The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (53 page)

FIGURE 49.
   The civic-ceremonial center of La Venta, Mexico, grew to exceed 1,600 yards; Complex A alone measured 300 yards.

Like the Tongans, the chiefs of La Venta liked to erect stone monuments. Most of the stones they used were foreign to the coastal plain of Tabasco. Notable among these were basalt columns and blocks from the Tuxtla Mountains, 50 miles to the west. Archaeologists believe that the basalt monuments, some of which weighed 20 to 25 tons, had been hauled to the coast and transported by raft to the Tonalá River. The distance involved seems impressive, until one considers the 500-mile ocean voyages needed to bring stones for some of Lapaha’s langis.

The most talked about of La Venta’s basalt monuments were the four human heads found 50 yards north of Mound A2. Standing up to eight feet tall, these three-dimensional monuments depicted broad-nosed, thick-lipped men in helmets. The chiefs of La Venta have understandably been credited with commissioning these giant heads. We should bear in mind, however, that some of the most impressive stone monuments at Lapaha were gifts to the Tui Tonga from neighboring or subordinate chiefs.

Among the other stones brought to La Venta were flagstones of marly limestone, available 35 miles to the west, and serpentine from the mountains of Puebla and Oaxaca, hundreds of miles farther west. While we have no doubt that La Venta’s chiefs inherited sacred authority and claimed semidivine ancestry, a chief’s ability to negotiate for massive quantities of exotic stone was undoubtedly a way to achieve still further renown.

González Lauck believes that Complex E of La Venta, a cluster of buildings some 200 yards northeast of Mound A2, was residential in nature. This spacing suggests that chiefly families at La Venta, like those at Lapaha, lived just far enough from the ritual buildings to ensure privacy.

We would like to know whether La Venta maintained separate residences for sacred and secular chiefly lineages, as was done in Tonga. Additional stone monuments in the Tonalá and Coatzacoalcos drainages hint at such a division. Some seem to depict chiefs seated cross-legged, accompanied by symbols of sacred authority; others show chiefs with what appear to be military headgear, body armor, or war clubs; and still others show serene, priestly individuals presenting infants to an unseen audience. While these monuments might represent the multiple roles of one paramount lineage, it is just as likely that they reflect the division of sacred and secular authority seen in the most powerful rank societies.

Like Lapaha, La Venta was an artificially created, sacred landscape. Despite its size, it was no more a “city” than was Lapaha. It was a civic-ceremonial center that grew by accretion as new chiefly lineages were added to the old. It differs from Lapaha in one respect, namely, that the architects of La Venta were committed to maintaining one consistent astronomical alignment for their buildings throughout. This was less important to the Tongans.

Both chiefly societies created linear arrangements of plazas, mounds, stone monuments, and elite burials. Both imported tons of stone; Lapaha wanted it for the facing of its huge langis, La Venta for its massive mosaic pavements and stone fences. La Venta produced more three-dimensional stone monuments, though none were as big as the Trilithon built by the 11th Tui Tonga. Let us close with this lament: what a shame that we lack anthropological and historical data on La Venta society, comparable to Gifford’s data on Tonga.

FROM RANK TO STRATA IN HAWAI’I

Hawai’i is one of the largest, yet most remote, of the Polynesian archipelagoes. Archaeologists believe that it may not have been colonized until
A.D.
300 or 500. The earliest colonists showed up on O’ahu, Kaua’i, Moloka’i, and the “Big Island” of Hawai’i. There are reasons to suspect that these new arrivals had traveled 2,300 miles from the Marquesas Islands.

According to archaeologist Patrick Kirch, the earliest Hawai’ians came from a society that already had differences in rank. On O’ahu, for example, the colonists buried a nine-year-old girl with likely sumptuary goods. The girl’s burial also featured a red stain that appeared to come from dyed tapa cloth, which could be worn only by people of noble birth or their titled attendants.

