultimate layout of the Great Plaza in the Main Group is attributed to him and this magnificent open space is dominated by his stelæ and altars. He also renovated the ball court, started the last phase of the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairway and constructed the well-known Temple 22, replete with cosmological imagery on the Acropolis. Some sudden upheaval ended 18 Rabbit’s career in A.D. 738. While attacking a neighboring chiefdom he was captured by his royal neighbor (likely a relative) Cauac Sky of Quiriguá. According to inscriptions, Cauac Sky sacrificed the captured chief in an “ax-event” and also destroyed the statues of Copán’s patron gods, which apparently had been carried along on the ill-fated foray.
This was a dynastic squabble of some sort, but the paramountcy bounced back for another half-century, then failed. The construction of buildings, temples and monuments and the rendering of royal inscriptions ended in AD 822. It is likely that one or more sub-chiefs tried to rule, but the power of the paramountcy was gone. The royal palaces were burned and there is evidence of violence from about AD 850, for the next half century.
This was a chiefdom that most likely operated on the collective (corporate) organizational model. Royal art shows the paramount as a warrior, but also as a leader in communal sacrifice. Also, the presence of a council house and the nearness of aristocratic housing to the core or main group of royal structures would indicate that the monarch was not an autocrat, but had to negotiate with noble sub-chiefs.
Yet again, by the reign of the last paramount, Yax Pasah (r. 763- prior to 820), who had completed building projects in the first part of his reign, sub-chiefs apparently began to exert themselves. Nevertheless, Webster et. al. (2000) note that Yax Pasah had much to feel complacent about as he surveyed his kingdom at the end of the 8th century. From atop the Acropolis he could look out over a vast panorama and see, within a few kilometers of his ancestral palaces and temples, the houses of thousands of his subjects. No previous Copán monarch had ever ruled so many subjects. Within a few hundred yards on the valley floor were the impressive households of many chiefly families, some of them his relatives by marriage and members of his regime. Farther up the hillsides were visible the farms of commoners whose labor and devotion were central to the vigor of his paramountcy. Also he could have seen men working in the quarries on the northern edge of the Copán pocket, from which a steady stream of porters carried building stone for his royal projects. The final stages of Structure 11 were being completed, as were the upper portions of the huge pyramid-temple Structure 16. Dwarfed by these immense projects, but of great personal importance to the monarch, was Structure 18, the tomb being prepared as his final resting place in the heart of the Acropolis.
This apparent recovery of sovereign power was illusory, however, because at the same time the households of lesser chiefs became bigger and more elaborate, some of them sporting carved stelæ, thrones and façade sculpture – all normally prerogatives of the paramount chiefs. It seems that internal competition was on the rise at the very apex of the paramount’s power. Aggrandizers often have to fretfully look over their shoulders.
Ostensibly the contentedness this monarch may have felt with the renewal of the chiefdom and his royal glorification was not, in reality, matched by the environmental and economic conditions in the Copán pocket. The regal-ritual city of Copán was on the decline in a material sense, in spite of royal ceremonies designed to ensure the paramountcy’s health and vitality.
Apparently the monarch lived off of tribute and was not that much wealthier than the families of the élite strata, given his need to build state monuments and hold impressive feasts and ceremonies. On the other hand, according to Webster et. al., the aristocratic sub-chiefs lived on some of the best land, concentrated as their households were near the royal core:

There are two main reasons for this concentration of élite establishments. The alluvial floor of the Copán pocket from the earliest times was the prime agricultural resource of the whole valley, and there were strong incentives to settle on or near it. Or, conversely, social groups fortunate enough to locate themselves early on this prime land and retrain access to it stood an excellent chance of achieving high social rank. Once the royal household had been established at the Main Group in the 5th century, there were also powerful political and social incentives for lesser élites to have their own households nearby (2000:45).

These people may not have been involved in extensive trade in prestige items, because archaeologists have not found distinguishing household goods, although it was clearly a stratified society. Materially, the paramount and other chiefs did have larger houses than commoners and their homes were filled with art, shrines, tombs (but few grave goods), stelæ, carvings, large plazas and extensive pottery shards, which archaeologists interpret to indicate large-scale feasting.
Some households also seem to have been set up as political and ritual centers, perhaps as chiefs vied for power some families functioned in a politico-ritual fashion in an attempt to attain ascendancy. Some of these households had attached workshops where local craftsmen were employed making prestigious lapidary and shell objects. Also, skeletal remains show a marked difference between the diet/health of élites vs. commoners.
This was clearly an exploitative society with the figurehead of the paramount at the apex of a small (perhaps as little as two-hundred and fifty persons) élite class of chiefs and family members, with no middle class or large artisanal group, with the bulk of the population being poor farmers. It seems that the royals and chiefs did not manage the economy, but siphoned off labor value to support their titled lifestyle. In return, the state was performing rituals to supposedly guarantee prosperity in perpetuity. Furthermore, the few élites had the best land and controlled clients who worked it on their behalf.
It was a good life for those on top, while it lasted; and it did manage to hold political form for twice as long as the United States has been in existence. But the end came:

Despite his numerous subjects and the splendor of his royal establishment, Yax Pasah might have felt some misgiving as he looked out over the Copán pocket from his lofty perch on the Acropolis. The many great noble households in the urban core were a reminder that he could no longer dominate political events as his royal ancestors had. Farmers complained more frequently about the insecurities of their lives, and it was harder to extract cheerful cooperation from them for royal projects and to keep them from defecting to distant parts of the valley. Yax Pasah’s nobles were increasingly fractious as eroded soil from the hillsides invaded their compounds (2000:193).

