Orderly Anarchy: Sociopolitical Evolution in Aboriginal California 9780520959194

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Orderly Anarchy

origins of human behavior and culture Edited by Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and Joe Henrich 1. Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture, edited by Douglas J. Kennett and Bruce Winterhalder 2. Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution, edited by Stephen Shennan 3. The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania, by Frank W. Marlowe 4. Life Histories of the Dobe !Kung: Food, Fatness, and Well-being over the Life Span, by Nancy Howell 5. Friendship: Development, Ecology, and Evolution of a Relationship, by Daniel J. Hruschka 6. Emergence and Collapse of Early Villages: Models of Central Mesa Verde Archaeology, edited by Timothy A. Kohler and Mark D. Varien 7. Technology as Human Social Tradition: Cultural Transmission among HunterGatherers, by Peter Jordan 8. Orderly Anarchy: Sociopolitical Evolution in Aboriginal California, by Robert L. Bettinger

Orderly Anarchy Sociopolitical Evolution in Aboriginal California

Robert L. Bettinger

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bettinger, Robert L., author. Orderly anarchy : sociopolitical evolution in aboriginal California / Robert L. Bettinger. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28333-6 (cloth) isbn 978-0-520-95919-4 (ebook) 1. Indians of North America—California— Civilization. I. Title. e78.c15b473 2015 979.4004’97—dc23 2014032694

Manufactured in the United States of America 23 10

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper). Cover image: Hunter and bighorn sheep from site CA-Iny-1375, Sheep Canyon, Coso Rock Art National Historic Landmark, Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, California. Photo courtesy of Far Western Anthropological Research Group, Inc.

To Ishi

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments 1. Introduction Defining California Jorgensen’s Western North American Indians Sample Regional Variation Orderly Anarchy

2. California in Broad Evolutionary Perspective The Evolutionary Fate of Hunting and Gathering The Rise and Fall of Agriculture in Western North America

3. The Evolution of Intensive Hunting and Gathering in Eastern California Intensification Studies in California Ideal Free Distribution Plant Intensification in Eastern California Introduction of Bow and Arrow Technology Effects of the Bow Hunter-Gatherer Group Size, Subsistence Risk, and Resource Pooling

x xi

1 3 4 6 12 15 16 21

29 30 32 38 44 46 51

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Contents

The Small Group Shift in Owens Valley Alternative Routes to Plant Intensification

4. The Privatization of Food Pinyon Intensification in Eastern California Family Band Organization Murdock’s Theory of Social Organization The Social Organization of Great Basin Family Bands Why Pinyon? The Generalization and Spread of Privatization

55 56 59 64 81 83 87 88 91

5. Plant Intensification West of the Sierra Crest

95

Appearance of the Bow and Intensification Acorns as a Resource Archaeology of Acorn Use and Intensification Medieval Climatic Anomaly

99 110 113 116

6. Patrilineal Bands, Sibs, and Tribelets The Patrilineal Band Privatization and the Evolution of Tribelets The Archaeology of Tribelet Development The Role of Property

7. Back to the Band: Bilateral Tribelets and Bands Demise of the Patrilineal Tribelet Patrilineal to Bilateral Organization Ascent of the Individual Emergence of Anarchy and the Yurok-Karuk-Hupa Household Group Cooperation in the Presence of Anarchy Discussion

8. Money Background Why Money in California? How California Money Might Have Evolved Money and Inequality

9. The Evolution of Orderly Anarchy Motivation Crowding Mind-Set in Aboriginal California Aboriginal Orderly Anarchy in Evolutionary Perspective Quantifying Organizational Authority

119 120 125 141 144 149 149 152 168 169 174 177 179 179 183 190 196 199 201 204 208 210

Contents | ix

Quantifying Individual Autonomy The Evolutionary Landscape: Results

10. Conclusion Money The Importance of Subsistence Economy Orderly Anarchy More Generally Hierarchy versus Orderly Anarchy: Alternative Adaptive Strategies Orderly Anarchy Now and in the Future

Glossary References Index Map section between chapters 1 and 2.

214 216 223 230 231 234 238 241

243 249 281

List of Figures

figures in text 3.1. Population trajectories for Owens Valley, the Great Basin, and the Central Valley / 34 5.1. Archaeological record of plant use in relation to changing population size in the Central Valley / 96 5.2. Cumulative frequency distribution of radiocarbon dates from Northwest California / 105 5.3. Acorn leaching / 112 8.1. A Hupa man measuring dentalia / 182 8.2. Bead frequency and Gini coefficient through time in central California / 197 9.1. Plan view (looking from the top down) of an evolutionary landscape with two dimensions of behavioral variation (organizational authority and individual autonomy) and two cultural fitness peaks (anarchy and hierarchy) / 209

figures in boxes 3.1. California–Great Basin seed beaters / 36 4.1. Payoffs for hoarders and sharers / 74

x

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due first and foremost to Peter Richerson, who has been my good friend and colleague since I came to the University of California, Davis, in 1980. Pete encouraged me over the many years that went into this book, read the manuscript in all its many versions, and made comments and offered suggestions and references. Running a close second here would be Joe Jorgensen, who contributed more to this work than just his Western Indians volume and Western North American Indians database. I benefitted from all of his work and from conversations with him about problems of mutual interest. I wrote this alone, but many of the ideas echo Jorgensen’s. Thanks are due also to the 6 outside reviewers, including Sam Bowles, Bill Hildebrandt, Terry Jones, Monique Borgerhoff-Mulder, Joe Henrich, and one anonymous individual, who read and thoughtfully commented on the manuscript for the University of California Press. Hildebrandt was especially insightful in commenting on the archaeological sections, the writing of which would have been impossible without his expertise. He did not let our friendship interfere with his judgment in pointing out obvious errors and omissions. Sam Bowles, like Richerson, has been my good friend and has encouraged me over the many years it took to finish this work. Of all the outside reviewers, Sam commented in greatest depth on this book’s various parts and the completed manuscript, for which I will be forever in his debt. Gustavo Neme, Adolpho Gil, and Peter Jordan contributed to the tentative world map of hunter-gatherers at a.d. 1500 that appears xi

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Acknowledgments

in Chapter 2 but should not be held accountable for its flaws. Last but not least I need to thank Lisa Deitz, who mapped the territories of all the California groups, based in part on work by Jackie Honig Bjorkman, who served as the cartographer for Victor Golla’s splendid work on California Indian languages. I need to thank Lisa Deitz a second time here for so carefully proofreading the manuscript. Finally I thank the host of UC Press people who helped shepherd this book through the editorial process: acquisitions editor Blake Edgar, acquisitions assistant Merrik Bush-Pirkle, project editor Kate Hoffman, freelance copy editor Julie Van Pelt, and series editors Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and Joe Henrich. I particularly appreciated the attention and good humor of Julie Van Pelt and Kate Hoffman.

chapter 1

Introduction

On August 29, 1911, a Yahi man who would later be given the name Ishi, turned up at a rural slaughterhouse in the northern Sacramento Valley, California, having lived the last three years entirely alone, the thirty or so years before that in a band of not more than fifteen or twenty individuals, successfully hiding from white civilization in the rugged volcanic mountains rising behind the modern town of Chico. His story, so eloquently documented in Theodora Kroeber’s Ishi (1964), testifies to the resilience of the Yahi, their ability to persist, maintaining their culture and technology, despite encroachment by much better equipped miners, ranchers, and farmers, by living in very small groups in very small territories. Yahi persistence is exceptional yet quite understandable as the result of a distinctively Californian evolutionary trajectory dominated by the development of small groups living in small territories. The evidence for this extreme insularity is overwhelming—obvious even from a language map. California accounts for only 2% of all the land north of Mexico, but nearly a third of the indigenous languages spoken—78 native California languages in all, 74 of them spoken by at least two, and usually many more, autonomous polities recognizing no political bond or social obligation (Golla 2011: 1). Popularly conceived as complexly organized, California sociopolitical organization is more aptly termed minutely divided, in the extreme into independent family groups, just as in the neighboring but environmentally impoverished Great Basin (Lightfoot 1

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Introduction

and Parrish 2009: 76–80). The linguist Golla found this comment from Powers telling. So contracted are their journeyings and their knowledge that they do not need a complicated system of (tribal) names. If there are people living twenty miles away they are not aware of their existence. In consequence of this it was almost impossible for me to learn any fixed names of tribes. (Powers 1877: 315; cf. Golla 2011: 4)

This went hand in hand with extreme parochialism in attitudes, culture, and worldview equally distinctive to aboriginal California; certainly the northern half, with its many small, inward-looking societies legendary for their “limited knowledge, understanding, experience, and tolerance of neighboring peoples” (Heizer 1978b: 649). Neighborly relations among the Coast Miwok illustrate this mind-set: “The Tomales people didn’t like the Nicasio people; the Nicasio people didn’t like the Healdsburg (South Pomo) or Petaluma people; the Marshall people didn’t like the Bodega people; and nobody liked anybody else” (Kelly 1978: 419). Scholars have recently been less interested in this small-group, isolationist tendency than in sociopolitical behaviors reflecting a more forward stance and appetite for expansion, power, and control. Inequality and sociopolitical complexity are the hallmarks of interest here, tendencies I believe to be overdrawn for much of California. In this volume I explore their antithesis, a sociopolitical downsizing and evolution of what I have come to call orderly anarchy, and the emergence of the extreme anarchies in Northwest California, where “social organization was marked by an almost unprecedented lack of organization and by extreme individualism and mutual distrust” (Goldschmidt and Driver 1940: 131). Environment and technology contributed to this process but did not decide it. They provide explanations in accord with the facts but not the chronology, suffering what might be called an embarrassment of time. Had hunter-gatherer evolution been an automatic response to technology and environment, the ethnographic California–Great Basin pattern would have developed much earlier than it did. That hunter-gatherer social evolution was halting and slow in California suggests a more complex evolutionary landscape, presenting difficult adaptive problems to which there were often multiple solutions (what evolutionary theorists term multiple stable equilibria), historical contingencies pushing hunter-gatherers sometimes in one direction,

