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This chapter discusses the Neolithization process in Central Europe. The process began during the latter half of the seventh millennium cal bc, then experienced a major shift with the expansion of the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK), and ended in the mid-fifth millennium cal bc. During these two thousand years a multi-faceted combination of migrations, adaptations, and acculturations, together with socio-political cycling, led to the fundamental transformation of Central European societies from segmented tribes to emergent complex chiefdoms. The trajectories were triggered by external parameters like climatic fluctuations, and internal factors such as human agency.

In South Africa, there are some significant examples of alliance and imperial patronage by co-optation of Zulu chiefdoms for warfare, and in using client chiefs to bring about the downfall of King Cetschwayo in 1883. Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland, as High Commission territories, became imperial clients under traditional chiefs and assemblies, forming their own patron parties in the 1960s to protect traditional lineages that predominated over small educated elites in states that became nominally independent, 1965-66. Thus, in the former High Commission territories the politics of patronage triumphed over constitutional blueprints. There is also evidence that neo-traditonal forms of clientage have survived among Xhosa communities and in peri-urban slums in South Africa.

The thesis of this book is that Hawai'i consisted of three to four competing archaic states, each headed by a divine king. Hawai'i offers a “model system” for how differences in rank originally dictated by kinship gave way to a durable inequality legitimated in new cosmogonic and religious ideologies, how control over the means of production passed from the domestic to political economies, and, ultimately, how chiefs became kings. This chapter uses a comparative ethnographic and linguistic approach to situate Hawai'i within its broader Polynesian context. The controlled linguistic analysis reveals that Hawai'i does not conform to the patterns typical of other Polynesian chiefdoms, that it had been transformed into something qualitatively different by the time of contact with the West. An overview of the chapters included in the book is provided.

This chapter reviews the contours of the Hawaiian archaic states which were functioning at the time of first contact with the West, and then investigates the major categories held to be criterial for archaic states, and the hypothesis that the contact-era Hawaiian polities are properly conceived of as states, rather than as chiefdoms. Contact-era Hawai'i was a true class society, a trait that puts it squarely in the realm of early archaic states, as opposed to chiefdoms. The Hawaiian economic system had elements of both “staple” and “wealth” finance to it. Furthermore, the chapter explores the functions of the kahuna pule and their principal cults, both in legitimating the divine kingship, and in serving the political and economic interests of the king and the ali'i class. Hawaiian social organization exhibits a key axis of the transformation from chiefdom to archaic state.

This chapter argues that it is not in the Amazonian tropics that the quest for an indeterminate transcendence found fullest realization south of the Arctic, but among the mobile hunters and gatherers of eastern and central North America, where the solitary vision quest practiced in parts of the Pacific Northwest took on an importance in tribal religious life perhaps unparalleled elsewhere in the world. The tribes of southeastern North America possessed, in economic, political, and ceremonial terms, “the richest culture of any native people north of Mexico,” a culture strongly influenced by civilizations in Mesoamerica. Most tribes combined hunting and gathering with intensive farming of maize, beans, and squash; their societies were hierarchically ranked by age or achievement. These linguistically diverse but culturally similar peoples were organized into highly centralized chiefdoms.

This introductory chapter sets the stage for the regional studies on Mississippi-period Florida in the volume. It provides a general history of Mississippian research in Florida and, in the process, makes a distinction between Mississippi period and Mississippian. The authors emphasize that, while positioned along the periphery of the Mississippian world, the various late prehistoric Florida societies were not isolated from the social, economic, and ideological developments of the interior Southeast. Moreover, regardless of their individual economic adaptations and sociopolitical structures, they are relevant to Mississippian archaeology. The chapter reviews topics such as Florida's native cultures and their contacts with the Mississippian world, long-distance exchange networks, Florida farmers, nonagricultural fisher-foragers, and chiefdoms, and the conspicuous lack of shell-tempered pottery throughout most of the state.