Possibly, some people even murmured that perhaps the paramount’s all-important power over the chiefly ancestors and gods who guaranteed cosmic balance and prosperity was not what it had been or was supposed to be. Perhaps, they may have feared, calamity was on the horizon.
The authors of the Copán monograph believe that one fundamental process – human-induced environmental degradation – was the powerful cause of political collapse and demographic decline. They note that the ultimate cause of the decline of Copán was a complex Malthusian feedback process – that is population stress and eroding pressure on land came about due to population growth. One could say that élites lived well but did little to ward off the real dangers that faced them while they dealt ritualistically with imagined influences on their wellbeing.
Stepping back from Copán to look at general history, we can see that chiefdoms often gave way to kingdoms and empires and eventually nation-states. Along that evolutionary pathway, sociocultural formations, at times, were debased and were rebuilt. Sometimes big men formed individual or network polities and at other times those polities evolved into collective or corporate forms. The reverse was also true.
In the long run, two kinds of dominating forces prevailed: (1) cultural scripts or ideologies of domination and (2) dominating rule-sets that came to be accepted by populations as normal and acceptable. In other words, with the passage of time, individual autonomy and kin group autonomy were superceded by strong leadership and sociocultural formations that institutionalized domination, at least temporarily. Hegemony is never a sure things, as Etowah and Copán histories show. Institutions can be eroded by various means e.g., environmental degradation or war from without.
In this process in both polities, while it lasted, leadership offices and institutional complexes revolving around such offices provided opportunists a framework within which to operate in order to access more and more prestige, power and property. An office became a platform for legitimate and publically-supported pursuits and also a shield behind which selfish quests unacceptable to the population at large could be hidden. We see privilege in archaeological remains mirrored in the better health of élites, their superior homes, their possession of prestige goods and elaborate burials. When we get to historical times, we have documentation of high-living at the expense of commoners.
This happened many times in history and continues today. We will see a modern example of this in the concluding chapter of this work in the state-management system of modern day America, wherein military, civil service, political and business officers compete and cooperate to manufacture the goods necessary to wage war. While the élite class of Copán was small, in the United States it has grown to immense proportions, with many operating within the state-management system hovering in or around Washington D C.
Just as the institutions of chiefdoms, kingdoms and empires gave aggrandizers an institutional frame within which to aggress against the weaker members of society, leaders also exacted value from workers and put that value to largely selfish purposes in the pursuit of more prestige, power and property. As I just mentioned, we see this happening to today’s America, where the military-industrial complex (now called the state management system) drains off wealth for war. These trillions of dollars could be put to better use building the resiliency of America against natural disaster, disease and terrorist attacks, but as with political behavior we will investigate in ancient polities, there are those in Washington DC who use their offices in pursuit of private agendas that bring harm to the general populace. Alas, it is an old, sad story.
Both in ancient times and today, self-interestedness has taken place within an institutional framework and has led to a draining of society’s strength for personalistic aggrandizement, often aiding male aggression in warfare and the pursuit of adventure. The only question throughout history has been: who gets to do the draining and how much can be drained without getting killed or deposed?
Aggrandizers on the rise have always had to deal with other ambitious men who, seeing the benefits of office, wanted to replicate the chief’s authority, such as in the Copán case above. Sometimes this competition came from within the chief’s court and at other times from provincial officers. History even provides examples of slaves who rose to great heights, as with the West African slaver Samori Touré who established a widespread empire based on slave-raiding and pillage (Mendonsa 2002:260). Since selfishness has never been limited to one man, competition, feuding and warfare became a prominent feature of sociopolitical life after the emergence of opportunities to acquire private wealth and power that emerged primarily in the early Neolithic. Sometimes it was wealth in foodstuffs, but with the advent of long distance trade, opportunists went after prestige items and materials for better weaponry as well. Both were ways aggrandizers could construct moments of power, but such moments did not always last and there were always new go-getters on the horizon.

Were Chiefs Altruists?

Chiefs tended to justify their rise to power with doctrines that indicated they were being elevated for the public good. However, then as now, the loudly proclaimed altruism of office could mask discrete ambition.
It may well be that the initial creators of chiefly political economies did have the best of intentions i.e., to defend the community, to help society by harnessing the power of Deity, to organize the irrigation system, etc. Whatever the need, they may have been intent on filling that need with no nefarious intentions and, in many instances, their efforts surely had to have led to public improvements. However, once power structures were in place, they, or subsequent chiefs, may not have been as concerned with the social good as with lining their own pockets. A political economy is a set of structures that can be used for meeting universal needs, or for achieving the particularistic goals of chiefly aristocrats. It depends on the nature of the office-holders how office is used.
In the early years of the Neolithic there developed a new and emerging concept of restricted altruism. The more or less pure egalitarianism and generalized reciprocity of the Paleolithic were gone forever. In the early Neolithic generosity and sharing came to be encapsulated within corporate groups, largely within families. In that climate of delimited altruism, chiefs would have grown up knowing the high value placed on sharing and would have incorporated that ethos in their scripts as they tried to formulate chiefdoms to unite corporate groups under their hegemonic umbrellas. In their efforts, no doubt, they projected themselves as altruists and created a discourse that put chiefship forth as being good for each and every citizen and corporate group in society. No doubt that was an ongoing negotiation between powerful forces in those early decades of the Neolithic.
But while there was undoubtedly contention and debate, chiefs eventually rose above the general public in power, prestige and property-holding. With the rise of chiefs the nature of exchange was significantly altered to become redistributional economic exchange. The chief, acting manifestly in the interest of the community would collect taxes, renders or labor from the people. But given that his position was now official, hereditary and accepted by the community, redistribution went forward alongside extraction of value to support officialdom. Put bluntly, officialdom was a new, big mouth to feed. It is likely the siphoning of value began in a small way and increased with the passage of time.
Initially, chiefs attained a level of domination over others that had never before been experienced in human society. They came to control strategic resources, like land, food, water and the labor of producers and warriors. When long-distance trade networks developed, they also moved to corner the market on the flow of prestige items, such as jade in ancient central Mexico or the Chalcholithic (6900-5800 B.P.) anthropomorphic figurines of Bulgaria or the assorted weapons, jewelry and other imported items in Anglo-Saxon graves. Archaeologists know this from élite burial sites around the world, which show a disproportionate number of high quality trade items.
Chiefs sometimes became commanding officers. In crafting a command, they instituted rules that allowed them to judge others, passing sentences of death in some cases. Thus, chiefs came to act as adjudicators and these judicial functions gave them even more power over the people. In chapter 7, in the case of the Kuba kings, we will see the evolution from weak chiefs with little or no individual judicial power over people to a Divine King who could have anyone killed at will. Power has a way of hardening through time, if aggrandizers have their way.
Sometimes this judicial role became an avenue to corruption. I encountered a modern case of this during my fieldwork in Africa. Some years after the colonials created chiefs in Sisalaland, the paramount chief attained enough power that he adjudicated a wide variety of disputes, including cases of marital conflict. One chief, who had a reputation as a ladies man, would quietly listen to the case of connubial dispute, then, if he fancied the woman, he would send the husband packing back to his village, keeping the woman in his palace. The reason he gave was that this was preventative detention, ostensibly to curtail further conflict between husband and wife. Here we have a case of the chief claiming to be acting for the good of society, when, in fact, he was building a private harem. In this way the chief was able to take many such women to his bed, and when he died he left over sixty wives behind, some of whom had become such by this subterfuge.
Throughout the history of chiefdoms, altruism was normally built into the platform of aspiring chiefs, but as they built the institutions of power, there was always the potential for baser activities behind the shield of office.
 