Introduction | 3

sometimes another (Bettinger 1978b, 1980). It is easy to overlook this evolutionary complexity, and as a consequence the latitude for huntergatherer adaptive persistence, change, and expansion, often at the expense of agriculture, right into the late Holocene. Chapter 2 (“California in Broad Evolutionary Perspective”) examines the scope of these developments in broad evolutionary perspective, first for Holocene hunter-gatherers worldwide, then for hunter-gatherers in North America, western North America in particular. Chapter 3 (“The Evolution of Intensive Hunting and Gathering in Eastern California”) and Chapter 4 (“The Privatization of Food”) are about the mainly social, rather than technological or environmental, obstacles to subsistence intensification and how they were solved in California east of the Sierra Nevada. Chapter 5 (“Plant Intensification West of the Sierra Crest”) describes the same obstacles and how they were solved in California west of the Sierra Nevada. Chapter 6 (“Patrilineal Bands, Sibs, and Tribelets”) and Chapter 7 (“Back to the Band”) discuss the sociopolitical evolution and development of the patrilineal, and subsequently the bilateral, political organizations that evolved as a consequence of subsistence intensification, the ascendance of individuals and the family at the expense of larger, more inclusive organizations. Chapter 8 (“Money”) discusses what turned out to be the final stage of huntergatherer intensification in California, the shift from barter to money exchange, a populist and quintessentially Californian innovation that promoted anarchy. Chapter 9 (“The Evolution of Orderly Anarchy”) develops and presents anecdotal support for an explanatory framework for orderly anarchy grounded in evolutionary game theory; it then develops and applies a methodology for testing the anarchy hypothesis. Chapter 10 (“Conclusion”) briefly reviews and summarizes key concepts and the potential for and expression of orderly anarchy among other hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. The Glossary at the end of the book is meant to serve as a useful reference for readers unfamiliar with some of the concepts and terms used in the text.

defining california This book is about aboriginal California, by which I mean the groups holding territory within the modern boundaries of the state, excepting only the Oregon Athabaskan and Paiute groups holding small plots on the northern state border, which were excluded. Kroeber’s (1925) Bureau of American Ethnology California Handbook adopted this tack; the

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Introduction

Heizer-edited (Heizer 1978a) Smithsonian California Handbook did not, including only groups regarded as belonging to the California culture area, excluding groups holding territory in the state but deemed more closely affiliated with other culture areas. The Modoc and Klamath hold territory in California, for example, but were included in the Plateau Handbook, despite reservations of Plateau specialists (Stern 1998: 446; Walker 1988: 1) that they align more closely with California and the Great Basin. The obvious objection to modern boundaries is that they may not reflect aboriginal realities, defining samples that are arbitrary. Unfortunately, it is impossible to define any cultural sample that is not in some sense arbitrary. The problem is an old one—and to my lights insoluble. Culture does not routinely vary in a way that produces neatly defined, sharply bounded culture areas. The distribution of a single culture trait can be sharply bounded—present here, absent there—but not culture areas defined on the basis of many different traits. On this view, the modern boundaries of California suit my purpose, delimiting a distinctively Californian sample large enough to be interesting, small enough to be manageable, including all the ethnographic groups that anyone might want to consider “classic Californian” and enough of their neighbors to reveal the larger patterns and processes that both unite aboriginal California and distinguish it from other culture areas. This sample is statistically represented here by the 66 groups holding territory in California that are documented in Jorgensen’s (1980) Western Indians, derived from his Western North American Indians (WNAI) database that codes 435 variables for 172 groups, an electronic copy of which Jorgensen provided me in 1994.

jorgensen’s western north american indians sample There were so many different California groups that sampling was necessary. Jorgensen aimed to be representative rather than exhaustive, omitting many groups, lumping others together. Yokuts, for example, are represented by just 5 groups (Chuckchansi, Kings River, Kaweah, Lake, Yauelmani) in the WNAI database, against the 12 documented in the Culture Element Distributions series (Aginsky 1943; Driver 1937) and 28 dialect groups recognized by Whistler and Golla (1986). On the other hand, the WNAI Lake Yokuts are an amalgam of Chunut, Tachi, and Wowol, which were three politically independent, albeit neighboring, Yokut groups.

Introduction | 5

There are many important gaps in the Jorgensen California sample, including most of the Bay Area and Central Coast groups partially documented by Harrington (1942) and more recently by Milliken (e.g., Milliken 1995). Certainly the most problematic omission is the Southern Coast Chumash, considered by many (along with the Gabrielino) the most culturally “complex” in all of California. I do not know the Chumash nearly so well as most holding this view, but granting it to be true does not change that Jorgensen (1980: 2) did not code them and I am unprepared to so because my coding would lack the perspective of the WNAI sample, which was the product of five individuals, including Jorgensen, each of whom read the basic sources for all 172 ethnographic groups in the WNAI sample and coded all 172 for a specific subset of variables (Jorgensen 1980: 301–305). The noted comparative ethnologist Harold Driver, for example, handled the 45 technology and material culture variables. Coding the Chumash would require just this: reading ethnographies and related sources not just for the Chumash but for all 172 groups in the Jorgensen sample! Jorgensen and his collaborators worked hard to eliminate biases and cross-checked each other for reliability (Jorgensen 1980: 1–13, 301– 305). Nevertheless, because errors are unavoidable and because the coding of variables can be imprecise, California specialists are bound to have problems with the WNAI data. For example, the WNAI codes the Hupa as having political leaders, probably on the basis of the ethnographer Goddard’s statement that “each village had a head-man, who was the richest there” (Goddard 1903–1904: 58). The possibility for a different interpretation is raised in sections that immediately followed. His power descended to his son at his death, if his property so descended. On the other hand, any one [sic] who by industry or extraordinary abilities had more property might obtain the dignity and power. . . . There seem to have been no formalities in the government of the village or tribe. (Goddard 1903–1904: 59)

Most California scholars since Goddard have held that, along with the Karuk and Yurok, the Hupa lacked either political leaders or formal political organizations (e.g., Goldschmidt and Driver 1940: 104; Wallace 1978: 168–169). To make certain, however, would require reading all the same ethnographic sources and coding political leadership for all 172 groups in the WNAI sample. It seemed more reasonable to accept that while not perfect, the WNAI database is a valuable source of useful

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Introduction

information—certainly the best we have and are likely to have for a good while.

regional variation I partition the Jorgensen database in two different ways. When the pattern I am illustrating has to do with California alone (e.g., Table 6.2), I employ a sample consisting of all 66 Jorgensen groups holding territory in California, subdivided by the regions discussed below. On the other hand, when, as in Table 6.5, the pattern I am illustrating is a contrast between California and the 4 other traditionally recognized western North American culture areas (Northwest Coast, Southwest, Plateau, Great Basin), I use a California sample consisting of just the 56 Jorgensen groups that are traditionally regarded as belonging to the California culture area, and I assign the other 10 groups holding territory in California to the other western North American culture areas (Plateau, Great Basin, or Southwest) to which they are traditionally assigned, as indicated in Tables 1.1–1.7. Thus, the Modoc are included as part of the Northeast California region sample in Table 6.2., which is concerned with variation within California, and as part of Plateau culture area sample in Table 6.5., which is concerned with comparing California to other culture areas. It is important to keep these differences in mind. California itself I divide as shown in Map 1.1 (see map section between Chapters 1 and 2): into 7 regions (Northwest, Northeast, North Coast Ranges, Sacramento Valley, San Joaquin Valley, Southern Coast, Southern Interior) that approximate the divisions scholars have traditionally recognized (e.g., Baumhoff 1978) but that, as noted above, I have expanded to include adjacent groups that, like the Modoc, hold territory in California but have been traditionally assigned to other culture areas. Again, it is important to keep the distinction between these regions as defined by groups traditionally assigned to the California culture area and the larger area that encompasses outlying groups included in those regional samples here merely because they hold territory in California. As noted above, tabulations of regional variation within California (e.g., Table 6.2) include all groups holding territory in California; comparisons between California and other culture areas (e.g., Table 6.5) include only the groups traditionally assigned to the California culture area. Along the same lines, references in the text to a region of California, or the groups of that region, say the San Joaquin Valley, refer to that region proper, that is, just the San Joaquin Valley

Introduction | 7 table 1.1 jorgensen (1980) sample of 6 groups holding territory in northeast california. Jorgensen Number 51 52 53 112 113 115

Northeast, n = 6 Eastern Achomawi Western Achomawi Atsugewi Klamath Modoc Surprise Valley Paiute

Culture Area California California California Plateau Plateau Great Basin

note: Of these groups, 2 (Klamath and Modoc) are traditionally assigned to the Plateau culture area, and 1 (Surprise Valley Paiute) to the Great Basin culture area. When reporting variation within just California, the Northeast sample includes all 6 groups; when California is being compared with other culture areas, the Modoc and Klamath are included in the Plateau (not California) sample, and the Surprise Valley Paiute are included in the Great Basin (not California) sample.

geographic region and the groups within it, and not the broader area encompassing the outlying Great Basin groups I have included in the San Joaquin Valley region sample because there was no other place to put them. The location of the 7 regions of California are briefly discussed below, with tables listing the groups in each and maps showing their locations within that region, following the territorial boundaries provided in Golla’s (2011) work on the languages of California. For readers unfamiliar with California, I have included Map 1.2, showing the major geographic provinces of California. Northeast California Northeast California (Table 1.1, Map 1.3) is a heterogeneous mix of 6 groups representing the California, Plateau, and Great Basin culture areas. Physiographically the region is dominated by the Cascade Range and Modoc Plateau. Roots are more important, and acorns commensurately less important, than in any other region of California. Northwest California While traditionally assigned to the California culture area, the northernmost of the 11 groups representing the Northwest region (Table 1.2, Map 1.4), notably Tolowa, Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk, are often characterized

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Introduction table 1.2 jorgensen (1980) sample of 11 groups holding territory in northwest california. All are traditionally assigned to the California culture area. Jorgensen Number 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 44 45 46

Northwest, n = 11

Culture Area

Tolowa Yurok Karuk Hupa Wiyot Sinkyone Mattole Nongatl Eastern Shasta Western Shasta Chimariko

California California California California California California California California California California California

as the southernmost representatives of the Northwest Coast culture area. As discussed in the text, however, except for housing and certain crafts, these groups are much more closely allied with California. The region is dominated by the Klamath Mountains and major river systems, the Smith, Klamath, Trinity, and Eel, that supported major runs of salmon and steelhead, which, while probably more important here than anywhere else in the state, were probably less important than the acorn. North Coast Ranges These 7 North Coast Ranges groups (Table 1.3, Map 1.5) occupied what is today the California wine region. Baumhoff (1978) considered the area the most environmentally rich in California, with extensive acorn groves, large deer populations, and heavy salmonid runs. The North Coast Ranges groups, along with those of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, are typically chosen to exemplify the California culture area. Sacramento Valley The Sacramento Valley region occupies the northern half of the Central Valley, flanked by the North Coast Ranges on the west, the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range to the east. While the dominant geographical feature is the Sacramento River, the largest river with the largest salmon runs in

Introduction | 9 table 1.3 jorgensen (1980) sample of 7 groups holding territory in the north coast ranges, california. All are traditionally assigned to the California culture area. Jorgensen Number 43 60 61 63 64 65 66

North Coast Ranges, n = 7

Culture Area

Kato Coast Yuki Yuki Northern Pomo Eastern Pomo Southern Pomo Wappo

California California California California California California California

table 1.4 jorgensen (1980) sample of 13 groups holding territory in the sacramento valley, california. All are traditionally assigned to the California culture area except the Washo, traditionally assigned to the Great Basin. Jorgensen Number 47 48 49 50 54 55 56 57 58 59 62 67 119

Sacramento Valley, n = 13 Trinity River Wintu McCloud Wintu Sacramento River Wintu Nomlaki Valley Maidu Foothill Maidu Mountain Maidu Foothill Nisenan Mountain Nisenan Southern Nisenan Yana River Patwin Washo

Culture Area California California California California California California California California California California California California Great Basin

note: When reporting variation within just California, the Sacramento Valley sample includes all 13 groups; when California is being compared with other culture areas, the Washo are included in the Great Basin (not California) sample.

