The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (8 page)

THREE

Ancestors and Enemies

Among clanless foragers like the Basarwa and Hadza, homicide was an individual matter. The assassin might be killed by his own relatives or a member of the victim’s family. In other cases, the perpetrator might go into hiding, while his relatives placated the victim’s relatives with food and valuables.

An important change in social logic, however, took place with the formation of clans: a kind of “us versus them” worldview seems to have been created. If someone from Clan A murdered someone from Clan B, it was considered a crime against the victim’s entire clan. This required a group response. As the result of a principle Raymond Kelly calls “social substitutability,” Clan B could avenge its member’s death by killing anyone from Clan A, even women or children who were innocent of the original murder. Sometimes, in fact, merely doing something that Clan B interpreted as an insult—trespassing on their territory, for example—could get members of Clan A killed.

How far back can “social substitutability” be detected in the archaeological record? The answer is as far back as the late Ice Age, a time when other evidence for clans or ancestor-based descent groups was accumulating.

JEBEL SAHABA

Our oldest archaeological evidence for group violence comes from the Nile Valley. Jebel Sahaba is a sandstone mesa to the east of the river, two miles from Wadi Halfa. At the base of the mesa, archaeologist Fred Wendorf found a late Ice Age cemetery. This was an area where, as at Wadi Kubbaniya, foragers relied heavily on seasonally flooded embayments, places where catfish and tilapia gathered and dense mats of purple nut grass grew.

Some 15,000 years ago, several different groups of foragers occupied that stretch of the Nile. Each of these groups could be distinguished by its style of stone tools, like the two groups identified by Wilmsen at Lindenmeier. But while the two Lindenmeier groups seem to have coexisted peacefully, it is clear that the groups competing for Nile embayments did not.

The cemetery at Jebel Sahaba contained 58 skeletons of men, women, and children. Twenty-four of the skeletons showed signs of violence. Some 116 flint artifacts, the majority of them parts of spears or arrows, had entered the bodies of these people; in some cases, they remained embedded in the skeleton. Some victims had literally been riddled with arrows, while others had old, healed wounds that would suggest a history of violent injury. Included were defensive fractures of the forearm, broken collarbones, and an arrow point in one man’s hip.

Examples of overkill were frequent. A middle-aged man, Burial 21, had been hit with 19 flints; projectiles were found in the top of his pelvis, his forearm, his lower leg, his rib cage, and the base of his neck. One young woman, Burial 44, had been hit with 21 flints; three of these were probably the barbs of a spear that penetrated her face and reached the base of her skull. Nor were children spared. Two youngsters interred together, Burials 13 and 14, had flints in their neck vertebrae, each probably representing a
coup de grâce.

According to Kelly, armed conflict among groups with clans falls into one of two categories: confrontation and ambush. Confrontation takes place between all-male war parties, and there is no element of surprise. Ambush, on the other hand, often kills unsuspecting men, women, and children. Kelly considers Jebel Sahaba clear evidence for ambush. He describes several victims as having been “pincushioned” with arrows fired by multiple enemies, a common phenomenon in ambushes.

Wendorf agrees with Kelly and suspects that two factors led to a history of ambushes at Jebel Sahaba. First, the Nile embayments of that era would have been rich but circumscribed environments, surrounded by desert. Second, there were several groups of people competing for the fish and nut grass of each embayment, apparently ready to defend them with violence if necessary.

Ambushes of this kind are too small-scale to be considered war, but they can be nasty, and once begun they can turn into blood feuds that can last for years. While blood feuds tend to arise with clans, there are exceptions to this rule of thumb. In areas of rich resources like those of the tropical Andaman Islands, described later, even clanless foragers could “afford to make enemies of their neighbors,” as Kelly puts it. In the case of Jebel Sahaba, however, we believe that we are dealing with societies with clans. One reason is that the site was a cemetery.

To be sure, even Neanderthals sometimes buried their dead. Only at later sites like Jebel Sahaba, however, do we see actual cemeteries created so that multiple generations of men, women, and children from the same social unit could be laid to rest together. In an era without written deeds, creating a cemetery allowed foragers to lay claim to a rich embayment by arguing that their ancestors had been buried there since time began. It was their way of saying, “We were here first.”

THE ANDAMAN ISLANDERS

The Andaman Islands are located in the tropical Bay of Bengal. They were colonized by hunters and gatherers thousands of years ago, perhaps by watercraft from Burma (modern Myanmar).

When first contacted by Western explorers, the foragers of the Andamans did not have permanent social groups larger than the extended family. In spite of this, they displayed some of the behaviors characteristic of larger-scale societies. They built bachelors’ huts for unmarried youths and reserved special types of burials for highly respected elders. They also engaged in ambushes like those of societies with clans. Some anthropologists think that this group violence was permitted by the islands’ rich food resources, which made it less crucial to stay on good terms with one’s neighbors.

Anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown visited the Andaman Islanders from 1906 to 1908. He learned that there had once been 5,000 of these foragers living on the largest island, which covered 1,660 square miles. By the 1920s, only 800 of them were left.

The nuclear family was the basic unit of Andaman society, but with this unusual twist: many children were adopted, usually around age ten, by friends. A family would adopt as many children as they could support, allowing the biological parents to visit their children often. At puberty, a boy left home to share a bachelors’ hut with other youths, but he remained obedient to both his biological and adoptive parents. Clearly, on the Andamans it
did
“take a village to raise a child.”

