HowChiefsCome to Power

The Political Economy in Prehistory

Timothy Earle

Stanford University PressStanford, CaliforniaI997

Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 1997 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityPrinted in the United States of Amcrica

CIP data appear at the cnd of the book

Stanford University Press publlcations are distributed cxclusively by Stanford University Press within the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America; they are distributcd exdusvely by Cambridge University Press throughout the rest of the world,

To my research collaborators:

The Hawaiian Social Morphology and Economy Project,197r-72 (Marshall Sahlins, director; Eliza Earle)

The Upper Mantaro Archaeological Research Project, 1977-89 (Terence D'Altroy, Christine Hastorf, and Catherine Scott, codirecyarfar , and the_ ris>>>,,,.>,,,.>"'i:?i:?i:?i:?"i::l"i:?

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dreds, and we can estimare that more than 100,000 such polities ex isted; now the largest polity contains more than a billion people, and the United Nations has only about 160 sovereign states.

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Within the social arena, networks of power overlap and intersect

Fiifure 1.1. Decreasing numbcr of independent world polities ( Carneiro1977).

[2Introductiun: TheNature of Political Power

Introduction: TheNature of PoliticalPowerI3

(Mann 1986). Intheir quest for ascendancy, or simple survival within a combative political world, aspiring leaders and groups must fashion power from whatever media are at hand. Inthe competition for posi tion, leaders may be divided institutionally with contrasting power sources and without a central hierarchical structure (Crumley 1987). In many instances, increasingly unstable political schemes can result from the institutionalization of separare bases of power that only intersect in limited ways. The evolution of centralized political in stitutions may be more the exception than the rule for the trajectories of social change. Mann (1986) sees the evolution of strong states in the Middle East, for example, as an unusual (if not uuique) result of social processes built on cconomic power inherent in irrigation tech nology that bound a desert population to its leaders. Control over the sources of political power is basic to the stable institutionalization and extension of leadership within societies, and this control may be shown to rest ultimately in the material process of an emerging politi cal economy that finances the development of ali sources of power and thus acts to rein them in centrally.Is it possible to speak of the primacy of one source of power over another? No source can stand alone as the medium out of which political institutions are fashioned, and each can be of first importance in specific situations. Popes have crowned and destroyed monarchs, and vice versa; the word and the sword can both be mighty, as can economic sway.But the sources of power are not of equal weight in the establish ment of a stable and centralized political institution. Although ali sources will likely be manipulated in the quest for authority, pri macy rests in material process. The physical essence of the economy makes it the ideal medium from which to fashion social institutions of large size and temporal continuity. Production and exchange are in herently organizational in their nature; they bind people together in an organic and decisive way. Materia] things used tg_stisfy, sym bolize, and terrorize take on the force of social i tions, but have a permanence and extension that the relationships themselves lack. The flow of cultural things binds the media of coercion and belief to the organized relations of the economy. Control over the economy

thus stabilizes and restricts long-term access to the other media of power.The political success of individual leaders in creating, extending,and perpetuating political institutions has been based on limiting access to the sources of power by competing individuals and social groups. Although the potential sources of power have proliferated with increased complexity, the scale of political institutions has in creased through an ability to link together the different sources of power and to control them directly and indirectly :hrough control over the political economy. An evident conclusion is that the different sources of power are fundamentally intertwined and interdependent, and that they grow from a material base.The material process allows the different sources of power to begrounded in the economy; control over resources and technology can be extended to control human activities generally andhUfI1anlabor more specifically. Thus, although there are manir;,tes to social com plexity anCI many blind alleys, the creation of politically expansive and centralized institutions requires that the available sources of power be rooted in economic control. There is no necessity or inevitability of political centralization; as we shall see, Hawaiian chiefs governed strongly centralized institutions, while Pemvian Wanka chiefdoms remained fragmented.This book adopts a multilinear evolutionary approach (Steward1955; Johnson and Earle 1987). The multilinear aspect of this ap proach recognizes the different routes to complexity. Divergent sources of power exist according to specific historical conditions, and these sources can be put together in infinitely variable ways. The nature of the power sources and the ways in which they are structured then affect the long-term social dynamics of an individual polity. By evolutionary I mean that the approach focuses on the dynamics of expansion and collapse of institutionalized polities. I do not imply that social evolution is desirable or inevitable (moving inexorably toward sorne teleological goal) . Rather, there are forces of change that determine (through selection, if you will) the character of po litical systems. Why is one system "successful" in terms of its ability to expand and continue, while another fails? I argue that the deter-

I4Introduction: The Nature of Political Power

mining factor is the chief's ability to control and extend access to the sources of power.