California, the region’s ethnographic economy centered more on acorn and deer than fish. I have included the Washo in this region (Table 1.4, Map 1.6) because they hold territory in California, abut Sacramento Valley groups, and fit better in this region than any other. As noted above, however, while tabulations of regional variation within California (e.g., Table 6.2) include the Washo as part of the Sacramento Valley sample,

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Introduction

when referring to the Sacramento Valley in the text, I mean just the Sacramento Valley proper and Sacramento Valley groups traditionally assigned to the California culture area, that is, excluding the outlying Washo. San Joaquin Valley Less well watered than the Sacramento Valley, the San Joaquin Valley (the southern half of the Central Valley) nevertheless supported a diverse and locally dense population—Lake Yokuts villages numbering over a thousand individuals, for example (Cook 1955). Eventually devastated by Euro-American contact, the aboriginal lifeways of San Joaquin Valley groups persisted longer than those of coastal groups to the west affected early on by missions. As with the Sacramento Valley region, I have included in the San Joaquin region 4 adjacent groups (Kawaiisu, Owens Valley Paiute, Panamint Shoshone, Chemehuevi) that hold territory in California but are traditionally assigned to the Great Basin culture area (Table 1.5, Map 1.7). Again, keep in mind that while tabulations of regional variation within California include these groups as part of the San Joaquin Valley sample (e.g., Table 6.2), when I refer in the text to the San Joaquin Valley and San Joaquin Valley groups, I mean just the San Joaquin Valley proper and San Joaquin Valley groups traditionally assigned to the California culture area, excluding the 4 outlying Great Basin groups. Southern Coast The sample of Southern Coast groups (Table 1.6, Map 1.8) is small and combines groups traditionally regarded as representing distinct subareas of California, specifically the Central Coast (or Southern Coast Range), stretching from San Francisco south to Point Conception; and the Southern Coast proper, from Point Conception south to the California border. The Salinan represent the Central Coast; the Gabrielino, Luiseño, and Western Diegueño the Southern Coast proper. In effect, my Southern Coast sample consists of any group in the Jorgensen sample holding territory on the coast south of San Francisco. As discussed further below, the absence of the Chumash from this sample is troubling, particularly since of all the coastal groups south of San Francisco, only the Chumash and Gabrielino were heavily invested in marine resources, an adaptation one wishes were better attested in the Jorgensen sample.

table 1.5 jorgensen (1980) sample of 15 groups holding territory in the san joaquin valley, california. Four of these groups (Kawaiisu, Owens Valley Paiute, Panamint Shoshone, and Chemehuevi) are traditionally assigned to the Great Basin culture area. Jorgensen Number 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 117 118 135

San Joaquin Valley, n = 15

Culture Area

Northern Miwok Central Miwok Southern Miwok San Joaquin River Mono Kings River Mono Chuckchansi Yokuts Kings River Yokuts Kaweah Yokuts Lake Yokutsa Yauelmani Yokuts Tübatulabal Kawaiisu Owens Valley Paiute Panamint Shoshone Chemehuevi

California California California California California California California California California California California Great Basin Great Basin Great Basin Great Basin

note: When reporting variation within just California, the San Joaquin sample includes all 15 groups; when California is being compared with other culture areas, the Kawaiisu, Owens Valley Paiute, Panamint Shoshone, and Chemehuevi are included in the Great Basin (not California) sample. a

Jorgensen’s Lake Yokuts are an amalgam of Tachi, Chunut, Wowol.

table 1.6 jorgensen (1980) sample of 4 groups holding territory on the southern coast, california. All are traditionally assigned to the California culture area. Jorgensen Number 80 81 82 89

Southern Coast, n = 4 Salinan Gabrielino Luiseño Western Diegueño

Culture Area California California California California

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Introduction table 1.7 jorgensen (1980) sample of 10 groups holding territory in the southern interior, california. Two of these groups (Mohave and Yuma) are traditionally assigned to the Southwest culture area. Jorgensen Number 84 86 87 85 83 88 90 142 140 141

Southern Interior, n = 10

Culture Area

Serrano Pass Cahuilla Mountain Cahuilla Desert Cahuilla Cupeno Mountain Diegueño Desert Diegueño Kamia Mohave Yuma

California California California California California California California California Southwest Southwest

note: When reporting variation within just California, the Southern Interior sample includes all 10 groups; when California is being compared with other culture areas, the Mohave and Yuma are included in the Southwest (not California) sample.

Southern Interior The Southern Interior sample (Table 1.7, Map 1.9) includes the only 2 agricultural groups (Mohave and Yuma) holding territory within California, both along Colorado River, both traditionally assigned to the Southwest culture area. Both groups are included with the Southern Interior in summaries of variation within California, and with the Southwest sample when comparing California to other culture areas. The region is arid, especially in the Colorado Desert east of the Peninsular Ranges. While acorn was important in the western part of this region, as one moves progressively east mesquite (Prosopis juliflora) and screwbeans (Prosopis pubescens) loom at least as large and for many groups larger.

orderly anarchy It is important to avoid confusion over my use of the term anarchy, which to some implies a state of political chaos, disorder, and lawlessness. I use anarchy in its literal sense to mean “without rulers,” referring more broadly to a system without a publicly enforced government. While anarchy sometimes leads to chaos, the point of this volume is that it need not, and in aboriginal California did not, evolving instead as an orderly anarchy, defined here as a persistent state of order and

Introduction | 13

productive social interaction in the absence of formal authority or means of enforcement. While use of the term in connection with aboriginal California and the Great Basin was suggested to me by my colleague Peter Richerson, it is not new to anthropology, going back to Evans-Pritchard’s work on the pastoral Nuer of the Sudan. The Nuer have no government, and their state might be described as an ordered anarchy. Likewise they lack law, if we understand by this term judgements delivered by an independent and impartial authority which has, also, power to enforce its decisions. (Evans-Pritchard 1940a: 5–6)

In his chapter on the Nuer in the edited volume African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940), Evans-Pritchard expanded on the concept, emphasizing that at least among the Nuer, anarchy did not lead to chaos. The Nuer constitution is highly individualistic and libertarian. It is an acephalous state, lacking legislative, judicial, and executive organs. Nevertheless, it is far from chaotic. It has a persistent and coherent form which might be called “ordered anarchy.” (Evans-Pritchard 1940b: 77)

That so many of us assume that anarchy means chaos suggests that while the concept of orderly anarchy has been around for some time, it is not as well studied or understood as it should be. Students of Native California have recognized the distinctive nature of anarchical systems there (e.g., Goldschmidt and Driver 1940; Kroeber 1925; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009), and scholars have discussed the development of anarchical tendencies within much more complexly organized systems on the Northwest Coast (Angelbeck and Grier 2012), but not nearly enough attention has been paid to building a theoretical framework for understanding how hunter-gatherer systems of orderly anarchy actually function and evolve, which is my purpose here. This project began with my Howard D. Winters Memorial Lecture entitled “Explaining Hunter-Gatherer Intensification in Western North America,” given February 2, 1995, sponsored by the New York University Department of Anthropology and Office of the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science and Social Sciences, honoring my late colleague Howard Winters. As parts of the argument developed, I incorporated them in subsequent papers, most notably “Why Corn Never Came to California,” a lecture presented at the Santa Fe Institute in 2003, which was never published because at that point the book that follows had started to develop. I did not know it would take another ten years to complete.

S

map 1.1. Regions of California. Dotted lines indicate areas of linguistic and cultural overlap.

map 1.2. Geographic provinces of California.

map 1.3. Northeast California group locations. Groups represented in the Jorgensen (1980) sample are labeled in larger, bold font than groups not represented. The heavy line indicates the boundary of what is traditionally considered Northeast California on cultural grounds, represented in the Jorgensen sample only by the Eastern Achomawi, Western Achomawi, and Atsugewi. As noted in the text, the Klamath and Modoc, traditionally assigned to the Plateau, and Surprise Valley Paiute, traditionally assigned to the Great Basin, are included here in the Northeast region sample because they hold territory in California adjacent to Northeast groups, not because of cultural similarities.

map 1.4. Northwest California group locations. Groups represented in the Jorgensen (1980) sample are labeled in larger, bold font than groups not represented.

map 1.5. North Coast Ranges group locations. Groups represented in the Jorgensen (1980) sample are labeled in larger, bold font than groups not represented.

map 1.6. Sacramento Valley group locations. Groups represented in the Jorgensen (1980) sample are labeled in larger, bold font than groups not represented. The heavy line indicates the boundary of what is traditionally considered Sacramento Valley on cultural grounds and what is meant when referring to the Sacramento Valley and Sacramento Valley groups in the text. The Washo, traditionally assigned to the Great Basin culture area, are included here in the Sacramento Valley region sample because they hold territory in California adjacent to Sacramento Valley groups, not on the basis of cultural similarities.

map 1.7. San Joaquin Valley group locations. Groups represented in the Jorgensen (1980) sample are labeled in larger, bold font than groups not represented. The heavy line indicates the boundary of what is traditionally considered the San Joaquin Valley on cultural grounds and what is meant when referring to the San Joaquin Valley and San Joaquin Valley groups in the text. The Kawaiisu, Owens Valley Paiute, Panamint Shoshone, and Chemehuevi, traditionally assigned to the Great Basin culture area, are included here in the San Joaquin Valley region sample because they hold territory in California adjacent to San Joaquin Valley groups, not on the basis of cultural similarities.

map 1.8. Southern Coast group locations. Groups represented in the Jorgensen (1980) sample are labeled in larger, bold font than groups not represented.