Several researchers of Fort Ancient evolution have concluded that Mississippian migrations and interactions stimulated Fort Ancient development, while others have denied any significant outside influence on the development of the Fort Ancient way of life. We can no longer assume that a clearly identifiable elite and a hierarchical settlement pattern were universal characteristics of Mississippian societies. Mississippian and Fort Ancient communities also are commonly described as chiefdoms and tribes, respectively, the outcomes of different evolutionary pathways. This essay examines Mississippian dimensions of Fort Ancient mortuary practices at the SunWatch village in Dayton, Ohio. The site contains a clearly Mississippian-style feature (a wall-trench house) and artifacts (negative-painted pottery, shell-tempered pottery, discoidals), and was occupied during the “crest” of neighboring Mississippian developments (between A.D. 1100 and 1500). This essay analyzes the relationship between Mississippian characteristics and the emergence of power within a defined social group. Row patterning is evident in burial groups throughout the SunWatch village.

This chapter explores how local and national politics intertwined in North-Western Ghana during the decolonisation period, and considers the complex interplay between elements of continuity and change resulting from new linkages with national power blocks. Conflicts over landownership, political authority, local citizenship and taxes, which had first become manifest upon the introduction of indirect rule, set in anew under local government reform. At the heart of these debates were three controversial issues: the relationship between earth-shrine parishes and chiefdoms; the role that the distinctions between first-comers and late-comers, between landowners and settlers, should play in the new political order; and the disputes that arose over the political authority to which farmers who continued to farm in more than one locality should pay their taxes. In all these debates, ethnicity continued to serve as a basis for legitimating administrative boundaries and political rights, though ethnic identities were (re-)defined more narrowly or widely by local actors according to their political interests.

This chapter describes a re-engagement with Hawaiian archaeology through research efforts in Kahikinui, one of the twelve ancient districts (moku) of Maui. Some might have thought Kahikinui an odd choice in which to investigate the rise of archaic states in ancient Hawai‘i, as it is considered a kua‘āina, or “backwater” district (literally “back of the land”). Yet it proved to be the right place to investigate the rise of archaic states in ancient Hawai‘i. Being ecologically marginal Kahikinui had not suffered from the effects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century land development; the archaeological landscape of an entire moku, or district, was intact. More importantly, the radical shifts in economic production, land tenure, religious organization, and social structure that accompanied the transition to archaic states would likely be reflected more clearly in such outlying kua‘āina lands than in the “salubrious core regions” frequented by the chiefs.

The villages in Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, host some of the most lavish feasts in Southeast Asia, especially for funerals or memorials. In addition megaliths were raised for the wealthiest deceased family members. There is also considerable variability in economics, sociopolitical organization, and feasting within the Torajan area. This chapter discusses and tries to explain some of this variability, from low level transegalitarian villages in poor mountainous areas to the proto- or real chiefdom levels of the valley bottoms where paddy rice produces major surpluses. The corporate kindred with its ancestral house as the center of ritual and feasting activities is a distinctive feature of Torajan societies. Slavery was very developed, and secondary burials were strongly associated with elites in order to provide enough time to amass as much wealth as possible for proper funeral feasts. Why funeral feasts feature so prominently in Southeast Asia tribal societies is discussed. Other feasts were hosted by households, reciprocal work groups, lineages, corporate kindreds, villages, districts, and village alliances.

The most active and still vibrant megalithic tradition in Southeast Asia is probably found in Sumba. Given the importance of megaliths and their interpretation in prehistoric archaeology, and given the intimate association of megaliths and feasting in the Torajan area, we focused considerable attention on the feasting traditions of Sumba, especially as they related to megaliths. The megaliths are also associated spatially and behaviorally with ancestral corporate lineage houses. The logic of megalithic construction is discussed together with benefits sought by hosts for sponsoring feasts. The range of major feasting types is described.