The Fabrication of Chiefly Authority

In the early Neolithic, authority was being fabricated and centralized, first in corporate groups then more broadly in chiefdoms. The chief had to act in ways that demonstrated that he had more than raw power. Long-term rule rested, then as now, on convincing followers that the leader had authority i.e., power legitimized by the people he professed to rule.
As aggrandizers, chiefs organized the social world to their advantage, giving meaning to objects and activities and to chiefship itself, a fabricatory exercise aimed at attaining more power and hegemonic scope. Chiefs did this, partly, by the following means:

 Creating the illusion of social altruism

 Conspicuous display & consumption

 Feasts

 Ceremonies

 Building monuments & grand architecture

 Amassing prestige-enhancing items

 Controlling artisanship

 Controlling crucial trade

 Controlling the means of production

 Controlling the means of destruction

 Controlling information

 Attaching themselves to Deity

In the first instance, the chief had to present himself as someone who could create benefits for the other factions in society e.g., by defending them and their surplus against outsiders; or by providing a service that their individual units could not. When a chief built fortifications for the village, for example, he was demonstrating his protective ability and also creating a materialization of his authority. A battlement could be functional and symbolic at the same time. Building the Great Wall of China, for example, was probably more effective as a statement about the central state than as a physical barrier to invaders. Of course, chiefly construction was more modest, but no doubt equally impressive for the citizens of a small chiefdom. In the area of my fieldwork in West Africa, one could still see remnants of mud walls constructed in small polities to keep out slavers e.g., the defensive walls in the village of Gwollu in Sisalaland Northern Ghana (see: http://www.ghanaexpeditions.com/regions/highlight_detail.asp?id=&rdid=143). These were constructed by Koro Limmann, who would have been a titular chief or big man, as a defense against slave raids.
In agricultural communities these materializations oft times took the form of fertility objects and/or ones designed to influence the ancestors, supernatural forces or Deity. For instance, in the rain forests of Nigeria there are rows of giant stone phalluses left by ancient monarchs who ruled over farmers. Fertility and fecundity would have been ideal concepts to attach to chiefly institutions.
Especially when chiefship was a new sociopolitical phenomenon, repeated display of the chief’s power was important. Display is a broad term to include his speaking ability, dress, architecture, ceremonies, feasts, parades, multiple marriages and whatever the chief did to elevate himself in the eyes of the people. These are all aspects of what Geertz (1980) referred to as aspects of the “theater state.” In this perspective, politics is partly about acting powerful and about demonstrating chiefly or state power in public displays.
Also along this vein, Dr. Junker notes for the Philippine chiefdoms of the past:
Ethnohistorical sources indicate that at the time of European contact, the coastlines and lowland river valleys of most of the major islands of the Philippines were inhabited by politically complex, socially stratified societies, organized on the level of what cultural evolutionists refer to as “chiefdoms.” Philippine chiefs were central figures in complex regional-scale political economies. Hereditary chiefs controlled the agricultural productivity of lower-ranked farmers through restrictive land tenure and debt-bondage, they mobilized surplus for elite use through formalized tribute systems, and they amassed wealth through sponsorship of luxury good craftsmen and through inter-island trading and raiding activities. The accumulated material fund of power was used competitively by chiefs in ritual feasting, bridewealth payments, and other display or exchange contexts to enhance their social ranking, to strengthen political alliances, and to expand their regional political authority (1999:3).