map 1.9. Southern Interior group locations. Groups represented in the Jorgensen (1980) sample are labeled in larger, bold font than groups not represented. The heavy line indicates the boundary of what is traditionally considered Southern Interior California on cultural grounds and what is meant when referring to the Southern Interior and Southern Interior groups in the text. The Mohave and Yuma, traditionally assigned to the Southwest culture area, are included here in the Southern Interior region sample because they hold territory in California directly adjacent to Southern Interior groups, not because of cultural similarities.

map 2.1. Projected distribution of hunting and gathering groups around the world circa a.d. 1500. Data are reliable for North and South America, less so for Africa, and extremely speculative for northern Eurasia owing to lack of systematic surveys. Areas indicated as “Mixed/Transitional” are either mosaics of hunter-gatherer groups and horticulturalists/agriculturalists groups (especially in South America) or characterized by huntergatherers in transition, in northern Eurasia by hunter-gatherers incorporating horses as a means of transportation.

chapter 2

California in Broad Evolutionary Perspective

It is easy to place the peoples of California in broad evolutionary perspective: they are hunter-gatherers. Excepting a few groups along the Colorado River, the peoples of California made their living exclusively by hunting, fishing, and gathering indigenous, nondomesticated plants and animals (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009: 124–125). As it turns out, Native Californians furnish a large portion of what we know about hunting and gathering as a lifeway. They make up 55 (16%) of the 339 groups in Binford’s (2001) exhaustive sample of ethnographically documented hunter-gatherers, for example. Australia contributes almost as many (54 groups), but Australia is almost twenty times as large. California provides what is easily the most detailed record of huntergatherers in what might be called a pristine state; hunter-gatherers living alongside other hunter-gatherers in an essentially hunter-gatherer world. In evolutionary terms, it is difficult to think about them any other way—hence this conundrum: traditional culture evolutionary theory has hunter-gatherers either adopting agriculture or being replaced by agriculturalists. This is what one sees in Africa and Eurasia, where there were only remnant hunter-gatherer populations at contact. This is not what one sees in California or indeed, North America, however. California was just one sector of a thriving western North American hunter-gatherer contingent that was just one part of a still larger North American hunter-gatherer contingent that was clearly doing more than just holding its own against agriculturalists at the time of Euro-American 15

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contact. This is obvious simply from the numbers. At contact, huntergatherers occupied more of North America than did agriculturalists (Map. 2.1; see map section between Chapters 1 and 2). This disconnect cannot be lightly dismissed; one cannot put the hunter-gatherers of California in evolutionary perspective without substantially reworking our evolutionary view of hunter-gatherers, beginning with the understanding that ethnographic hunter-gatherers are not evolutionary relics, that hunter-gatherer evolution did not cease with the invention of agriculture. Hunter-gatherer systems continued to evolve in ways that often put them on equal footing with agriculturalists, and sometimes at a definite advantage. I make this case twice below, first in fairly general terms for huntergatherers worldwide and then in a more detailed way for western North American hunter-gatherers.

the evolutionary fate of hunting and gathering The first modern synthesis of cultural evolution, the work of Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) (1877), preserved the very ancient and seemingly self-evident scheme of humankind progressing from huntergatherer (Morgan’s stage of savagery), to agriculturalist (barbarism), to organized state society (civilization). Morgan’s cultural evolution was unilineal, characterizing human development universally, and progressive, evolving by the successive replacement of inferior by superior traits developed in response to environmental or social challenges, each laying the groundwork for new kinds of organization with new challenges. Morgan’s and other similar models are no longer popular in anthropology (Brown and Price 1985: 436). Morgan remains a landmark historical figure, but progressive evolution is theoretically passé. Modern anthropologists interested in cultural evolution are more inclined to see evolution as Darwin would, rewarding chance favorable innovations that happen to arise from time to time, avoiding the teleology evident in Morgan’s thinking. The paradox is that, despite multiple cautionary tales and the generally sophisticated stance taken by anthropologists that evolution is neither directional nor progressive (RowleyConwy 2001: 64), textbooks routinely present a picture of world prehistory that is exactly as Morgan outlined. Beginning with early hominids, they discuss hunter-gatherers, the development of agriculture, and the evolution of more complex social formations, ending with state-level society. In short, Morgan’s “outmoded” progressive scheme

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correctly portrays the chronological order in which critical human developments occurred: hunter-gatherers first, agriculture next, and civilized states last in time. The reason for this progressive trajectory has to do with what are called evolutionary landscapes. Evolutionary landscapes are adaptive topographies whose peaks and valleys represent levels of fitness associated with different combinations of traits and behaviors; the peaks represent “good” combinations (higher fitness), the valley “bad” combinations (poorer fitness). Morgan must have imagined something like this when developing his unilineal scheme: humans start at some low point, proceed to the nearest peak as hunter-gatherers, and then move from peak to peak, negotiating the intervening valleys, on their ascent to civilization. Morgan’s theory, however, was teleological; he imagined humans could see this landscape fully revealed and thus develop the innovations needed to traverse it. His and many much more recent contributions of similar kind are mainly exercises in hindsight. If one already knows the layout of the adaptive landscape and the innovations necessary to negotiate it (e.g., invention of agriculture), theorizing becomes mainly a matter of imagining the kind of circumstances that would invite these innovations and developing models that produce these circumstances. In modern evolutionary theory, by contrast, the players are blind, unable to see peaks and valleys. They are forced to find a route to the next higher peak by trial and error experiments with new traits and trait combinations. These occasionally send some players down into an intervening valley, often to extinction, but occasionally to the foot of a slope leading to a higher peak. The topography of the adaptive landscape largely determines the direction and pace of this evolutionary development. If it is relatively smooth, with a single well-defined peak, evolutionary change will occur smoothly and relatively rapidly. The players will move directly to the peak and then randomly in small increments around it, the topography always correcting them back to the top. Evolutionary change continues to occur because they are blind, thus unaware they can go no higher. This is a system in stable evolutionary equilibrium; change is random and nondirectional. If, on the other hand, the topography is convoluted, full of deep fissures, and has many peaks of different height, evolutionary change will not be smooth; instead, it will halt each time a local peak is climbed or a deep fissure is encountered, waiting there until the proper combination of traits serendipitously evolves, moving it to the foot of a higher peak. Convolutions of the landscape will make evolutionary change

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nondirectional, following local topography this way and that, with many dead ends and much backtracking. In truth, if the landscape is at all complex, it will be difficult to know whether a system actually is in stable evolutionary equilibrium. A system may linger on a local adaptive peak for a good deal of time, experimenting with suboptimal innovations and retreating backward, in momentary equilibrium, until the right combination of traits and behaviors comes along, moving it to the foot of an adjacent but higher adaptive peak, where it will again linger. In such an adaptive landscape, with most systems in momentary equilibrium, the large-scale pattern of evolutionary change may not be directional but it will be progressive, moving from peak to successively higher peak. This is why the progressive component of Morgan’s socialevolutionary account of human development rings true: because it is. Since the end of the Pleistocene, cultural evolution has been progressive (Carneiro 1985; Giere 1988: 11, 131–132). Humankind has moved from lower to higher peaks—higher population densities, longer life spans, and so on—and it is unlikely that we have reached the highest one possible. The question at hand, then, is where ethnographic huntergatherers, in California and elsewhere around the world, fit in this scheme. In Morgan’s unilineal scheme, hunter-gatherers should all have gotten with the hill-climbing program and ended up on the same peak, but of course many did not. What stopped them? There is good evidence that the evolutionary progress of hunter-gatherers was strongly checked by environmental conditions that prevailed before the Holocene, the current stable, warm, wet, and carbon dioxide–rich interval that began 10,000 years ago (Richerson et al. 2001). The Pleistocene atmosphere was too carbon-depleted, and climate changed too rapidly from cold to warm and back, for hunter-gatherers to develop the plantintensive adaptations that characterize Holocene hunter-gathers, making agriculture impossible. Once these environmental barriers were removed, some systems moved quite rapidly, others more slowly, to a higher agricultural peak, but again many of the world’s people did not move that way at all. It is common to think that agriculture, once discovered, was destined to spread worldwide (e.g., Diamond and Bellwood 2003), but again the ethnographic record says not. At least not until very recently, when it was simply carried along in the global spread of a much larger cultural package. Just prior to the 15th and 16th century European voyages of discovery, roughly 10,000 years after the world’s climate had turned

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favorably for agriculture, hunter-gatherers continued to occupy a large part of the world’s surface (Map 2.1). The classic progressive evolutionary explanation for hunter-gatherer persistence took two forms. One quite rightly emphasized environment. Agriculture is not likely to evolve in, or ever spread to, arctic Canada or interior Siberia. Some scholars went much further than this, however, arguing that certain environments, notably those of the New World, discouraged the physical and evolutionary development of all species, including humans. However foolish this might seem today, early Americans took these views seriously. A good deal of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and much of his inspiration for the Lewis and Clark Expedition centered on countering this claim, which had been developed in greatest depth by the famous French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) (Chinard 1947). Modern environmental explanations are more credible, many having to do with climate and the presence of species suitable for agriculture. It was the geographer Karl Sauer who first argued, quite plausibly, that California remained nonagricultural because its summer-dry Mediterranean climate (Sauer 1936) was unsuited to maize, a tropical grass that thrived in the adjacent Southwest, and for a time in the eastern Great Basin, when summers were wetter. Kroeber (1939) found this argument compelling. Environment may also explain why many native western North American plant species were not domesticated. In California, for example, Blumler (1992) argues that annual grasses were typically too small to merit aboriginal experiments that might lead to agriculture. Similarly, Indian ricegrass (Achnatherum hymenoides), a key winter seed staple in the Great Basin, seems incapable of producing a domesticated, shatter-resistant strain that would permit efficient mass harvesting by sickle, in the manner of wheat in the ancient Near East (Jones 1990; Whalley et al. 1990). The problem with the environmental explanation is that postcolonial expansion proved that large parts of Australia, California, and Argentina are suited to agriculture, yet prior to colonization they were peopled almost entirely by hunter-gatherers (Porter and Marlowe 2007). The alternative to the environmental explanation was developmental: surviving hunter-gatherers had for some reason simply resisted progressive adaptive change. Though the argument was not phrased this way, in evolutionary landscape terms, hunter-gatherers had lingered on the same hunter-gatherer adaptive peak, as though in evolutionary equilibrium. Though they seldom voice it or put it down on paper, many