The group sharing a camp might consist of 20 to 50 individuals, but with an interesting architectural dichotomy. Inland groups created a beehive-shaped communal house, called a
bud,
by packing every family’s shelter into a circle so tight that all of it could be roofed over with mats. During the dry season, when no roof was needed to protect them from rain, families dispersed into open-air camps, or rockshelters. Coastal groups, on the other hand, made camps like those of the Basarwa. They arranged their small shelters in a circle, surrounding an open space used for bonfires or dances (
Figure 3, top
).

As with many foragers, there was a protocol to be followed. Each woman owned the wild yams she had collected and reserved them for her immediate family. A big fish belonged to the man whose harpoon killed it. A wild pig belonged to the man whose arrow struck it first, with this exception: when a young, unmarried man killed a pig, its meat would be distributed by an older hunter, with the choice parts going to senior men.

FIGURE 3.
   Traditional foragers on the Andaman Islands arranged their huts in a circle or an oval, surrounding a space left open for dancing. The settlement might include a bachelors’ hut and a public cooking area. Andaman Islanders regularly saved skulls and other skeletal parts from their ancestors, a behavior that can be detected in many of the earliest prehistoric villages in other parts of the world.

This deference to one’s elders was typical of Andaman society. Terms of respect equivalent to “Sir” and “Lady” were used by young people when addressing elders. Seniority, therefore, was a source of unequal treatment, and this inequality extended to reciprocal gift-giving. The Islanders had a system like the hxaro of the !Kung, but when an older man received a gift from a younger man, his reciprocal gift could be of lesser value.

Each of the 13 ethnic groups in the Andamans deferred to a group of elders called
maiola.
Each also had an informal headman called a
maia igla.
Despite being groomed for the position for years, the maia igla had no real authority, only the power of persuasion. His wife had similar influence among the women of her group.

Younger men performed tasks for the headman, waiting their turn to be elders. The position of maia igla did not automatically pass from father to son, but the grown son of a deceased headman would be given preference if he was highly respected. To earn respect he needed to be generous and kind, slow to anger, and skilled at both hunting and combat. Such a man was referred to as
er-kuro,
“big,” a term used frequently in larger-scale societies.

Group Violence

During Radcliffe-Brown’s stay in the Andamans, he found that two of the 13 ethnic groups—the inland Jarawa and the coastal Aka-Bea—had become mortal enemies. Raymond Kelly, who has restudied the Andaman information, traces their hostilities to the period between 1792 and 1858, when the Aka-Bea took away territory from the Jarawa. After that, whenever foragers of one group came upon their enemies hunting pigs, gathering honey, or collecting shellfish, the larger party would attack the smaller. So frequent were such attacks that the Jarawa, who usually went around naked, took to wearing bark armor to ward off arrows.

Because the Aka-Bea and Jarawa spoke different dialects, it was difficult for them to hold peacemaking ceremonies. In areas where there was no such language barrier, the Islanders did negotiate truces. Any man who had killed an enemy took to the jungle for months of ritual purification; in his absence, the women of both groups arranged for the other men to dance and hunt together, ending hostilities for a time.

Despite having no clans, the Andaman Islanders displayed several behaviors typical of societies with clans. One of these was the painful ordeal of deliberate scarring at initiation, which was thought to ensure toughness. A second behavior was the creation of the bachelors’ hut. While its original purpose was probably to make sure teenage boys did not sleep with teenage girls, the hut was also associated with ceremonies; for example, the bachelors often prepared ritual meals for the entire camp. Such bachelors’ huts may have been the prototype out of which larger-scale societies created the “men’s house.”

A third intriguing behavior was the unequal treatment shown certain elders after death. While most Andaman Islanders were buried in the ground, some respected and influential people had their corpses exposed on platforms in trees. Such elders were mourned until all the flesh was gone from their bones. Then—to the accompaniment of dancing—their bones were recovered, washed, painted, saved, made into ornaments, given away as presents, or worn to protect against illness (
Figure 3, bottom
).

Why do the clanless Andaman foragers show us so many ritual institutions typical of societies with clans? As we mentioned earlier, many anthropologists suspect that it had something to do with the abundant resources of the Andaman Islands. We doubt, however, that this was the whole story. We detect principles of social logic that allowed for differential burial treatments and exceptions to reciprocal gift-giving. This logic was tied not to the Andaman environment but to the premise that elders were more deserving of respect than youths.

AN INTRODUCTION TO AUSTRALIA AND TASMANIA

The eighteenth-century Europeans who arrived in Australia found it already inhabited. The descendants of the hunters and gatherers who entered Australia more than 45,000 years ago had grown to an estimated 300,000, divided among 300 groups called (for want of a better term) “tribes.” On the island of Tasmania, southeast of Australia, there may have been another 8,000 foragers.

Every Australian forager belonged to a clan. Many groups had a pair of still-larger social units, each composed of multiple clans. These paired units, called
moieties
(after the French word for “one half”), provided a kind of “loyal opposition” for each other in social and ceremonial situations. Society was thus built of nested units—families within clans, clans within moieties, each unit requiring its own rituals. What we do not know is whether nested units arose from clanless society or were an ever-present alternative, depending on local circumstances.

The Aborigines of Australia (a term they themselves find politically correct) present anthropologists with a number of paradoxes. On the one hand, they once lived in simple windbreaks, and many of their stone tools resembled those used 90,000 years ago in the caves of Mt. Carmel. Isolated for tens of thousands of years, they appeared to many observers to offer insights into life in the Stone Age. On the other hand, as archaeologists and anthropologists soon learned, the Aborigines had been undergoing continuous change ever since they arrived in Australia.