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B      ,  tants of West Central Africa had chosen to adopt farming and/or herding and were actively building common overarching institutions between autonomous local communities, among which diffuse matriclans may have been the first. In other words, the inhabitants were now beginning to build societies. Once they had fully mastered their rejection of foraging and nomadism as a way of life, the possibilities for further development inherent in the new technologies and novel social institutions could begin to unfold. And unfold they did after ca. , albeit not as a bud automatically expands into a flower. That metaphor implies an ineluctable progression toward a preordained goal, which was not the case here. There never was a single inherent program that automatically forced people to expand the scale of their societies continually and continuously from village to region so as to wrest power relentlessly from a multitude of villages in order to concentrate it in a single capital. Nor was it a matter of taking authority away from the many family heads to centralize it into the hands of a single paramount, even though some societies did end up as large kingdoms. What happened was that in different regions people developed their incipient societies by recognizing and implementing additional choices as further solutions to issues of common governance. As these choices and solutions were different in each region, each region went its own way. Certainly those choices and solutions were still concerned with and constrained by the physical environment, but in each case the collective imagination of different societies came up with different outcomes. The available evidence makes this clear and invites us to distinguish between three different major sociocultural regions in the area. Nevertheless, these regions are in fact congruent to a large degree with different amounts of rainfall, different qualities of soils (fertile loamy or poor sandy soils), and different conditions for herding bovine cattle. Moreover, such conditions largely account not merely for different patterns of aggregation among the populations in the area but also for the major differences in population densities between the regions from the beginning of the second millennium onward. Later directions of development resulted not from automatic environmental effects but were inspired by the operation of the collective imagination shared by the members of a given society. The planalto, for instance, was well suited for keeping large herds of cattle; thus, people there kept some cattle but relegated herding to a subordinate place and did not even drink milk. On the PART TWO so-called Kalahari Sands in the east, all societies developed sodalities as institutions of common governance but some refused to accept any form of monocephalic rule while others recognized common neighborhood chiefs as spokespersons for and living emblems of their neighborhoods. Actually, the three major sociocultural regions were characterized above all not by objective environmental differences but by major differences in the subjects which mesmerized people. Thus in one region all minds and imaginations were enthralled by cattle, in another they focused on initiations and social position, and in the third everyone dreamed of the splendors of sacralized leaders and the possibilities of participating in such splendors. How did these differences between the regions develop? In earlier times, the great innovations had affected nearly the entire area in a roughly similar fashion and this allowed us to discuss the whole area all at once. But once sedentarization had been achieved, the population of some settlements in privileged places, blessed with a favorable environment, gradually increased, probably both by migration and by natural increase, as the villagers became more knowledgeable about their disease environment and found ways to mitigate its effects. As such settlements grew larger, they split so that sets of related neighboring village communities began to form larger societies.After several generations, this process led to the emergence of a pocket of relatively higher population density in such places.1 Greater interaction between a larger number of people within each pocket then further fueled more rapid sociocultural change. As these pockets were rare and at sizeable distances from each other, the shared ideas and social practices within each of them began to drift more and more away from those current in another. As each of these pockets grew, they increasingly became centers of attraction for the scattered small settlements or camps in their hinterland so that in due time these peripheries were assimilated into the...

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