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modern anthropologists, including hunter-gatherer specialists, evidently operate from some version of this idea. Again, however, the data, in this case archaeological, suggest otherwise. The Holocene archaeological records of the hunter-gatherers of southern Africa, central Australia, and western North America (to name only the ones I have written about specifically in these terms) all show remarkable amounts of technological and social change that accompanied a shift from nonintensive, timeminimizing strategies in the early Holocene to intensive, energymaximizing strategies in the late Holocene (Bettinger 2001). Groups in these regions were clearly not in long-term equilibrium. They were exploring their adaptive landscapes, seeking out new peaks and negotiating the intervening valleys, as actively and as innovatively as were the hunter-gatherers that ended up domesticating plants and animals. They did not end up as agriculturalists because they were exploring a different sector of the adaptive topography that did not lead to agriculture. This hunter-gatherer evolution has been too much overlooked. Its study has been limited by the idea that the sector of the adaptive landscape explored by Holocene hunter-gatherers was smaller, with uniformly lower adaptive peaks, than the one explored by the groups that developed agriculture. Again, the persistence of hunter-gatherers on a major scale until very recently hints otherwise; too many hunter-gatherers survived in too many places for the hunter-gather peaks to have been uniformly lower than agricultural peaks. Study of the problem has been further limited by the idea that the evolution of Holocene hunter-gatherers, in their much smaller evolutionary sector, should recapitulate the evolution of agricultural systems in matters social, political, and economic. If agriculturalists evolved by developing complex social hierarchies and pursuing courses of territorial expansion through warfare (Carniero 1970; Flannery 1972), hunter-gathers must evolve this way as well. Certainly some western North American hunter-gatherers seem to have done so; on the Northwest Coast, for example. One of the purposes of this book, however, is to show that other Holocene hunter-gatherers, specifically those in California and the Great Basin, were organized and evolved quite differently. Taken together, the differences between California–Great Basin hunter-gatherers and hunter-gatherers in places like the Northwest Coast will show that the adaptive sector explored by western North American hunter-gatherers was large and complex, on a par with the adaptive sector explored by western North American agriculturalists, and that the evolutionary achievements of pre-Columbian

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western North American hunter-gatherers were no less grand than those of pre-Columbian western North American agriculturalists. To place hunter-gatherers of California within this evolutionary framework, it is necessary first to place the larger group of western North American hunter-gatherers in evolutionary relationship to agriculturalists. California played a key role in an evolutionary contest that pitted agriculturalists against hunter-gatherers, who were ultimately successful. On this view, California was not an evolutionary backwater. It was, instead, on the cutting edge of a hunter-gatherer trajectory that had outpaced agriculture and consistently displaced it.

the rise and fall of agriculture in western north america As do those about world prehistory, textbooks on North American prehistory generally adopt some version of the unilineal, progressive Morgan scheme (e.g., Fagan 2000; Jennings 1989): they start with hunters (Paleo-Indian stage), who become hunter-gatherers (Archaic stage), who become simple agriculturalists (Formative stage), who become developed agriculturalists with complex sociopolitical organization (Classic stage), who become quasi-state-level polities that maintain standing armies and levy taxes to pursue an agenda of predatory territorial expansion (Post-Classic stage). The order of presentation, again, is not a matter of theory but a simple timeline. Like world prehistory, New World prehistory largely precludes alternative treatment. The textbooks duly report a cultural chronology that is in fact progressive: hunting and gathering predates agriculture, which predates stable settlements and more complex sociopolitical organization. Textbooks are generally content to connect the dots along this trajectory, tracing historical connections (e.g., Basket Maker to Anasazi) without delving into large-scale evolutionary explanation, although progressive evolution by stages emerges clearly as subtext, mainly because it is convenient to divide by chapters in that familiar way. In the main, archaeologists have historically favored treatments that adapt the prehistoric record to suit Morgan’s scheme. The North American version of Morgan’s culture stage scheme was implicit in Kidder’s (1927) Pecos sequence and later in the Midwestern Taxonomic System (McKern 1939), but first set forth explicitly by Willey and Phillips’s (1958) Method and Theory in American Archaeology. As its early critics noted (Baumhoff 1963; Caldwell 1958; Heizer 1958;

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McKern 1956), the Willey and Phillips scheme makes agriculture and maize (Zea mays) the prime movers of New World culture history. The successful domestication of maize in Mesoamerica around 3550 b.c. (and a handful of other key genera, including beans, squash, and cotton slightly later; tubers and quinoa in South America) dominates this sequence and prefigures its outcome, culminating in the maize-fed PostClassic Aztec state of Mesoamerica and the Inca state of South America. Willey and Philips argued that they were merely reporting the facts, not advancing an evolutionary model, but Caldwell countered that they plainly were, the last two of their five stages of New World prehistory (Classic and Post-Classic) being represented only in Latin America. Clearly, Willey and Philips were weighing some facts (Latin American culture history) more heavily than others (North American culture history) in accord with Morgan. Caldwell was certain that hunting and gathering was much more important than maize agriculture in North America, which had followed an evolutionary trajectory very different from that of Latin America. That maize profoundly influenced North American prehistory is beyond dispute, however. Following its domestication, this remarkable tropical grass spread north from Mesoamerica reaching the American Southwest by 2050 b.p., where it crossed the Colorado River and kept right on going north, reaching northern Utah (at Steinaker Gap near Vernal) by a.d. 250, complete with irrigation systems and impressive subterranean bell-shaped storage pits (Talbot and Richens 1996). Maize agriculture quickly entrenched. By a.d. 1150 it supported settled communities with stone and adobe architecture not just in the Southwest proper (Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado) but north of there, from southern Nevada and Utah (Virgin and Virgin-Kayenta Anasazi) to northern Utah (Fremont). During these same centuries, of course, maize was also moving in the eastern United States, up the Mississippi River to the Great Lakes and along the eastern seaboard to Canada. A snapshot of prehistoric North America at about a.d. 1200 would show maize agriculture dominating most of North America, supporting many small sedentary or semisedentary communities along with the occasional spectacular multilevel chiefdom with quasi-urban centers outfitted with monumental architecture in the Mississippian east (Cahokia and Moundville). Textbook treatments usually stop here, having traced a complete evolutionary sequence in North America in which complex agricultural society rises from primitive hunter-gatherer beginnings. It is more convenient to ignore the next four centuries before Columbus and

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the Spanish entrada, during which these directional trends all reversed. On this count, the textbooks are not merely reporting the facts; like Willey and Philips, they are ignoring facts not in accord with Morgan. By the time Columbus arrived, the map of North America looked very different than it had at a.d. 1200. My concern is with western North America, but the situation in eastern North America is worth passing mention to show that the trend in which I am interested was continentwide. When Columbus landed, the major agricultural Mississippian centers of the east were deserted. The once-great center of Cahokia was a ghost ruin within what has been called the Vacant Quarter, a vast, depopulated crescent stretching from St. Louis east to Cincinnati and south to Nashville, perhaps 45,000 mi2 in all (Cobb and Butler 2002; Williams 1990). So stark was the contrast between the archaeological manifestations of Mississippian greatness and modest trappings of relic Mississippian peoples encountered by early explorer-ethnographers in areas south of the Vacant Quarter (e.g., the Natchez), people came to regard Mississippian as a “lost civilization,” fallen to barbarians. This was the source of the famous “Mound Builder controversy,” which pitted those who held that the mounds were the work of people ancestral to ethnographic North Americans against those who did not. The contrast in the West figured less prominently in the popular view but was equally dramatic. Although Puebloans figure prominently in the accounts of early Spanish explorers, when the Spanish arrived most of the formerly agricultural Southwest was in the hands of hunter-gatherers, Apacheans (ancestral Navaho and Apache) recently arrived from the Subarctic. Of the agriculturalists, there remained only the Pima, Papago, and Pai (e.g., Havasupai), dug in on the western and southern fringe, and the classic Hopi and Rio Grande Pueblos, islands in the middle, completely surrounded (Map 2.1). Replacement was complete north of the San Juan River, where there were no true maize growers at all; the ruins of Mesa Verde were now in the hands of a different group of hunter-gatherers, the Ute, a Numic-speaking people recently arrived from Eastern California as part of what is termed the Numic spread, the movement of Numic peoples from a Panamint Valley–Death Valley–Owens Valley homeland north to Nevada, Oregon, and Idaho and northeast and east through Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arizona (Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982; Lamb 1958; Madsen and Rhode 1994). Contact western North America completes a picture of nonlinear cultural development in which neither maize agriculture nor complex sociopolitical formations cap the sequence. Hunter-gatherer societies dominated

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north of the San Juan and west of the Rockies. In California their densities were higher than anywhere in agricultural North America except the Eastern Pueblos. South of the San Juan River, on both sides of the Rio Grande down almost to the Gulf of Mexico, were simpler and much more thinly spread hunter-gatherers, who sometimes traded amicably with agriculturalists but more usually made their life difficult by raiding them. Thus the hunter-gatherers of ethnographic western North America do not represent a relic evolutionary stage; hunter-gatherers had grown and spread. It is the agriculturalists—the Hopi, Zuni, and Pima—who were evolutionary relics. This is more than merely a matter of environment and cultural isolation. Hunter-gatherer persistence can be laid to these factors in the Arctic, Subarctic, Plateau, and perhaps even the Northwest Coast, but not in the Southwest, Southern California, or Southern Great Basin, occupied by hunter-gatherers who were acquainted with agriculturalists who grew maize on a large scale, but who did not do so themselves in any serious way (Lightfoot and Parrish 2009: 138). The systems of maize agriculture that were entirely displaced north of the San Juan River, and substantially displaced south of it, cannot be dismissed as crude and easily susceptible to invasion. They were as sophisticated and highly developed as 4000 years of trials, innovations, and experiments could make them. Multiple strains of maize had been developed by careful selection to tolerate cold and drought, and a variety of alternative organizational solutions had evolved to mobilize labor for field improvement and irrigation. Indeed, short of industrial-era innovations—including genetic engineering, mechanization, fertilizers, soil complements, and, of course, extensive use of fossil fuels—it is difficult to imagine how Southwestern maize agriculture could have been made markedly more productive than it was at contact. To view the pre-Columbian contraction of this highly evolved system of maize agriculture as an evolutionary reversal, however, would be to repeat the mistake of Willey and Phillips, who accepted the traditional wisdom that maize agriculture was the only route for evolutionary advancement in the New World. Maize agriculture was simply replaced by something better: intensive hunting and gathering. This is an evolutionary reversal only if one tries to argue that the Mesa Verde peoples were more highly evolved than the Ute who replaced them, which is at odds with the facts. Granted, the circumstances of agricultural replacement do leave room for argument. It is generally held that agricultural retreat from the Southwest was less the direct result of hunter-gatherer advance than a combination of