Hawai’i’s earliest occupants had reached a fertile tropical paradise. One could grow yams, sweet potatoes, taro, breadfruit, coconuts, and pigs. To maximize access to resources, the Hawai’ians created resource territories called
ahupua’a,
each of which was shaped like a slice of pizza. The crust, or widest part, began at the ocean; the slice narrowed as one moved inland over the coastal plain, across the piedmont, and into the mountains. Each ahupua’a therefore included all the locally available land types and was set aside for use by a corporate, kin-based landholding group. The manager of each triangular slice was a hereditary chief called an
ali’i
(the Hawai’ian equivalent of Tikopia’s ariki and Tahiti’s ari’i), who was essentially the highest-ranking man of his lineage.

All five of the largest islands (Hawai’i, Maui, Moloka’i, O’ahu, and Kaua’i) had multiple rank societies. Smaller islands such as Kaho’olawe, Lana’i, and Ni’ihau rarely supported more than one chief and sometimes came under control of a larger island. For its part, the Big Island of Hawai’i was divided into five to seven districts (North and South Kona, North and South Kohala, Hilo, Ka’u, and Puna), each with its own chief. The most powerful were the chiefs of the Kona and Kohala districts.

Between 1100 and 1400, chiefly cycling in Hawai’i became as dynamic as that of the Kachin, Konyak Naga, Samoans, and Tongans. Most volatile were the relationships of junior and senior chiefly lineages. Despite having less sacred power, the heads of junior lineages kept accumulating supporters until they could overthrow senior chiefs by force. Some usurpers even killed or sacrificed their own half brothers. This is exactly the kind of fratricide that the builder of Tonga’s Trilithon had hoped to prevent.

Two key transformations took place in the late prehistoric period. First, Hawai’ian chiefs began marrying their own sisters and half sisters, whose levels of mana ensured the high rank of their offspring. They revised Hawai’ian cosmology to indicate that such sibling marriage was legitimate, since the gods from whom the chiefs descended had married their siblings as well.

The second transformation created true social strata. Like Tonga, early Hawai’i had a continuum of rank from high chiefs, to lesser chiefs, to landed gentry, to landless commoners, and so on. What the Hawai’ian chiefs did was eliminate the landed gentry by declaring all garden land the property of major chiefs. The result was two de facto strata, the
ali’i
(hereditary nobility) and the
maka’ainana
(commoners), with a gap between them that had formerly been bridged by the landed gentry. From that point on, Hawai’ian chiefs would use garden land to reward their allies and deny their rivals.

Hawai’i’s creation of a landless commoner class reminds us that the worst inequality results not from the granting of new privileges to the people on top but from the removal of existing privileges from the people on the bottom.

From 1450 onward, the details of Hawai’ian society become richer. For one thing, we have the oral histories of the Hawai’ians themselves, compiled by authors such as Samuel Kamakau, Kathleen Mellen, and Herbert Gowen. For another, we have research by archaeologists such as Patrick Kirch. We have, in addition, theoretical frameworks for Hawai’ian society provided by social anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, Valerio Valeri, and Irving Goldman. We draw on all those authors in this chapter and the next.

In late prehistoric Hawai’i, stratification was justified on the grounds that commoners had merely descended from human lineage founders, while the genealogies of the ali’i went back to the Sky God and Earth Goddess. Goldman stresses, however, that the ali’i were not considered a monolithic class; their vocabulary reflected almost a dozen internal gradations like those of European nobility. The offspring of sibling marriages between the highest ali’i were called
niaupio
and were considered semidivine. Subordinates prostrated themselves not only before these high chiefs but even before displays of their sumptuary goods. Under penalty of death, no one was allowed to handle a high chief’s garments or cast a shadow on his possessions. We consider a curtsy before the Queen of England an act of obeisance, but it pales in comparison to the acts demanded by niaupio.