The introduction explains the methods (derived mostly from anthropology) that the author will use to explain production, gift exchange, commodity exchange, and consumption in the colonial Southeast. It describes the social and cultural changes occurring in Southeastern Indian communities and British communities on the eve of contact.

We identify the archaeological manifestation of Joara as the Burke phase. The Burke phase (AD 1400–1600) refers to a regionally distinct distribution of earthen mounds and soapstone-tempered, Burke ceramics along the upper Catawba and Yadkin rivers in the western North Carolina Piedmont. In this chapter, the we document the history of Burke phase archaeology, and using four lines of data—mound construction, mortuary assemblages, settlement patterns, and ethnohistorical sources—suggest that one or more regional polities, or chiefdoms, integrated portions of the study area during Burke phase times. Finally, we suggest that two specific factors, an ecotone setting and a location along major trade routes, had particularly important roles in the success of Mississippian strategies along this South Appalachian frontier.

This chapter shows how most scholars agree that the military losses at the hands of the early explorers and the destabilization of Native chiefdoms had a profound effect on many Mississippian polities. Soto and his men came as a conquering army, and the intense combat of a direct military assault by the Spanish may have precipitated the collapse of some chiefdoms. This was probably the case at the chiefdoms of Napituca in northern Florida, Anlico in Arkansas, and Tascalusa in Alabama. Unlike these battles, Indian casualties at the battles of Chicaza and Alimamu seem to have been low. Therefore, it is unlikely that Spanish conflicts with Chicaza and Alimamu alone could account for the fall of these chiefdoms.

This chapter first delves into excavations at Nu‘u Bay in Kaupō, before reflecting on the author's book, How Chiefs Became Kings (2010). Kaupō, today a sleepy ranching community, was one of twelve districts (moku) of Maui's ancient kingdom. Around A.D. 1710, almost seven decades before British captain James Cook broke the sea barrier that had isolated the Hawaiian archipelago from the rest of the world, Kaupō was the royal seat of King Kekaulike. Revered to this day by Hawaiians on Maui, Kekaulike was a descendant of the great Pi‘ilani, who first unified the island kingdom around A.D. 1570. A survey on Kekaulike's life paves the way for reflections on the shift from complex chiefdom to archaic state in Hawaiian society, which is explored in the book, How Chiefs Became Kings.

The chapter analyses the nature, modes, and forms of exchange against the character of the social formation of early northern India in general and the Deccan and the Tamil region in particular. It provides an overview of the overland exchange networks of the Mauryan Empire, the subsequent situation of the Deccan, and a detailed analysis of the forms of exchange, coins, currency, and nature of markets of the Tamil region. It does a comparative study of the contrasting political economies of Rome and peninsular India on the one side and of the Roman Britain and the Tamil chiefdoms on the other. At the end, it examines whether overseas commerce has any impact on the political economy of the peninsular India, particularly the Tamil south.

It examines the relation of contemporary polity to overseas commerce. An overview of the overland exchange networks in the Mauryan Empire, subsequent Deccan and beyond against the political formations has been provided. It shows how the statecraft under the Mauryas protected trade and trade routes. A critical review of the structure of polity in the Deccan, the role of the Sātavāhanas as the lords of the southern trade routes and of the political formation of contemporary Tamil region is made. This is followed by an analysis of the relation between contemporary polity and overseas exchanges. At the end, it examines the feasibility of political control of contemporary exchanges by the chiefdoms.

This chapter considers the likelihood that Meillacoid and Chicoid represent contemporaneous social groups, and not sequential pottery styles. New research, previously unavailable elsewhere, is discussed in the context of mobility and the development of social hierarchy. The sites document a trajectory that was distinct from Puerto Rico’s, although Puerto Rico was engaged through the movement of people and ideas from Hispaniola to Puerto Rico. Hispaniola was the center of developments that emerged through transculturation of existing communities in Cuba, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. We are suggesting that this was not a linear course, but one that evolved through continuous networks dispersed across the region.