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climatic reversals and internal conflict. The demise of the Fremont and Virgin Branch Anasazi is often laid to climatic cooling and drought that together made growing seasons too short at elevations high enough to receive the required rainwater (e.g., Coltrain and Leavitt 2002). The same combination of cold and drought, this time fed by intense internal social conflict, is held to account for agricultural contraction in the classic Southwest, farther south (e.g., LeBlanc 1997). It might be argued, then, that the demise of agriculture in much of western North America demonstrates only that the limits of sustainable maize agriculture were farther south. However, the climatic downturn said to have unseated agriculture in the Four Corners area was relatively brief, lasting only a century or two. If climate change were the only thing involved, agriculturalists should have again expanded north when temperature and rainfall became more forgiving, as the Havasupai did on a small scale in reoccupying the Coconino Plateau after a.d. 1300. There was no general northern reexpansion of agriculture, however, because the area they had vacated had in the interim become completely occupied by spreading Apachean and Numic hunter-gatherers. That agriculture failed to make significant inroads against these groups in the remaining centuries before contact, indeed that agricultural groups like the Pima continued to withdraw before advancing Apachean huntergatherers (Jorgensen 1980: 148), tells us that Apachean and Numic peoples were behaving differently than the earlier hunter-gatherers, the ones who had either been displaced by agriculturalists (as in the Southwest and Virgin and Virgin-Kayenta Anasazi) or adopted agriculture themselves (as in the Fremont). Agriculture was again possible in most the places where it had been before, but agricultural groups could not compete with these new hunter-gatherers, with a different, more potent form of hunting and gathering. Other explanations are thinkable, of course. It is possible that the sociopolitical formations that had to be cobbled together in agricultural refugia, amalgamating many previously independent groups, included organizational checks and balances to prevent any one segment from dominating the newly formed whole. Conceivably these checks might have stifled the organizational innovations needed to permit group expansion following climatic amelioration. Steward (1937) addresses some of these issues in regard to pre-abandonment Puebloan amalgamations. Baumhoff (1963) presented a variation on this social structure argument to explain why maize agriculture did not spread to California,

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either before or after the climatic reversals in the Southwest. In contrast to Sauer (1936) and Kroeber (1939), who believed California’s Mediterranean dry summers prevented the dry farming, and thus spread, of maize, Baumhoff supposed that developed maize agriculture was possible (the archaeological Fremont and Anasazi routinely irrigated, as did all ethnographic maize growers in the Southwest) and could have supported more people per square mile in California than the ethnographic acorn economy, that is, the agricultural peak was higher than the acorn peak. He argued, however, that the transition from the native hunter-gatherer acorn economy to an agricultural maize economy would have been too costly. Bowles (2011) makes much the same point for early farming in general—that it was less productive than the intensive foraging it had to replace. Granting that might be true in general and in California particularly, it would then seem that maize agriculture should have spread to California not indirectly via diffusion but directly by the expansion of Southwestern groups with already highly developed maize economies into California, as had happened before in the Southwest and Great Basin. This expansion did not occur however. All of this assumes, of course, that initial agricultural displacement was due to climate change or social conflict among agriculturalists, not hunter-gatherer expansion. If hunter-gatherers had physically displaced agriculturalists, their continuing presence would by itself explain why agriculture could not re-expand. Either way, the failure of agriculture to again spread following a relatively brief climatic setback stands as a major evolutionary failure that clearly reveals the fundamental vulnerability of traditional Southwestern maize agriculture. Perhaps the problem was not with the crop but with the system needed to support it. Specialists argue that maize itself was never the backbone staple for some of the more northern agricultural groups, specifically the Fremont and Virgin Branch Anasazi, that it was for agricultural groups farther south (Madsen and Simms 1998). They stress evidence indicating that the more northern Fremont (especially around the Great Salt Lake) may have relied more on wild plants and game than maize, fielding a spectrum of farming and foraging strategies, emphasizing one over the other as conditions dictated (Simms 1999). At the very least, however, maize was central to the Fremont in this way: when maize disappeared, Fremont culture disappeared with it (likewise for the Virgin Branch Anasazi). Nothing of the identifying Fremont cultural repertoire (one-rod-and-bundle basketry, dewclaw moccasins, distinctive trapezoidal anthropomorphs depicted in rock art and clay

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figurines, and thin-walled gray pottery) persists in the Fremont core area much after a.d. 1250. So complete and abrupt a termination would be surprising, indeed improbable, for a cultural system with the technology, knowledge, and organizational flexibility to turn from foraging to farming and back again at will to suit local conditions. What is indisputably true about Fremont flexibility is that it rested on a backbone of maize agriculture; when maize failed the Fremont, foraging did too. Perhaps Fremont wild plant foraging targeted the very same, effectively Southwestern climatic regime and microenvironments that suited maize. If so, the same climatic cooling and drought that disrupted maize agriculture might have disrupted Fremont foraging in the same way. Alternatively, Fremont foragers may have specialized in the wild species least available to maize growers, thus the microenvironments least suited to maize and farthest from centers of cultural life, but tolerated this exile only because maize could be obtained from agricultural settlements in exchange, and quit the system when maize became too scarce. It is perhaps relevant here that the most foraging-reliant Fremont groups, those on the northern periphery of the Fremont area, lasted longer than their more maize-reliant counterparts, perhaps to a.d. 1550 (Nash 2012). That said, the record shows foraging alone could not sustain the Fremont system indefinitely. The abundance of wild plant foods in Fremont assemblages indicates that women made important contributions to subsistence, but either Fremont women were not as industrious, skilled, or resourceful or, what seems more likely, were simply not allowed to be as economically important as female foragers in Nevada and Southeastern California, who were the major contributors to hunter-gatherer subsistence economies that spread and prospered as Fremont systems collapsed. Numic and Apachean hunter-gatherers maintained and expanded their hold on formerly agricultural areas because their foraging was more intensive and technologically sophisticated than that of the earlier (preagricultural) hunter-gatherers, and competitively superior to that of remnant agriculturalists. In some places, agriculture supported higher average population densities than hunting and gathering, along the Rio Grande River for example, but even in these remaining agricultural strongholds, where conditions were presumably ideal, agriculturalists invariably augmented their diet with wild plants. These always made up more than 10% of total diet (Jorgensen 1980: variable 208) and were especially important reserve foods when crops were poor or failed. These same wild plants, however, were invariably the major staples of surrounding hunter-gatherers, who were better at extracting them, used

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them more regularly, and often preempted the best wild resource patches by making them primary places of residence. Once intensive hunting and gathering developed and spread, the dependence of agriculturalists on wild plants as reserve food probably prevented any real opportunity for agricultural expansion in western North America. Agriculturalists relied on wild plants to supplement their diet and as emergency reserves; the hunter-gatherers who grew maize used it as a dietary supplement but not as an emergency reserve (Steward 1970: 119–120). Thus, the competition between agriculture and hunting and gathering in western North America was waged on grounds inherently favorable to hunter-gatherers, a relationship quite stable at contact and unlikely to change barring some sort of catastrophic hunter-gatherer extinction. As the Numic homeland, California played a key role in this evolutionary contest between hunting and gathering and agriculture in western North America, and it is impossible to appreciate hunter-gatherer developments in California apart from this larger evolutionary trajectory. That agriculture never managed to spread to California was not due to isolation. California was always in more or less direct communication with agriculturalists, whose products occasionally turn up in archaeological sites (e.g., Earle 2005; Kroeber 1925: Plate 72; Ruby and Blackburn 1964). Agriculture never spread to California for the same reason that Numic and Apachean hunter-gatherers ultimately replaced agriculturalists in the Great Basin and most of the Southwest: California hunter-gatherer adaptations were superior (Bean and Lawton 1973; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009: 138). The relationship here was not static. Agriculture did not enter the Southwest at 1050 b.c., and the Great Basin at 50 b.c. full-blown. It evolved in sophisticated ways on a variety of fronts until its precontact collapse sometime between a.d. 1200 and 1400. Neither were the hunter-gatherer systems of California static during this time. They continued to evolve at a pace that kept them always ahead, as the eventual spread of Numic out of California shows. On this view, the contest in western North America was not between one agricultural system and one hunter-gatherer system, but rather between many systems of both kinds that continued to evolve. In western North America at least, the scope for evolutionary development among hunter-gatherers rivaled, and in the long run exceeded, that for agriculturalists. The ethnographic peoples within the borders of what is now California represent the culmination of these evolutionary developments.

chapter 3

The Evolution of Intensive Hunting and Gathering in Eastern California

The contact landscape of aboriginal western North America was mainly shaped by the emergence and spread of intensive hunting and gathering, often at the expense of agriculture. This evolutionary trajectory is undeniable in the Great Basin and Southwest where, having outcompeted, at least outlasted, their agricultural Puebloan predecessors, ethnographic hunter-gatherers were living among their ruins (e.g., Madsen 1994). The ascendance of intensive hunting and gathering is not so plain in California, however, because it developed in situ early enough to prevent agriculture from ever spreading there at all, leaving a California record that is hunter-gatherer from start to finish. The problem here is that whereas the forager-farmer distinction is qualitative (e.g., maize vs. no maize), the distinction between intensive and nonintensive hunter-gatherers is quantitative, thus more subtle. In a given setting, intensive and nonintensive hunter-gatherers will use essentially same suite of wild resources but in different proportions and quantities, a distinction that is often difficult to tease from the archaeological record available in most of California. This is unfortunate because the in situ development of intensive hunting and gathering, how it initially developed as opposed to how it later spread, is surely the evolutionary problem of more fundamental interest. Intensive hunting and gathering does not quickly nor inevitably evolve. It normally fails to do so, which is why agriculturalists from Mesoamerica, and later intensive hunter-gatherers from California 29

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(Numic), were able to spread into the Great Basin; and why intensive hunter-gatherers from the Subarctic (Apacheans) were able to spread into the Southwest. This is why the hunter-gatherers of California are so important; they seem to have solved an evolutionary problem that many hunter-gatherers did not, certainly not the hunter-gatherers pictured in traditional theories of cultural evolution. The blueprint for dealing with this problem is fairly straightforward: use theory to develop alternative scenarios for intensification and muster the kind of data needed to evaluate the alternatives. The theory part is relatively easy; a large body of existing work, including my own (Bettinger 1980, 1987, 2001; Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982), uses evolutionary and ecological theory to tackle the problem of hunter-gatherer intensification. The data part is more difficult because, as will become clear shortly, hunter-gatherer intensification is as much a social as subsistence phenomenon. It is just as important to keep track of how people distributed themselves over the landscape, where they went, how often they moved, whether they avoided or sought company, as it is to keep track of what foods they ate and the technology they used to obtain them. This is only possible if one has a well-documented regional sequence of subsistencesettlement systems that bridge the shift from nonintensive to intensive hunting and gathering.

intensification studies in california Studies of hunter-gatherer subsistence intensification in California have usually centered on the use of acorn (Quercus spp. and Lithocarpus)— the iconic resource of hunter-gatherer California west of the Sierra Nevada–Cascade cordillera (e.g., Basgall 1987; White 2003; Wohlgemuth 2004). For my purposes, however, the California case that better serves to introduce how intensive hunting and gathering initially evolved, and that most clearly demonstrates its evolutionary advantages over maize agriculture and nonintensive hunting and gathering, is not the use of the acorn west of the Sierra Nevada, but the use of the pinenut, or pinyon (Pinus monophylla), in California east of the Sierra Nevada, in Owens Valley and adjoining areas. Pinyon is admirably suited to understanding hunter-gatherer intensification because of the following: •

Pinyon was nutritious and productive enough to be important wherever it occurred.

