The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (14 page)

Chiefs, as mentioned earlier, owned the large houses in which dozens of people spent the winter. Within these houses, each person’s sitting place reflected his or her rank. Individuals of highest rank slept in the rear of the house, an area made private by the erection of a decorated screen. From the perspective of an observer standing in the rear of the house and facing the door, the chief occupied the right rear corner; the person second in rank occupied the left rear corner. The front corners were for the third- and fourth-ranked persons, while the fifth and sixth in rank occupied the middle of the house. Slaves usually slept just inside the front door, the most vulnerable area in case of an enemy raid (
Figure 7
).

How Might Nootka Inequality Have Been Created?

Archaeologists working in the Nootka region face a daunting task. Vancouver Island’s high rainfall can turn into mush plank houses, shingles, carved posts, and beds of ancestral skulls. In spite of these obstacles, dedicated archaeologists are searching for the origins of social inequality on the Northwest coast.

According to archaeologists Gary Coupland, Terence Clark, and Amanda Palmer, the large multifamily houses of the Pacific Northwest have a 2,000-year history. The McNichol Creek site in the land of the Tsimshian Indians, north of Vancouver Island, was occupied between
A.D.
1 and 500. Some of its occupants left behind artifacts of polished nephrite, a jade-like stone used for luxury items. More detailed evidence was recovered at the Ozette site on the northwest coast of Washington, a summer village occupied from 60
B.C.
to
A.D.
1510. The Ozette houses were large—up to 66 by 39 feet—and the quantity of luxury goods varied within and between houses.

FIGURE 7.
   The Nootka lived in large, multifamily plank houses that could exceed 70 feet in length. In these houses the location of sleeping areas reflected the hereditary rank of each resident. The chief, or top-ranked resident, slept in the right rear, behind a decorated screen. The second-ranked resident slept in the left rear. The remaining residents were distributed as shown in the drawing. Note that slaves were required to sleep near the entrance, the most vulnerable area in case of an enemy raid.

House 1 at Ozette had evidently sheltered at least 11 families, each with its own discrete hearth area. From the perspective of an observer standing at the rear of the house and facing the door, it was in the right rear corner that archaeologists found the highest density of luxury items. The second-highest density came from the left rear corner. Fewer luxury items appeared as archaeologists worked toward the door, where the lower-ranking families and slaves presumably slept. The archaeological evidence, in other words, matches Drucker’s description of a Nootka chief’s plank house.

On the Fraser River plateau to the east of Vancouver Island, rainfall is lower and the preservation of archaeological sites is better. The prehistoric societies of the Fraser River, which had access to their own salmon runs, may have experienced a period of inequality between the years 800 and 1200. While the Fraser plateau evidence does not necessarily explain how the Nootka created inequality, it allows archaeologists to suggest one way that it might have happened.

Two large villages on tributaries of the Fraser River may provide the key. Archaeologist Brian Hayden began excavating the Keatley Creek site in the mid-1980s. Anna Marie Prentiss began excavating the Bridge River site early in the twenty-first century. Each site is covered with depressions left by the collapse of semi-subterranean houses, some small but others exceeding 60 feet in diameter.

Prentiss believes that social inequality may have been present in the region by
A.D.
400 but did not become pronounced until 800–1200. Three processes were evident during the latter period. First, the acquisition of luxury items, including polished nephrite, increased. Second, the Bridge River site grew from 17 houses to 29 houses, while the Keatley Creek site may have grown to encompass 40 to 60 houses. The third process was a reduction in the number of small houses, accompanied by an increase in the overall size of the largest houses. One possible implication of the latter process is that small households could no longer amass the resources necessary to be economically viable. As a result, their members were being steadily incorporated into larger households as servants or poor relations.

Prentiss and her collaborators believe that between 800 and 1200, a growing number of impoverished families were willing to accept a subservient role in wealthy households in return for food, shelter, and protection. In turn, more successful families sought to preserve their accumulated wealth by passing on their resources, luxury items, and intellectual property to their offspring. This would represent a significant change in logic from an egalitarian foraging society, where hoarding and refusing to share were anathema.

While she does not phrase the process in such terms, we believe that Prentiss is describing what anthropologists call
debt servitude,
or even
debt slavery.
The first step in such a process is to loan food and valuables to impoverished neighbors. The second step is to foreclose on the loan. Families who accept food and shelter from wealthy neighbors are in a poor position to deny the latter’s claims to luxury items and hereditary privileges.

Prentiss reveals that after 1200, the archaeological remains of salmon at the Bridge River site decreased. It is not certain whether this was the result of environmental deterioration, overfishing, or both. Whatever the case, both the Keatley Creek and Bridge River villages were eventually abandoned. These events remind us that even though foraging societies did occasionally develop hereditary differences in rank, there may have been inherent limitations to supporting an aristocracy on wild foods.

THE HISTORIC TLINGIT

Now let us move farther up the Pacific coast, to the panhandle of southeast Alaska. It is a rugged coast with deep fjords, bays, fast-moving rivers, and rocky islands. The Native Americans of this coast spoke a Na-Dené language in which Tlingit was the word for “human beings.”