When the chief held a feast, built a battlement, paraded through the town in fine clothes carried aloft by servants, he was engaged in the “theater of power.” Feasts could also be proclamations of chiefly generosity. These were materializations of his potency and elevated status. Simple interpersonal rituals, such as not speaking directly to the chief but only through a court interpreter, conveyed a message: The chief is someone set apart from the normal throng and chiefship is very special. When I did my fieldwork in Sisala in Ghana I observed people approaching the chief on bended knee, making signs of subservience. In some West African paramountcies, the monarch was even approached by persons required to pour dirt over their heads as they crawled toward the paramount.
Food taboos were another means of highlighting the uniqueness of the supreme leader. For instance, in olden days, the chief of the Mossi people, who live in present-day Burkina Faso in West Africa, could never be seen eating or eliminating waste from his body. Such symbols set the chief apart and confirmed his exceptionality, his special nature and made him sufficiently different from commoners to lend legitimacy to his claim to rule. In other cases, the ruler was completely veiled behind screens, never to be seen by commoners. In Hawaiian chiefdoms, chiefs were carried around on litters and shown great deference and respect. Commoners had to prostrate themselves on the ground as the palanquin passed. Throughout West Africa, chiefs and kings are fanned when sitting, and when walking they are protected from the sun by an umbrella (see the opening scene in my film on the Sisala of Northern Ghana). In a durbar (celebration) I watched in Nigeria a Hausa emir arrived in a Mercedes. Courtiers ran along side the sleek automobile holding a huge umbrella over it. Old and new status symbols were merged on that hot, dusty afternoon.
Display was about bigness, being exceptional, but it also had to have been about continuity. The chief had to present himself as inimitable but also as one of the people. For instance, chiefs would have displayed ancestor shrines and relics from the past to connect up with the traditions of the people. If the people had forms of divination, the chief would have used an enhanced version of such oracular means to link himself to Deity. Just as a feast was a materialization to create shared feelings and interests, so would have oracles and shrines made chiefship seem a larger and more powerful version of normal corporate groups. No doubt chiefs had more and bigger shrines and their oracles would have been presented as a direct and extremely efficacious channel to the occult world giving the chief and his attendant priests unparalleled access to supernatural power.
Clever chiefs would have used preexisting concepts about the sacred to their advantage. Archaeologists tell us that early chiefs built great mounds and monuments, often on sites common folk already considered to be sacred and where the chief and his ritual attendants could perform ceremonies to claim and boost his link with mystical powers.
Just as chiefs moved to capture sacred space, they also went after sacred time, holding their rites at moments of calendrical or solar importance. Performing a ritual at a hallowed spot and at a sacred time would have had double effectiveness. Control of the ritual cycle was a crucial move by chiefs to corner the market on display.
Having official storytellers or written documents, such as inscribed stelæ or messages carved on monuments, palace walls and the like produced the effect of sending messages. Even if the people could not read them, writing or inscribing in and of itself was normally limited to élites and thus a sign of highness. Later in history legal documents and contracts become materializations of belief systems and, like other means of materialized ideology, may tell a story, validate a claim or transmit a message to enhance access to capital and power.
But in early chiefdoms, oratory was the main means of chiefly expression. For example, Yokut-Mono little chiefs were expected to be good speakers and were always required to say a few words at a public gathering or ceremony. Early chiefs typically used oral narratives and being a forceful public speaker had merit for little chiefs, but as time passed chiefs became removed from direct appearances, some even being hidden behind screens from public view and the yarn-spinning was done by court specialists such as the griots or praise-singers of West African societies.
Broadly, with smaller chiefdoms, writing was not part of display, but it appeared in chiefly behavior as some chiefdoms grew into kingdoms. The use of court spokesmen and occultists using divinatory devices also garnered chiefs’ special consideration. In a preliterate, oral-aural culture, being a good communicator was of prime importance for chiefs and communicating with Deity was the ultimate in communication.
Since food is a potent symbol of all that is good, sharing food has long been a symbol of social unity. Therefore, chiefs used feasts to make vast displays of staple foodstuffs. If the chief could symbolically represent cornucopia, he was thought to be in control of a fundamental value in society.
However, the fabrication of chiefly authority, or hegemony, was always problematic. Successful hegemons knew that there were other men desirous of power and they had to be able to contend with assaults on their chiefly privilege. The ultimate success of a chief’s efforts at resource appropriation was dependent upon holding off such contenders or folding them into positions within his chiefdom. Long-term success also was contingent on the continued backing of commoners. Exactly how much cooperation the chief was able to finagle was conditional on commoners getting what they wanted out of chiefship. Public acceptance of power is the true stuff of authority.
This was especially true when chiefs waged war on surrounding peoples and brought them under his hegemonic umbrella. Warfare was an unproductive way to maintain long-term control over people and wealth funds. It was more effectively established and maintained through the construction of legitimized sociocultural formations and cultural scripts. After conquering a neighboring group, it was often necessary to create lasting bonds of indebtedness and servitude with regard to conquered peoples in this way. Of course, the threat of the sword was always there, but long-term governance was more successfully brought about by creating alliances with powerful individuals and groups in the conquered society.
A chief would have had to present himself to the general public not as a solution to their problems, but as the solution. Given competing visions, the chief’s job was to manufacture the preeminence of his ideas, partly through:

 attaching his ideology to Deity

 maintaining secrecy (controlling information)

 materialization of chiefship

 ceremonial display (secular)

 performance of ritual (religious)

 holding relics

 being removed from normalcy

 holding feasts

 control of artisanship

 control of trade (internal and foreign)

 control of prestige goods

 building colossal architecture

 building monuments

 wearing special clothing

 engineering indebtedness

 ritually eating prohibited foods

 observing special taboos

 breaking some taboos e.g., practicing incestuous sex or marriage

All this was to maintain his hegemonic hold on truth and to prevent others from copying his position in society. Chiefs and other kinds of opportunists gave concrete, physical reality to ideologies in order to manufacture a sense of permanent reality to their ideas. Chiefs also employed oral means (and written once a society was literate) to provide appropriate discourses to reinforce their manufactured ideas. These discourses were sometimes spoken by them or broadcast in oral societies by spokesmen and later written down by scribes. The desired permanence of a given storyline was enhanced when monarchs had their messages chiseled in stone e.g., the Codex Hammurabi, which is a well-preserved ancient Babylonian law code, carved into a stone stele at the behest of the sixth Babylonian King, Hammurabi. The aim of this and all similar endeavors by chiefs and kings was to standardize understanding in society about who was in charge and who was not. The tradition continues today with Presidential press conferences and the televised State of the Union Address before Congress.

/./The Creation of Hereditary Succession

We see in elementary chiefdoms the basic ideas that will flourish throughout history to become the bases of kingdoms, empires and states. One of the most fundamental of these ideas was that members of an aristocracy came from an inherently superior line of descent. In chapter 8 we will see that Catalans called this nobilitas. In Catalonia, nobles were thought to have a bloodline infused with ingenio, or special intelligence. As part of their birthright they had the privilege of dominium, the right to command their inferiors (inferiores). By virtue of being born they were automatically in line for choice positions in society and would easily mature into ciutadans honrats or honored citizens. The embryonic ideas that would spawn such cultural separation between superiores and inferiores in the Middle Ages were laid down in primordial chiefdoms.
Thus, with the advent of Neolithic farming and the herding of animals many societies became hierarchical or ranked. There were aristocrats and non-aristocrats. Rank was ascribed by birth. Such ascriptions can be seen as legal fictions, fabrications on the part of the powerful to establish and maintain access to the best resources. Also rank can exist without exploitation or the ability of higher-ups having material or political advantage, but cultural ideas of grades of persons lay the groundwork for later stratification, which is rank plus unequal access to resources.
Chiefs worked to make chiefship hereditary. Where corporate kin groups existed, the idea of consanguinity already existed and the chief could easily build up the idea of his lineage being superior or even chosen by Deity. Given the assumed superiority of pedigree, it followed that succession to high office should stay in that gifted line and follow the rules of succession adopted by the chief. This kept power and resources in the hands of a single faction in society. Such succession rules and their acceptance by the public was a crucial step in the evolution of domination in périodes antiques.
An established chiefdom was based on formal office attained by specified rules of succession. It was a permanent, well-defined institutional order legitimized by the community. In many Polynesian chiefdoms succession to office was by the rule of primogeniture, the office of chief passing from father to eldest son. Such a formalized system prevented overt competition for power, especially during the interregnum, the time between the death of one chief and the installation of another. Agreed-upon rules of this nature, provided continuity and stability to the political economy, something that would have been in the interests of those benefiting from the way things were.
Early chiefs often based their power on authority derived from ascribed status in a royal descent group and their special relationship to Deity. As with acephalous segmentary societies, in early chiefdoms descent formed the basis of social positions and roles. Membership in a descent group was a crucial determinant of status. Thus a chief had to come from an aristocratic lineage or create that image for his offspring if one of them was to follow in his footsteps. This provided a formal chief with much more authenticity than big men and it gave him a ready-made support group that formed the core of leadership in the chiefdom.
Thus, chiefdoms were inherently more stable than big man systems, but less so than states. During his time in office, a chief was better able to organize and rule knowing that he descended from a chief and that one of his offspring would succeed him as chief. Of course, reality sometimes went the other direction and history is full of cases of deposed chiefs and regicide.