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•

•

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Pinyon lends itself to a nonintensive brown-cone form of procurement, in which the pinecone opens naturally, dropping its seeds to the ground, which are then collected; and intensive green-cone procurement, in which the cones are harvested unopened and green, and then roasted and threshed to free the nuts, which are archaeologically distinct (Bettinger 1976, 1999b), indexing nonintensive and intensive hunting and gathering, respectively. Intensive (green-cone) pinyon use entailed storage—almost invariably on the ground in brush-covered caches with rock footings that are readily observed archaeologically. Pinyon tends not to grow in association with other key plant staples and required specialized camps whose use for pinyon procurement is clear merely from location. Pinyon is abundant in those regions of California with very sparse vegetative understories that afford splendid archaeological visibility and opportunities for regional surface survey.

Eastern California, too, provides an ideal introduction to the problem of hunter-gatherer intensification in California generally. It was among the Numic-speaking peoples of Eastern California that a pattern of hunter-gatherer intensification centering on pinyon began around a.d. 450, coming to a head at a.d. 1250, erupting in what is known as the Numic spread: the rapid expansion of Numic-speaking peoples from Eastern California north and east, across and beyond the whole of the Intermountain West, including all the formerly agricultural parts of the Great Basin and northern Southwest (Bettinger 1991, 1993, 1994; Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982, 1983). As an evolutionary phenomenon, the spread of Numic-speaking peoples is instructive in three ways. First, Numic expansion into the huntergatherer (i.e., nonagricultural) Great Basin (e.g., southern Oregon, central Nevada, etc.), and beyond that into and across the Rocky Mountains, shows that intensive hunting and gathering is an evolutionary form distinct from nonintensive hunting and gathering, which it can replace on a large scale (Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982). Second, Numic expansion into the agricultural Great Basin and northern Southwest (e.g., the San Juan Basin) shows that intensive hunting and gathering can likewise replace and hold its own against agriculture, again on a large scale, as I have been arguing.

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Third, Numic groups expanded east and north into the Great Basin but not west across the Sierra Nevada, suggesting the presence of a major adaptive barrier preventing Numic spread into California. The Sierra Nevada itself was not much of an obstacle; products were routinely traded from one side of the range to the other in ethnographic times (Davis 1961), and obsidians from Eastern California sources (e.g., Hughes 1989) found in archaeological sites in the Central Valley of California indicate extensive east–west travel and commerce long before that. Neither can it be that social groups on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada were too large to allow a westward Numic spread. Numic family bands would later displace Klamath groups evidently much larger than themselves in the Fort Rock Basin, Oregon (Jenkins and Brashear 1994). The most likely explanation for the failure of Numic to spread westward is that groups there, west of the Sierra Nevada, had developed a mode of hunting and gathering just as intensive as had begun to develop around a.d. 450 in Eastern California. Barring this, Numic groups would have pushed across the Sierra into California as they did at about a.d. 1550, when the Little Ice Age gave them an opening (Morgan 2009). All of these arguments, but especially the last, follow from a basic ecological phenomenon modeled as ideal free distribution (Fretwell and Lucas 1970).

ideal free distribution The model of ideal free distribution (IFD) predicts that where individuals are free to move about between habitats that vary in productivity in ways that affect fitness, population will distribute itself to equalize individual fitness across all habitats, making fitness everywhere the same. Resources may be more abundant in the San Joaquin Valley than in the adjacent Southern Coast Range, for example, but people moving back and forth will adjust population densities in a way that equalizes individual fitness between the two. Say there are initially more resources, making individuals more fit, in the San Joaquin Valley than the Southern Coast Range. This will draw individuals from the San Joaquin Valley to the Southern Coast Range until the latter becomes so crowded and its resources so depleted that individuals living there do worse than those living in the San Joaquin Valley, and the flow of migration will reverse until the two are in equilibrium. The San Joaquin Valley may appear more affluent, its population more densely and permanently settled, but individuals there do no better than in the more sparsely settled

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Southern Coast Range. Difficulties of movement due to differences in environment and the like may lag this equalizing process, but major discrepancies are unlikely to persist for long, so that even large regions will be in dynamic equilibrium roughly on a decade to century scale. This dynamic guarantees that forces causing growth in one region will generate growth in adjacent regions, even where those causal forces happen to be absent. The IFD model explains why large-scale ethnic spreads like the Numic are rare. Geographical shifting of populations on the same adaptive peak maintains an IFD fitness equilibrium that prevents the development of major adaptive differentials. The Numic subsistence pattern spread rapidly because it carried the newly evolved and separate adaptive peak of intensive hunting and gathering, with its higher fitness equilibrium. This suggests that during its initial development, the fitness equilibrium of intensive hunting and gathering was only slightly greater than that of nonintensive hunting and gathering, allowing intensive hunting and gathering to develop separately and eventually jump to its higher equilibrium. When Numic spread, it did not go west over the Sierra Nevada, despite a long history of extensive east–west movement and contact. This suggests that west slope groups were also intensive hunter-gatherers on the same adaptive peak with an equivalent fitness equilibrium, giving Numic no advantage. As just noted, the Numic spread punctuates a trajectory of intensification that started around a.d. 450 in Eastern California; it follows that the hunter-gatherers in California west of the Sierra Nevada were probably simultaneously intensifying along very similar lines. And this is precisely what the archaeological record suggests (Figure 3.1). The archaeological record shows Great Basin populations, including those of Owens Valley in Eastern California, growing slowly until about a.d. 450, when intensive hunting and gathering begins to evolve in Eastern California and population grows rapidly (Figure 3.1). As a result, Numic peoples from Eastern California begin spreading into the Great Basin between a.d. 850 and 1250, eventually pushing Great Basin population as a whole to its ethnographic maximum between a.d. 1250 and 1750 Numic populations do not spread into California, however, because essentially the same kind of intensive hunting and gathering was evolving at roughly the same time there, attended by a quite similar trajectory of population growth. In Figure 3.1, this is represented by the record of

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figure 3.1. Population trajectories for Owens Valley, the whole of the Great Basin, and the Central (Sacramento and San Joaquin) Valley, California, expressed as a fraction of the maximum observed for any interval, which in all cases is the last interval, approximating ethnographic levels. Great Basin and Owens Valley values are based on projectile point frequencies adjusted for time (Bettinger 1999c: 68–69, Tables 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 5.8). Central Valley values are based on number of sites adjusted for time (Rosenthal et al. 2007: Figure 10.5).

population change in the Central Valley (Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys) of California (Rosenthal et al. 2007: Figure 10.5), which captures a pattern repeated in many local Central Valley sequences (e.g., White 2003). While population increase in the Central Valley lags by a few centuries, Figure 3.1 underscores its basic similarity to the population trajectory in Owens Valley, suggesting the two were in IFD fitness equilibrium. Correcting for preservation (Surovell et al. 2009) would not materially change these distributions or their implications for late prehistoric population growth. The most tangible, albeit prosaic, evidence in the material culture record for Owens Valley–Central Valley demographic equilibrium is the ethnographic distribution of the seed beater (Box 3.1).

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Implications Knowing that California west of the Sierra and California east of the Sierra were roughly in equilibrium has great practical value because it allows us to monitor hunter-gatherer intensification going on in the heart of California indirectly, by observing hunter-gatherers on its easternmost margins, east of the Sierra crest, where the archaeological record of many things connected with intensive hunting and gathering, including subsistence, settlement, and storage, is much more accessible. The justification for using Owens Valley Paiute prehistory to study hunter-gatherer intensification in California is more than an archaeological convenience, however. While the ethnographic Owens Valley Paiute (along with the Washo and all other Numic speakers save the Comanche) are conventionally assigned to the Great Basin culture area, they are more closely affiliated socially, economically, ritually, and politically with California. Steward (1938: 233–234, 236, 237, 251, 255–256, 258) long ago recognized Owens Valley as exceptional within the Great Basin, being much more densely settled, on a par with most of California. In contrast to other Great Basin peoples, with their mobile, nonterritorial family bands, the Owens Valley Paiute were organized into classic California-type tribelets of the kind described in Chapters 6 and 7. These were sociopolitical units made up of several unrelated families who held and defended a common territory, within which they might individually own small patches (Steward 1938: 52), and acknowledged quasi-hereditary leaders whose views and decisions carried great force, though usually requiring popular approval (Steward 1933: 304–305; 1941: 313, 314). As in California, the Owens Valley Paiute (and groups within their sphere immediately to the east) arranged many economic transfers using fixed-value currency or money (see Chapter 8) rather than simple gifting and barter, which was universal elsewhere in the Great Basin (Steward 1933: 258). In these and myriad other cultural patterns, from shamans and the annual mourning ceremony to sweathouses (Liljeblad and Fowler 1986: 423, 427–429), the Owens Valley Paiute are more Californian than Great Basin. That they happen to live in a valley with pinenuts rather than acorns does not materially change this picture; they treated pinenuts exactly as other California groups did acorns. Owens Valley Paiute tribelets (Steward’s districts) owned and defended the pinyon groves within their territory, individual families holding small tracts (Steward 1938: 52), and, unlike the neighboring Nevada Shoshone, did not pick up and shift to a new home range when the nut crop failed

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Box 3.1

The Seed Beater

The seed beater is quintessentially Numic (Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982), the hallmark of intensive Numic seed use, present wherever Numic languages (excepting Comanche) are spoken in the Great Basin and beyond. The seed beater is, however, just as quintessentially Californian (Driver and Massey 1957: Map 31), which is perhaps more difficult to recognize because it comes in several different forms. The Miwok, Washo, and Yokut seed beaters are in all respects like, and probably derived from, the Numic form, a single twined piece of parallel warps that are spread to form the spoonlike paddle head and tightly gathered and twisted to form its handle (Figure 1, top). The seed beater of Northern California groups was a decidedly different, composite affair with a separately made circular, radially twined paddle head that was attached to a stout handle of parallel warps (Figure 1, lower left) (Driver 1939: 334). The Cahuilla and Pomo display still a third form (Figure 1, lower right), somewhat resembling twined Numic examples but the paddle head done in wickerwork (Campbell 1931: Plate 36; Kroeber 1925: Figure 57). This disparity of forms shows that the pan-California distribution of the seed beater is not due to a single historical spread (as in the Great Basin) but a series of more or less simultaneous local developments up and down the state. California and the Great Basin are the only places in all of North America where woven seed beaters (rather than sticks) occur: these are the only peoples who exploited seeds with sufficient intensity to justify specialized seed technology. In the joint distribution of this signature seed harvesting technology, the ideal free distribution (IDF) concept is telling us that California east of the Sierra and California west of the Sierra were in fitness equilibrium. And this must mean that developments leading to pinyon intensification, and subsequently plant intensification in general, were also being played out west of the Sierra, but with different species.