The late Frederica de Laguna, who was both a social anthropologist and an archaeologist, estimated that there may have been 10,000 Tlingit in the year 1740. Unfortunately, by 1838 their numbers had been reduced to less than 5,500. Like the Nootka, the Tlingit built villages on sheltered bays in the winter and lived in hunting-and-fishing camps in the summer. Their winter villages featured plank houses large enough for at least six families and their slaves. Totem poles were erected in front of the houses to honor important ancestors.

Like some Australian foragers, Tlingit society featured two opposing divisions, called the Raven and Wolf moieties. Each moiety was made up of 30 or so clans whose members reckoned descent in the mother’s line. Clans were further divided into lineages or “house groups.”

Each house group claimed that it could trace its descent from a founding ancestor. In reality, however, the system was fluid. Lineages that grew rapidly might either split in two or become populous enough to declare themselves a new clan. Lineages that shrank below a certain threshold might be absorbed by a more prosperous clan. Recall that Prentiss and her collaborators have suggested a similar scenario for failing households on the Fraser plateau.

The lineages within each clan were ranked, and a Tlingit chief was simply the head of the most highly ranked lineage within his clan. His immediate relatives were a kind of aristocracy, identified by their hats, blankets, crests, ear ornaments, lip piercings, and tattoos. Lower-ranking lineages within each clan were treated as commoners but, as among the Nootka, could achieve renown through craftsmanship or bravery in combat. At the bottom of the social ladder were war captives who were kept as slaves.

The clans and their house groups owned the rights to good localities for winter villages, fishing-and-hunting territories, sources of timber, trade routes to neighboring societies, heirlooms, and a series of personal names. Of all their possessions, however, de Laguna argued that the Tlingit aristocracy favored their heraldic crests. These designs were woven on blankets, carved on canoes and totem poles, and depicted on wooden screens that divided the plank houses into living spaces (
Figure 8
). Crests could be based on supernatural beings, heavenly bodies, ancestral heroes, or totemic animals such as bears, sea lions, and whales.

FIGURE 8.
   Among the most prized intellectual property of chiefly Tlingit families were the heraldic crests and symbols bequeathed to them by their ancestors. Such motifs were embroidered onto the chief’s robe, carved on his house posts, and painted on the screens that provided privacy for his living quarters. In this drawing, inspired by two photos more than 90 years old, we see a bear and a salmon on the chief’s robe and a raven and a salmon carved on his house post. The painting on the cedar screen represents a Rain Deity surrounded by anthropomorphized raindrops.

Each family’s crest was said to have been acquired by a remote ancestor, and its owners chanted the history of its acquisition. Tlingit aristocrats displayed their crests at feasts, and guests from the opposite moiety were rewarded for serving as witnesses to the display. Some of the motifs on Tlingit crests were shared by their coastal neighbors, the Haida and Tsimshian. This is not surprising, since Tlingit clans carried on active trade with their neighbors and sometimes absorbed the remnants of shrinking Haida and Tsimshian lineages.

Tlingit houses, like their Nootka counterparts, were divided into multiple sleeping areas. The house’s owner lived in the rear behind a decorated wooden screen. In front of this screen was a platform, a place of honor, where the owner and his family sat. After the owner had died he was left on this platform for four days, dressed in ceremonial clothing, his face painted with clan symbols and his valuables displayed beside him.

If the deceased was a chief of the highest lineage, mourners sang continuously and his widows fasted for eight days. Eventually the chief was cremated. Those who built the funeral pyre and the wooden box for his ashes were given gifts. Sometimes a chief’s valuables, or even one of his slaves, might be added to the fire. In other cases a slave or two might be freed to symbolize the chief’s generosity.

As with Nootka houses, the sleeping area for slaves was just in front of the door. In addition to using their slaves as a first line of defense, the Tlingit kept their doors so small that an intruder would have to enter on hands and knees. Some villages were further defended with a palisade of wooden posts.

The Tlingit threw feasts equivalent to those of the Nootka, during which the host’s children had their nobility validated. Boys’ and girls’ ears were pierced for ornaments, girls’ hands were tattooed, and slaves who assisted in the ritual were rewarded with their freedom. Only people who had been honored in this way as children were considered true aristocrats.

De Laguna stressed that nobility came from the title bestowed by one’s father, not from the feast itself. As with the Nootka, in other words, the role of the feast of merit was to validate existing rank rather than generate it out of egalitarian life. The more feasts a man sponsored, however, and the more lavish his gifts, the greater his reputation became.

Accumulating wealth for a major feast was so daunting a task that some aristocrats turned to their poor relations, allowing them to work off debts by contributing items. The host’s wives also solicited contributions from their clanspeople, who belonged to the opposite moiety from the host. There was tension between rival clans, according to de Laguna, as they competed in gluttony and dancing. On the final day of the feast the host recited his family history and gave away furs, copper valuables, blankets, and even slaves.

Two types of inequality, in other words, were visible during Tlingit feasts of merit. The most important and pervasive type was inherited nobility. Aristocrats inherited titles and privileges from key ancestors and passed them on to their children in front of witnesses. The second type of inequality, less pervasive, was achieved prestige. Highly motivated aristocrats were able to sponsor more feasts and give away more gifts than others. Such displays enhanced a man’s reputation during his lifetime, but there was no way to transfer that reputation to his children; they were still too young to have achieved anything.