Controlling Land and Labor

In the end all this jural creation was about extending the chiefs power, funding new institutions and activities with the labor power of others and mobilizing part of surplus labor and goods toward this cause. Usually, chiefs usurped the labor of dependent producers, siphoning off part of commoners’ labor or all of it in the case of slaves.
Chiefs in different societies had different ideas about land ownership. Some claimed outright ownership of all lands, others acted more as stewards, parceling out the land to the various descent groups, which could work it in perpetuity, or until the descent group died out. In general, at this budding level of history, it was not so much the ownership of land that counted, as it was the control of labor. This was especially true in Africa, where land was abundant, but labor was in short supply.
According to Tim Earle in Hawaii it was the chiefs’ control of both labor and land that mattered. Because of population growth, there was increasing pressure on land (which on an island is circumscribed and limited), so chiefs began to conquer territory to gain control over productive lands. They claimed this land as theirs by right of conquest. Workers could receive rights to small subsistence plots in return for their work on the chiefs’ farms. Hawaiian chiefs acted as more than mere custodians of the land. They were exploiters, extracting value out of the sweat and toil of farmers.
The point is that whatever the crucial variables – land, labor, the means of destruction, trade – the chief was in a position to control their use. This organizational function gave him prestige in the eyes of the community, just as it did for big men in Melanesia, but for true chiefs, those holding formal offices, it also allowed them to amass wealth for themselves and their kin by siphoning from resource flows.
Let’s look again for a moment at our example of chiefs in Sisalaland, West Africa. Prior to the colonial era, which began in that area in December 1906, there were no formal chiefs. However, the British wished to rule through chiefs (this was called Indirect Rule in West African history), so they installed men of their choosing. Sometimes the chief was an established big man, at other times a ritual leader in the community and in some cases a “nobody” who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. There were even cases of slaves being pushed forward by big men who feared the power of the British and the unsuspecting colonials appointed these slaves as chiefs.
These “chiefs” had no traditional authority and at first the community did not take to the idea of chiefship very well. But some clever chiefs could see that the backing of the colonial hegemony gave them power, if not traditional authority. In time, many became wealthier than non-chiefs by using, and sometimes abusing, their positions.
Abuse usually occurred when chiefs would accept “gifts” to exempt certain persons from work parties organized by the colonials through the auspices of the chiefs. Backed by the threat of a British jail they could also fine persons who refused their orders. In other cases they levied taxes on the people, saying that the British demanded these levies, but the chief pocketed the dues. And finally, chiefs began to organize work parties to toil on chiefly farms, which grew to extraordinary size relative to the average farm because land was a free good in Sisalaland, but labor was the limiting factor to production. With a captive labor force at his beckon call, a greedy chief was able to produce vast surpluses on his extensive farms.
Some chiefs invested these profits in business ventures e.g., trucking, and became even richer. As the middlemen between the people and the government, chiefs were privy to knowledge about the outside world, about what business ventures would be profitable and they had the connections to bring them into being. All this newly generated wealth came about not because of authoritative structures developed over generations, but quickly because of an imposed framework of power established by the colonial overlords.
So we can say that historically chiefs benefited by controlling land and labor, but also any new opportunities that came along e.g., trade in prestige items, or in my Sisalaland case, business deals.

Chiefly Insecurity

Not all chiefs were successful at fabricating long-term domination. Some failed, being deposed or killed by internal rivals. Others did not develop sufficient defenses to prevent being subdued militarily by neighbors or marauders. Maintaining a chiefdom was an ongoing effort. Sometimes the internal threats were not violent, but symbolic, for example, Trobriand chiefs, while they succeeded to office based on descent, still had to prove themselves, very much like a big man. They did this by receiving and generously redistributing the goods that they were given. The chief constantly had to work to prevent other chiefs from out-competing him in being generous, thereby diminishing or destroying his authority. Incompetent chiefs were often replaced by more generous members of the aristocratic descent group, not unlike less authoritative big men.
To an extent, all politicos are capable of failure and can be replaced in one fashion or another. Political insecurity, however, seems to be a variable that might diagram as indicated in Box 5.3.

Box 5.3 Official Security through Time
>>>>> Secure hold on Office >>>>>
>>>>>> Increasingly Fabricated Authority >>>>>>
Big
Men Little Chiefs Chiefs Kings Emperors
Tenuous prestige achieved through repetitive fabrication of domination
>>>>> Institutionalized authoritative offices and roles for politicos
Influence >>>>> Authority

This is a broad generalization. Emperors were toppled and some big men are very skillful in maintaining their hold over people. But we can see the Trobriand chiefs as falling somewhere to the right of big men and to the left of more secure chiefs along the influence/authority continuum.
In history, long-term domination was brought about through the fabrication of authoritative institutions and by controlling the minds of commoners. In the course of societal evolution men became increasingly skillful at manufacturing consent and were, at the same time, involved in creating and concentrating better weaponry and state institutions. Men in office, therefore, could die, be murdered or deposed, but in the more developed chiefdoms and kingdoms the office had become institutionalized, hence the well-known phrase: “The king is dead; long live the king.”
 
