Chiefdoms and Chieftaincy in the Americas (review)

Chiefdoms and Chieftaincy in the Americas. Edited by Elsa M. Redmond. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. xii + 303 pp., foreword, preface, introduction, figures, tables, index. $55.00 cloth.)

Much has been learned about the ways chiefdoms were organized, their origins, and their ultimate fates from poring over historical accounts, sifting through archaeological sites, and observing contemporary peoples. This book, which focuses on the Americas, includes general statements on the development of chiefdoms (Elsa Redmond, Robert Carniero, and Pita Kelekna) and case studies of groups in South America (Elsa Redmond, Charles Spencer, William Sturtevant, Neil Whitehead, and Doris Kurella), the Caribbean (William Keegan and coauthors), and the United States (Winifred Creamer and Jonathan Haas, Helen Rountree and Randolph Turner, and Jerald Milanich).

These authors concentrate on the societies that gave rise to chiefdoms and the process of chiefdom formation. Redmond introduces chieftaincy to cover short-term leadership achieved by especially capable and charismatic people within the context of essentially autonomous villages. A chieftain is like a Melanesian big man, but without the latter’s geographical and cultural connotations. Chieftains exercise some control over their fellow villagers, the scope and duration of their authority are determined by the exigencies of various situations, and their reputation and influence extend to neighboring settlements. A chieftaincy is thus a society with recognized leaders, but their influence is short-lived, limited, and tied to particular circumstances. In contrast, chiefdoms are kin-based societies with social hierarchies headed by permanent chiefs, who inherit their positions of authority over the inhabitants of multiple villages. Chieftaincies came and went over time; only some of them developed into full-blown chiefdoms.

Whatever the merits of new sociopolitical categories, classification systems reveal nothing about the processes behind cultural change. What is really of interest are the circumstances that led to the crystallization of situationally advantageous leadership positions and intervillage alliances to form institutionalized social hierarchies, including chiefs, and permanent ties among dominant and subordinate villages. Carneiro refers to this transformation as the “flashpoint,” which is appropriate considering its likely suddenness. It makes considerable sense to argue that under the right conditions politically autonomous villages with presumptive leadership positions—Redmond’s chieftaincies—developed into multicommunity societies with fixed chiefly positions embedded within kin-based social hierarchies. But just what combination of circumstances gave rise to chiefdoms? Carneiro argues that whatever factors were behind chiefdom formation, they were few in number. Separate explanations are not needed in all of the many places where these societies arose. His position is arguably the most important and provocative point in this book. It is a challenge to look for ultimate causes, rather than being content with an uninterpretable hotchpotch of context-specific details.

Simplifying greatly, most scenarios for chiefdom origins invoke either warfare or economic relations, especially the role of chiefs as managers of critical resources or as major players in exchanges of highly coveted prestige goods. Contributors to this book emphasize the part played by warfare in chiefdom development. These societies arose in places where there was little chance of flight to escape severe endemic warfare. This position is argued strongly by Carneiro in an elaboration of his thirty-year-old environmental circumscription and warfare model. In short, the first chief was a highly successful and influential war leader who was determined to hold onto his position of dominance in the affairs of multiple villages located in places where the pressure on resources and harrassment by enemies could not be relieved by movement elsewhere.

Unfortunately, available data are far less than desirable. Historical records and archaeological markers of social, political, and economic structures are incomplete, biased, and often ambiguous. Thus two contributors to this volume, Carneiro and Sturtevant, can disagree over whether historical records indicate that some of the Tupinambá lived in chiefdoms. Moreover, the existence of chiefdoms can be obvious in historical accounts, while distinctive archaeological signatures are absent. Such is the situation for the early-seventeenth-century Powhatan of Virginia, as described by Rountree and...