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The Broad Perspective If anthropologists are correct, it is unlikely that any major alterations would have occurred in New World social systems during the past ¤ve centuries. Every example of substantial social change elsewhere has taken seven to ten centuries to establish itself, and then only if accompanied by signi¤cant longterm contact with other societies (Kryukov 1998, Murdock 1949:330–331). In the case of the Inca, Aztec, Maya, and Pueblo peoples we know that no major alterations have in fact occurred. The social fabric of those societies is fundamentally the same today as it was in the late 1400s and early 1500s, though on a reduced and nonurban demographic base and with reduced social self-determination. The Taíno, we also know, did not survive even as a tribal entity. Only the ethnically pluralistic Mississippian social systems saw signi¤cant modi¤cation. From archaeological evidence we know that the Mississippian Caddoan, Natchez, Tunica, and early Muskogean peoples of the era a.d. 1000– 1400 all had highly individualistic, hierarchical, IIB dualistic social systems in which rank was based on genealogical lineage and membership in dual social groups (moieties). With emphasis on the social role of the female strongly implied by the numerous archaeologically recovered stone ceremonial¤gurines of females, it is clear, too, that those societies were matri-oriented (see, for example, Emerson 1997:193–223). When we look at the social systems of these peoples today, however, we see that while all are still matri-oriented and some of the Caddoan peoples still retain a dualistic IIB social system, other Caddoan groups, as well as the historically known Natchez and all of 13 Hemispheric-Internal Relationships in the Twenty-¤rst Century TheInnerDesign the Muskogean peoples, are now characterized by a type III trinary social system. By the mid-1500s the large dualistic urban settlements of the Classic Mississippian period had long been abandoned, replaced by smaller, less highly organized settlements typi¤ed by the towns of the Natchez and the Muskogean peoples. The replacement of dualistic social systems by trinary systems implies the end point of gradual, ongoing modulation over a very long period of time. The precise nature of such long-term change in this case is not known, though it may well be attributed to gradual alteration in rules of marital residence and the concomitant nature of family households, which do seem to be re®ected in changes through time in domestic household types as seen archaeologically (Rogers and Smith 1995). The Americas’ unitary, dualistic, and trinary societies today are shown in the map in Figure 18. The relationships that link and separate them from one another form the discussion of the remainder of this chapter. Trinary Societies Though the twenty-¤rst-century New World would be dominated demographically and in area by unitary societies, as Figure 18 indicates, the more politically accommodating trinary societies would account for a large share of the New World population north of Mexico. As in the 1500s, they would continue to dominate the North American midlands, the Southeast, and signi ¤cant portions of the Southwest. Many would be small independent tribal groups, but some, through confederation, as suggested below, would show considerable areal spread, demographic size, and concomitant power. In Central and South America, other than the Taíno in the Caribbean and in Amazonian Brazil, trinary groups have always been fewer. The most well known native American trinary polity is certainly that of the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona. These ethnically diverse societies joined together in a kind of confederacy for self-protection against their Navajo and Apache neighbors sometime in the 1400s. That this polity would have lasted regardless of a European or Anglo-American presence is indisputable , and the United Pueblos would have been one of the major trinary policy makers in a twenty-¤rst-century America. The largest and most dominant trinary polity in the hemisphere today, however, would unquestionably be that governed by the Muskogean peoples of the Southeast. In the 1500s the Muskogean-speaking Coosa chiefdom of northwest Georgia and northeast Alabama—inheritors of the social, political, and religious beliefs and practices of the Classic Mississippian tradition—had 142 part iv. the future of the past already forged a politically and ceremonially powerful confederation of Creekspeaking towns and was on its way to controlling a signi¤cant geographical area (Hudson 1990:214–230, Hudson et al. 1985, Smith 1987:129–142, Smith 2001, Swanton 1946:124–126, 153–154). Given the political...

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