Chiefly Myths and Using Deity

Chiefdoms usually had a founding myth, a story that told how the first chief received his power, which could be used as a legitimizing basis of an ideology of chiefship. Sometimes mere antiquity provided such validity e.g., among the Mossi of West Africa, they knew that the first chief rode north out of the Dagomba Kingdom and settled at Ouagadougou in modern-day Burkina Faso. All subsequent chiefs then kept the original paraphernalia used by their founding ancestor – clothes and the bridle from his horse – as royal relics. These objects came to be considered sacred because this event occurred in antiquity, which gave them a patina of extraordinariness. Antiquity has the advantage of having, what John W. Baldwin has nicely called “the legendary haze of the remote past,” hence it can be useful to those putting a political structure together.
But chiefdoms also tapped into supernatural events, linking the first chief, and by implication all subsequent chiefs, to Deity or the supernatural realm. Chiefs were linked to sacred events in the past or the receipt of sacred objects and power from the gods. Origin myths spun by chiefs and their storytellers often related how the first chief received such objects and powers at certain sacred places e.g., a grove of trees, a pool of water or a unique rock outcrop. The chiefdom then maintained its identity and its continuity through repeated symbolic representations, so that chiefs periodically and ritually linked themselves to these sacred events and places. Presumably, by associating themselves with such sacredness chiefs wanted the people to see their rule as inviolable and as unquestionable as was Deity.
In many cases, chiefly ideology represented these sacred events as transpiring at the beginning of time or at least in the distant past. Obviously this was a materialization of antiquity and sacredness that gave chiefly power all the more validation. But such materialization can happen very fast. Among the Sisala of Northern Ghana, the British created chiefs in the first decade of the twentieth century. The colonials set up a station with a small troop of soldiers in the town of Tumu. Therefore, because of his easier access to this new source of power, the chief of Tumu, the Tumukuoro, became more powerful than other chiefs and was eventually considered the paramount chief.
It was a struggle for the first Tumukuoro to establish himself as having authority in the eyes of his own community and especially in the view of all the disparate villages of the region. His power came from his appointment to office by the newly arrived Europeans. Traditionally, power came from supernatural means e.g., a custodian of the earth (tinteeng-tiina) had power over others because he could communicate with the ancestors through divination and gain ancestral backing by making sacrifices on sacred shrines. When a tinteeng-tiina died, his authority over those shrines passed to his heir. Being an authority in the eyes of the Sisala meant having shrines.
The new chief was not the tinteeng-tiina, but he knew the power of ritual, so he moved quickly to establish his reputation as a magician, someone who had secret shrines closeted away out of public view. Secondly, he built a large shrine just outside his palatial residence, the Tumuwiheiya shrine. In the matter of a few years, this shrine came to be the “chief’s shrine” in the peoples’ eyes. The authenticated power of this innovative chief was so great that by his death in the middle of the last century, some people did not respond to the call to attend his funeral because they had come to believe that he would never die.
Today, the latest incumbent of the Tumukuoro-ship sits in his large throne-like chair on a balcony overlooking the Tumuwiheiya shrine. There he conducts moots in which he sorts out the issues in cases of conflict within his domain. In intractable cases, this modern-day chief still requires disputants to swear an oath on the Tumuwiheiya shrine.
In a case of the disputed appointment of a village chief in Bujan in the 1990s, antagonists were mollified by negotiations at the chief’s palace. He was able to get them to agree to back the newly appointed chief, but he also made them swear allegiance on the Tumuwiheiya shrine. It is understood that if a person makes such an oath, and then reneges, or is lying in making his oath, the ancestors will kill the person. Shortly after the disputants left the palace and returned to their homes, one man, who had been particularly reluctant to support the new chief, or go along with the compromise, died suddenly. He was a robust man in the prime of his life and such a death is considered a “hot” death, in need of explanation though divinatory means.
His kin promptly consulted a soothsayer. Divination revealed that he had been killed by the Tumuwiheiya shrine because in his heart he did not really support the Tumukuoro’s negotiated settlement. Thus, we see than in a matter of less than a hundred years, the sacralized institutions of chiefship have come to have lasting power in the minds of the people. This is all the more important because the real power base of chiefship has eroded over the years, with the disappearance of the colonial regime; with the installation of the ephemeral and chimeral regimes of the post-colonial period; and because the paramountcy was stripped from the Tumukuoro by the national government.
Sacred objects held by chiefs must have had great power in persuading compliance by commoners in the early Neolithic. We can assume this since it still operates like this in modern day chiefships. For example, the Asantehene of the Asante of Ghana rules over regional chiefs, district chiefs and village chiefs. Deriving his authority from possession of the divinely-provided Golden Stool, which is said to have descended from heaven in a great storm, the Asantehene holds unquestionable authority over lesser monarchs and his subjects.
In a similar vein, Professor Junker reports that in the Philippines in particular, and in Southeast Asia more broadly, the adoption of foreign religions, the elaboration of court ritualism and the growth of various other ideological means for increasing rulers’ sacred authority and political validity were particularly important in strengthening tenuous political bonds.

A Shift in Decision-Making

In societies based on bands of hunter-gatherers, individuals were influenced in their decision-making by public opinion and gossip but beyond that they were free of official institutions. In the Neolithic, headmen arose to make decisions within the corporate lineage and other types of corporate groups. With chiefship came a move upward in decision-making. Many of the decisions made on a daily basis by the average person in a band society or in a descent-based society were now made by the chief.
Not at first, as we have seen. Influence chiefs (or little chiefs) had to interact and work with their constituents more directly in coming to community decisions. But titular chiefs were eventually replaced with “authority chiefs,” who held stronger positions, allowing them to make decisions independent of their constituents.
This was one kind of dependency. Another was that, with the rise of political domination by chiefs, an individual became dependant on a new division of labor as chiefs moved to control key craftsmen e.g., potters, warriors, herdsmen, scribes, herbalists, metalsmiths, tailors and priests. Thus, economic decisions of individuals became intertwined with political decisions made by higher-ups. Members of society became much more interdependent in complex ways. But they also become more dependent on the élite sector, which contained chiefs, lawmakers and scriptwriters projecting an official doctrine.