The offspring of a niaupio was merely a
pio.
The offspring of a niaupio or pio man and a woman from a junior chiefly line was called
wohi.
The offspring of a niaupio or pio woman and a man from a junior chiefly line was called
papa.
From that point on, titles continued to decline in prestige until they reached persons of mixed ali’i/maka’ainana descent (for example, the child of a chief and his commoner concubine). Even though the latter were not noble, they were treated with more respect than the average commoner.

To paraphrase Kirch, Hawai’ian society now consisted of a multilevel pyramid of ali’i of different titles, superimposed on a permanent underclass of commoners that worked the land and paid tribute to its hereditary lords. The tribute paid to paramount chiefs included pigs, dogs, chickens, tapa cloth, pearls, ivory, and the feathers of tropical birds. Payment of tribute was timed to coincide with a harvest ceremony, making it more palatable by placing it in the context of religious ritual.

Below the Hawai’ian paramount chiefs, or
ali’i-ai-moku,
were
ali’i-ai-ahupua’a,
subchiefs who ruled the pizza-slice strips running from the mountains to the sea. Below them were stewards called
konohiki,
minor nobles who directly managed the gardens and fish ponds. These officials gave Hawai’i an administrative hierarchy of at least three levels, considered typical of the most powerful chiefly societies.

Religion and Politics in Hawai’i

The escalation of inequality in protohistoric Hawai’i affected religious roles as well. Early Hawai’ian society, like that of Tikopia, had a transitional mix of men’s houses, shrines, and temples. Just as in Tonga, priests had traditionally come from families specializing in ritual expertise. As competition and usurpation increased, however, so did the need for priestly legitimization of a ruler’s genealogical credentials. Oral history records that Liloa, a chief of the Big Island in 1420, bribed a cooperative priest to legitimize him with an offer of chiefly land. Liloa is also believed to be the first paramount chief to split his inheritance, granting his firstborn son control of the land while his second son was given religious authority.

By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Hawai’ians were building temples called
heiaus,
which stood on stone masonry platforms. Most early heiaus were dedicated to agriculture, but Kirch describes at least one such structure that was rebuilt as a
luakini,
or war temple, and dedicated to human sacrifice. The priests serving in these temples were drawn from both social classes. Minor priests were still commoners, but the high priests or
kahuna nui
(“big kahunas”) were drawn from the ranks of nobles.

Admit it. All your life you have heard the phrase “the big kahuna” and never knew what it meant until now.

War and Politics in Hawai’i

In Hawai’i, as on Tonga, armed conflict was used for both political usurpation and territorial conquest. So great was the role of toa that it created “nobles by command” like those of Colombia’s Cauca Valley. Each paramount chief was a titular commander in chief. He referred to himself metaphorically as “the head”; his subchiefs were his “shoulders and chest”; the priests were his “right hand”; his spokesman/minister was his “left hand”; his warriors were his “right foot”; the farmers who worked the gardens of his chiefdom were his “left foot.” Renowned warriors received grants of land and were allowed to marry women who outranked them.

Honaunau: Kona’s Lapaha

In 1475 the paramount chief of the Kona district on the Big Island created his own civic-ceremonial enclosure, 715 feet long and 404 feet wide. Naturally defended by the ocean on its north and west sides, the Honaunau enclosure was protected on the east and south by a wall 12 feet high and 330 yards long. Like Lahapa on Tonga, Honaunau grew by accretion and included several temples. One of these temples, Hale-o-Keawe, played a role similar to that of a Tongan burial mound: it preserved the remains of past Kona chiefs. A larger temple, called Ale’ale’a, underwent six renovations after its original construction.

One major difference between Honaunau and Lapaha was that Kona’s chiefs did not live permanently at the civic-ceremonial center. During the year, Kirch reveals, Hawai’ian chiefs moved from district to district within their chiefly territories, so that the burden of tribute and corvée labor would be evenly distributed among their subjects. This behavior tells us that chiefs were expensive to support and helps explain why they needed to keep adding followers through conquest.