Studying Chiefdoms

A chiefdom is a regional polty with instirutional governance and. sorne social sttatification organizing a population of a few thousand to tens ofthousands ofpeople (Carneiro 1981; Earle 1987). Chief doms are intermediate-level polities, bridging the evolntionaty gap between small, village-based polties and large, bureaucratic states (Johnson and Earle 1987). Although chiefdoms are highly variable, characteristically the organization at this scale requires poltica! hier archy or an overlapping series of hierarchies for coordination and decision making (Johnson 1982); the advantages gained by a few within such a hierarchy result in a measure of social sttatification (Sahlins 1958). Archaeologists use the presence and distribution of monumental consttuctions and prestige goods to document the evo lution of chiefty societies (Creamer and Haas 1985; Earle 1987; Peebles and Kus 1977; Renfrew 1973, 1974).Chiefdoms are inherently emergent political instirutions, and sothey provide critica! cases bywhich to understand how leadership was developed and expanded. Chiefs are leaders who hold oflices, and an outsider can meaningfully say, 'Take me to your leader?' These o:ffices are characteristically highly generalized, such that a chief can lead in affairs of poltics, relgions, and economics, but frequently individuals exist who have different power bases that are not consoldated in a single oflice. To understand chiefdoms should thus provide a key to the subsequent development of complexity correlated with the rise of state societies.It is my contention ( Earle 1978) that the fundamental dynamics of chiefdoms are essentially the same as those of states, and that the origin of states is to be understood in the emergence and develop ment of chiefdoms. The history of chiefdoms documents the evolu tionaty ttajectories that in sorne siruations resulted in the instiru tionalization of broad-scale, poltically centralized societies and in

Introduction: The Nature of Political PowerIS

others resulted in highly fragmented and unstable regions of competi tive polities. Understanding the dynamics of chiefty societies that encouraged centralization, expansion, and fragmentation offers a view into the historical background of the modern worklThree cases are used to develop the arguments in this book -Denmark during the Neolthic and Early Brome Ages (2300-1300 B.C. ), Hawai'i from early in its settlement to its incorporation in the world economy (A.D. 800-1824), and the high Andes of Peru from the early Huacrapukio chiefdoms through Inka imperial conquest (A.D. 500- 1534). I have been lucky enough to have conducted extensive field r search on each case. These societies were chiefdoms, politie; orga ruzed in the thousands, or at most tens of thousands, with emergent political leaders and sorne measure of stratification. The goal is to investigare roughly one thousand years of the prehistory from each case in order to evaluate the long-term evolutionaty dynamics ofchiefdoms.These cases illustrate chiefdoms with different bases for social power. In fact, the purpose of the analysis is to investigare these contrasts in terms of how chiefs come to and exercise power. Why are different routes to power followed? How do the media of power and their control affect the long-term trajectories of poltica! instirutional development? As I have already suggested, the specific economic con ditions of the regions greatly affect the available options. Chiefs use what they can to gain and retain power over subjects and followers. But there are always unforeseen consequences of their actions. How emergent chiefs attempt to control power affects the dynamics of the poltica! system. Choice among power networks is opportunistic, but the sources of power vary in the stability that they give to a poltica! institution and in the potential spatial extent of the polity that they can support. The assumption of this srudy is that fundamental eco nomic and historical clifferences between the cases help us understand the difference in the power strategies and poltica! outcomes.Rather than MAUI

side of Kaua'i, air is forced upward and cools, producing rain. On the windward side, annual precipitation at the coast is about r,300 milli meters, increasing to 10,000 millimeters at the mountain crest; to leeward, rainfall decreases to below 500 millimeters annually. Follow ing these sharp gradients, vegetation varies from dense tropical rain

THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS

HAWAI'!V

Figure 2.7. Thc island of Kaua'i (Earle 1978).

l( forests to virtual deserts. Wthin a compact area, soil, water, and vege

the rnling lineages of, tbe differ.enunajor..islauds- Kaua'i, O'ahu,llci Hawai'T..Stretching back for twenty generations and more,

tation vary drarnatically, and this variation strongly affects agricultnralproductivity across the island.At contaet th social organ.iz.i!tLQU of the Hawaiian Islands was the most complex of any J'.olynesian ch_i fdoI!l and probably of any chiefaas-kllown elsewhere in the world. A str