Dismantling Egalitarianism

Anthropologists have come to see that in the range of societies from egalitarian to complex, there was a gradual increase in stratification rather than sharp breaks between societal stages or types. Even in egalitarian societies some informal inequality was already present. Yet in early communities of the Neolithic there were powerful values supporting sharing and community decision-making that were contradictory to ranking or stratification. These behavior modes and ideas had to be dismantled or overcome by those wishing to elevate themselves to the status of chief.
This was not a uniform historical progression. In some cases, authority chiefs emerged rapidly e.g., among the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Pacific Coast, but among the Iroquois – who had a surplus and a long history of war and contact with Europeans – chiefs maintained greater egalitarianism. Put another way, Iroquois aggrandizers in the context of a corporate chiefship failed to entirely dismantle the ethos of equality. In spite of having a complex society, Iroquois leaders remained only titular chiefs.
There is convincing evidence that egalitarianism and the sharing ethic remained strong throughout the seventeenth century among the Iroquois. Also consensual leadership and factionalism lasted even longer, despite the massive dislocation of Iroquoian life resulting from disease, war, loss of land, absorption into a European-dominated world economy, resettlement in communities composed of more than one native group and domination by European political control.
The Iroquois even had a democratic approach to their conquered enemies e.g., when they defeated the Huron they did not attempt to turn them into tribute-paying subjects or a servile cohort within Iroquois society. Nothing indicates that the importance of the egalitarian principles in the Iroquoian ethos more clearly than this fact.
Iroquoian chiefs were sometimes referred to as “peace chiefs.” Chiefs and their families lived in larger houses than did other Iroquoians but these houses were not more lavishly constructed or furnished better than commoner homes and they served as community meeting places. Chiefs played a major role in entertaining foreign visitors, which was an expensive duty, as well as a source of prestige. They controlled trade routes and had the right to collect presents from clansmen or strangers who made use of them, as well as tolls from individuals passing through or making use of clan territories.
Peace chiefs also controlled their clan segment’s treasury, which contained the shell beads and other valuables used to conduct diplomacy with other groups and to provide compensation for murders and serious injuries committed by members of the clan segment against other families belonging to the same confederacy. Peace chiefs played a leading role in conducting councils and community projects and were treated with special respect. They were also expected to play a leading role in providing the hospitality associated with council meetings, collective activities such as erecting palisades, and an elaborate annual cycle of public celebrations and rituals.
In providing the food for such events, the chief was actively supported by his entire clan or even the whole village, although he and other members of his lineage were expected to exert themselves more than anyone else. Although peace chiefs were in a privileged position to obtain exotic goods through diplomatic exchanges and foreign trade, they were required to dispense these goods generously to other members of their community in the course of rituals in which gift giving played a major role.
In return, their advice appears to have been listened to more than that of other people. They had more responsibilities, but also more privileges e.g., more community support could also be mustered for curing rituals for chiefs and their families than for other people.
While peace chiefs played a major role in organizing community religious rituals, they did not possess any special supernatural powers. At puberty most boys sought the personal support of a supernatural being through vision quests. Shamans likewise acquired their powers individually in this fashion.
Much supernatural power was controlled by curing societies, which cut across clan, community and even tribal divisions. Membership in these societies was gained as a result of being healed by them. It seems that in some societies, like the Iroquois case, such sodalities performed functions that limited the powers of chiefs.
While chiefs inherited the office name of their predecessor, the Iroquoians feared the spirits of the dead and sought in the long run to sever relations with them. Hence peace chiefs were not in a position to acquire supernatural powers through special relations with the spirits of dead ancestors, which may be another reason their power was limited.
Professor Trigger feels that perhaps the semi-sedentary nature of Iroquoian culture was related to the practice of swidden agriculture, which may have created less concern with property and its protection than developed among the more sedentary Pueblo Indians of the southwestern United States or among the Northwest Coastal storagers, who had permanent base camps, geographically circumscribed natural resources and an elaborate material culture. Trigger believes that:

Tribal societies based on swidden agriculture may constitute an important subset of prestate societies that is of great interest for investigating the relationship between power, property, and equality… Their relatively low overall population densities, lack of investment in long term assets, and easy mobility may have facilitated the maintenance of economic equality well beyond the point where such equality gave way under many other economic regimes. Ultimately, an upper limit was imposed on the size of such systems by the inability of consensus to maintain even the limited order needed to make their overall political organization function, and by the inability of gossip and witch-fears to maintain economic equality in opposition to growing community size and decision-making requirements. What is most important to recognize, however, is that whatever their differences, small-scale societies are not merely egalitarian by default, or groups that have failed to “assign and focus . . . power” (Krader 1968:61). Instead, at least some of them appear to possess powerful and well-integrated mechanisms to defend equality that must be eliminated if hierarchical organizations are to develop. One of the challenges facing evolutionary anthropologists is therefore to understand the processes involved in the eventual destruction of the behavioral patterns that maintained equality in small-scale societies (1990:144).

It seems that when material conditions and opportunities for aggrandizement are available, achievers rise to the occasion and fabricate domination, but when material conditions and opportunities are limited, inequality remains informal and is not strongly institutionalized, limiting the rise of authority chiefs.
In egalitarian societies, there is a conservative bias as individuality is downplayed. By all accounts for scores of centuries people resisted formalization of small social inequalities that inevitably creep into any human group. In these societies democratic mores predominated and individuals and aggregates of individuals retained free and equal access to tools and nature. Furthermore, no élites controlled human labor and people had the freedom to direct themselves as they go about their work. Yet the archaeological and ethnographical evidence is clear on this: when a surplus became available certain self-starting members of society began to accumulate more of it than others. In addition, they began to create ideas and formal rules to justify such privileged access. They fabricated a protective cloak of office and institutional justification for their aggrandizing endeavors and society moved toward inequality and stratification.
Certainly, early go-getters would have had to overcome an egalitarian ethos and resistance from their fellows who were not used to selfishness and hierarchy. How is it, then, that chiefs dismantled an egalitarian way of life or reoriented a community to accept chiefly domination? Domination was primarily ideational. That is, control was not physical control so much as mind control. I believe that the establishment of domination and the move away from relative egalitarianism toward chiefship and extraction of labor value was not done by force, in most cases, but by a gradual process of institutionalization.
This has to have been done through a slow process in which the practices and beliefs of the old social order were redefined or reoriented to justify the authority and statecraft of emerging rulers while other societal forms, which emphasized communality, were dismantled. The process was gradual so as to avoid the reactivation of the egalitarian mechanisms that might push the process back. Nevertheless, there had to have been a back-and-forth process of starts and stops, successes and failures throughout history. There had to have been leaders who lost power and others who emerged to reinstitute authority structures.
Legitimizing ideas were also used to gradually establish new patterns of behavior that allowed élites privileged access to long distance trade. When this developed to a point where chiefs could access foreign goods (utilitarian and luxury) they attempted to corner the market. Writing of African polities, Gray & Birmingham note that foreign trade:
provided the means by which kings (or paramount chiefs) consolidated their authority over vassal chiefs. The system of patronage involved handing out material possessions, as well as offices, and the rich imports received at royal courts filtered down through the ranks and into the provinces to provide repayment for loyalty, tribute and service. The paying and receiving of tribute was a two-way process in African states, and did not result in the same massive concentration of wealth at the top as occurred in medieval Europe or pre-Columbian America. The benefit which a vassal derived from paying his tribute was not feudal protection…but returns in kind. At the lowest level the returns might consist of a feast accompanied by music and dancing at the chief’s village. At a higher level the reward for generous tributary payments would consist of rich fabrics and foreign intoxicants (1970:19).

Furthermore, aggrandizers did not establish domination out of thin air. Rather, they built on the specific, historically constituted political and economic conditions of previous generations. A script and its attendant power took their form and meaning from what cultural ideas and values were already in existence, which became slightly tweaked, with rule additions to establish chiefly rule.
As chiefs moved to establish an ideological hegemony, they were able to materialize their doctrine in a variety of ways e.g., through special shrines, sacred places, monuments, abnormal architecture and control of trade in high value objects etc. Also, the evolution of a skewed power-dependence relation between chief and society occurred when decision-making became linked to the use and possession of basic resources.
Poleconomic aggrandizement in a minor key already existed before the rise of chiefs in the form of the kinship order. One view of kinship structures is that they were masks for economic and political activities i.e., poleconomic functions were embedded in kinship relations. Elders in the lineage behaved to control people and goods, but this was always defined as being the ancient way of doing things, which downplayed power being exercised. Any privilege that accrued to elders was seen as natural and non-exploitative and, in fact, they would have been few and not extravagant benefits of office. Concomitantly, up-and-coming chiefs had to go to great pains not to appear to be materialistic or to be taking for themselves too much privilege. If poleconomics was imbedded in benign-appearing forms, then decision-making at the chiefly level had to be re-embedded in new institutions, which also functioned to hide the underlying nature of poleconomic control.
The process of disassembling existing structures that were used to control wealth and labor, the kinship order, could best be brought about by office-holders within those structures, those very men appointed to guard against such dismantling. From the safety of kinship offices they could maneuver to institutionalize greater inequality and more privileges for themselves and do it in seemingly authoritative ways.
Archaeologists see the shift from communalistic kinship organization to more of an individualistic oriented society in the shift of burial types e.g., at some point prehistoric groups in Puerto Rico stopped burying their dead in the central plaza of the village. At this juncture they began placing them in domestic locations or in other contexts such as caves. The archaeologists Curet & Oliver hypothesize that central burial correlated with corporate group organization, while individual burials corresponded to an emerging importance of the smaller household as opposed to the larger kin group. The structure and power of the corporate groups appear to have diminished over time. Concomitantly, the individual household became the most important social unit.
Among the people I studied in Ghana, the Sisala, graves have undergone a similar transformation as corporate groups have lost power and individualism has been on the rise. Furthermore, British-appointed chiefs have come to take on some of the functions of lineage headmen. Lineages are still important in Sisalaland but under the impact of modernization they are waning. This can be seen in two facts: burials and the physicality of the central ancestor shrine of the family homestead.
The traditional way to bury the dead was to place the body in a tomb located in the kaala (homestead courtyard) of the grieving family. This subterranean vault contained the bones of all past family members. Nowadays some bodies of important persons are being buried alone and above ground and encased in cement. Such individualized graves also, at times, contain ornamentation and writing praising the lifetime feats of the buried individual.
A similar shift from communalism to individualism can be seen in the decay of the tradition of the lineage ancestor shrine (lelee). This was the most important communal lineage shrine in the past. It was formed by placing the nadima bracelet (soul bracelet) of the departed on an existing pile of such bracelets in the center of the lineage courtyard. Blood sacrifices were frequently made on these bracelets to insure lineage prosperity. Yet, as with the modification in burials, the lelee shrine has shifted in importance and form. Many of the bracelets from pre-modern times had market value and have been pilfered and sold to merchants that visit the villages to procure such relics. The new lelee shrine is simply a mud mound, not unlike many shrines owned by individuals.
It is unclear how strong these trends are but they are taking place today along with the rise of chiefship and the development of chiefly shrines such as the Tumuwiheiya mentioned above. Old communal ways are giving way to modern forms as the power of lineage elders wane, the power of chiefs begin to fill the void.
Emerging chiefs in the Neolithic past must have seen such transformations in progress and “nudged” them along. I believe that incremental altercation of codes and fundamental concepts of existing institutions was the process whereby chiefs were able to rise up and dominate kin-based societies. In short, the built chiefship on the bones of kinship.
Let us now turn to cases of selfish pursuits by chiefs, kings and presidents as they have presented themselves to us in history. In chapter 6 we will discuss the political and economic actions of Scottish Highland redistributor war chiefs’ and their transformation into exploitative landlords.
In chapter 7 we will explore and contrast the rise and fall of kings in the African states of Kongo and Kuba.
In chapter 8 we will investigate the creation of the institution of serfdom in Medieval Catalonia by Sword and Pen.
In chapter 9 we will explore the aggrandizement of the kings of Aragó-Catalonia as they built a war machine to conquer the Muslims in Spain and to capture trading entrepôts in the Mediterranean.
Chapter 10 brings us to the aggrandizement of men in power in the state management system and political office in the modern day governmental structures of the United States.
The central question of this book is: how do aggrandizers in office respond to changing conditions, ones that open up opportunities for them? Within these case histories we will see some repetition and uniformity of aggrandizing behavior, actions already presaged in our earlier examples but these chapters offer an in-depth look at the behavior of lairds (chieftains of Highland Scotland), castle-lords of Catalonia, the Count of Barcelona and U.S. government workers and politicos. We will see differences, but more importantly, we will see similarities in the exploitative behavior of office-holders, be they chieftains, landlords, kings, counts or bureaucrats.

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