(Steward 1938: 233). Owens Valley Paiute made up for such shortages with lowland seeds stored earlier in the year or by trade. Finally, Owens Valley has acorn (Quercus kellogii), which was handled exactly as in California (Steward 1933: 246). Finally, note the ease with which the Numic-speaking Western Mono moved from Eastern California onto the west slope of the Sierra Nevada,

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California–Great Basin seed beaters. Top: Numic-style seed beater characteristic of the Great Basin and the Miwok, Washo, and Yokuts, with parallel warps that are spread to form the spoonlike paddle head and tightly gathered and twisted to form the handle. Lower left: Northern California–style seed beater with radially twined paddle head attached to a stout handle of parallel warps. Lower right: Pomo- and Cahuilla-style seed beater similar to the Great Basin style, with parallel warp head but done in wicker (i.e., not twined). Photographer: Top and lower left, Elizabeth Guerra; lower right, Lisa Woo Shanks. Specimens: Top and lower left, C. H. Merriam Basketry Collection; lower right, Grace Hudson Museum.

shifting from pinyon to acorn procurement and inserting themselves into the ritual, social, and political life of the Yokuts already living there. On that view, the differences between the pinyon-using Owens Valley Paiute in Eastern California and acorn-using groups in California west of the Sierra Nevada crest are superficial; they are about natural history not about economy. Owens Valley prehistory provides no clues

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about the technology of acorn intensification, but subsistence technology per se is really not the issue here. The issue is subsistence intensification, the development of intensive hunting and gathering in California, which is an economic, social, and political phenomenon; and Owens Valley can surely tell us a great deal about it.

plant intensification in eastern california Multiple lines of evidence link the aforementioned Numic expansion to a distinctively intensive subsistence-settlement strategy in which groups restricted residential mobility, permitting the procurement and storage in bulk of plant foods (e.g., pinenuts) that were abundant and relatively easy to acquire, but costly to process (roast, hull, grind, and cook) (Bettinger 1991, 1993, 1994, 1999c; Bettinger and Baumhoff 1983). The pre-Numic system, on the other hand, emphasized residential mobility to gain access to high-quality resources (e.g., mountain sheep) that were easy to process but more costly to acquire, being more mobile and thinly scattered. These systems differ in the balance between (1) time spent locating resources as opposed to the time spent procuring and processing them (i.e., searching vs. handling) and (2) time spent traveling from camp to camp as opposed to time spent hunting and gathering (i.e., traveling vs. foraging) (Bettinger 2001). The more labor-intensive Numic pattern manifests what is called a processor strategy (Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982); it devoted relatively more time to foraging than to traveling between foraging places, and more time to processing resources than to searching for resources to process. By contrast, the less intensive pre-Numic pattern manifests a traveler strategy; it devoted relatively more time to traveling between foraging places than to foraging in them, and to searching for resources to process than to processing them. Processors and Travelers Processors and travelers both maximize rates of return, that is, make choices that maximize energy (i.e., food value) acquired relative to the time expended in acquiring it (or that minimize time relative to energy acquired, which amounts to the same thing). Differences in populationresource balance, however, cause travelers and processors to weigh time and energy differently and consequently to favor subsistence-settlement tactics that differ in terms of the total time invested. Traveler populations

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are small in relation to available resources (energy), which makes energy less limiting than time, which is also needed for other important activities—traveling, establishing social contacts, and finding mates. Travelers, therefore, can be thought of as time minimizers (Belovsky 1987: 34, 36, Figures 2, 6); they choose prey and employ technologies and annual rounds that limit time devoted to resource procurement, devoting just enough to meet basic nutritional limits. Conversely, processor populations are large relative to resources, which makes energy scarcer and more limiting than time. Processors, therefore, can be thought of as energy maximizers (Belovsky 1987: 34, 36, Figures 2, 6); they target resources and use technologies that maximize the total amount of energy acquired by devoting as much time as possible to resource procurement. More willing to expend time getting food, processors extract more energy, and thus support more people, per given unit of space, and they devote more time to actual resource acquisition—nearly all of it in handling and processing resources. Time minimizing and energy maximizing can be viewed as different local maxima on the kind of adaptive topography described in Chapter 2 (Box 3.2). Chronology of Energy Maximizing Many lines of evidence suggest that energy maximizing developed late in most of western North America, after a.d. 450. It is certainly that late in Owens Valley and the adjacent Great Basin, which is clear from archaeological reconstructions of population that were presented above (Figure 3.1). Initially occupied sometime around 9050 b.c., Owens Valley remained sparsely populated for the next 9500 years. At a.d. 450 it was still only about 13% of its ethnographic size. Then, however, population leapt upward, more than tripling between a.d. 450 and 1250 (i.e., from 13% to 50% of its ethnographic size in 800 years), and then doubling to its final ethnographic size between a.d. 1250 and 1750 (from 50% to 100% in 500 years) (Bettinger 1999c: Table 5.8). This doublebarreled population explosion is a clear signature of energy maximizing, a trajectory of extracting more and more energy, and thus supporting more and more people, per given unit of space. Such intensification is often attributed to excessive population growth or crowding, but Owens Valley energy maximizing clearly did not arise from either. The shift to energy maximizing that produced this Owens Valley population growth occurred sometime around a.d. 450, when population was still small and hardly growing at all. Population growth, then,

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Box 3.2

Time Minimizers and Energy Maximizers

One way to understand the distinction between time minimizing and energy maximizing is with respect to the concept of time discounting, in which payoff value diminishes with the amount of time required for it to be realized (this is the basis for interest rates on bank loans). In this case, the relative value of time determines the future discount rate, 1/(1 + kD), where k is the discount rate and D is time. Because time minimizers value time more than energy maximizers by definition, k is greater for time minimizers than energy maximizers. This means that, given subsistence choices with the same expected rates of return, time minimizers will prefer those that take less time. For example, an activity that yields 10 kcal in 10 minutes has the same rate of return as an activity that returns 20 kcal in 20 minutes, 1 kcal/min in both cases. However, if k = 0.1 (i.e., at an interest rate of 10%), the activity that takes 10 minutes has an expected return of 5 kcal , or 0.5 kcal/ min, which is greater than the activity that takes 20 minutes, whose expected return is 6.67 kcal or 0.33 kcal/min. It is easy to see, then, that time minimizers may opt for activities that produce lower rates of return than those with higher rate of return that take longer. It is less intuitively obvious, but nevertheless true, that future discounting causes time minimizers to prefer riskier activities over less risky ones. Specifically, among activities that take the same amount of time and produce the same mean return, time minimizers will prefer those with more variable returns (because they maximize the chances of the quickest return). To see this, suppose two resources have the same mean rate of return and that the first always takes exactly the same amount of time, and the second takes either less time or more time, with equal probability; with discounting, the value of the quicker than average return always more than offsets the slower than average return.

did not produce energy maximizing in Owens Valley. It appears to be the other way around: energy maximizing produced population growth. Population might well have played a role, nevertheless, because it is not population size nor population growth, but rather population pressure, that usually inspires or rewards adaptive change. The widespread archaeological intuition that population growth is evidence of population pressure is quite wrong in this respect; population growth is inversely related to population pressure. Populations grow when population pressure is weak or absent; they grow very slowly or not at all when population pressure is strong.

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On this view it is clear that Owens Valley groups were under relatively severe population pressure long before a.d. 450. The feeble rate of population growth before that is the unmistakable sign of a population pushed against a ceiling that curtailed its further growth—technoenvironmental limits most usually. At 13% of its contact size, however, the a.d. 450 Owens Valley population cannot have been at this limit unless in comparison to contact times (1) the environment was dramatically less productive, (2) people were more selective about what they ate, or (3) their technology was much less efficient. Consider the alternatives in turn. Less Productive Environment It is certainly possible that the pre–a.d. 450 population of Eastern California was sometimes kept small by environment. It is widely believed, for example, that relatively harsh, dry climatic conditions limited environmental productivity, and thus population, during the middle Holocene, 5050–3050 b.c. (Grayson 1993). However, if population had been limited only by climate, it should have grown rapidly to its contact size immediately following climatic amelioration at 3050 b.c. That is, the meteoric growth that occurred in the 1300 years between a.d. 450 and 1750 should have occurred 3500 years earlier, between 3050 b.c. and 1750 b.c. Greater Dietary Selectivity A better explanation for why the pre–a.d. 450 population was so small is that it was checked by dietary selectivity connected with a specialized subsistence pattern geared to large game, which kept population at sizes that large game could support. This is in accord with the subsistence record (e.g., Hildebrandt and McGuire 2002) and about the right scale to explain pre–a.d. 450 population size. The ethnographic Owens Valley diet (e.g., Binford 2001) was approximately 65% plants, 5% fish, and 30% game, of which at most half, or about 15% of the diet, was large game (Steward 1955a: 104). A rough and ready projection from this would suggest that large game alone could support a population equivalent to this proportion, or about 15% of ethnographic size; this is close to the population at a.d. 450, which was 13% of ethnographic size. This does not mean that only large game was eaten, just that population never grew larger than large game could reliably support; large game determined the population ceiling—at least roughly.

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An ethnographic example that helps explain this apparent paradox is provided by the Hadza of Tanzania, who depend on gathering for 65% of their subsistence but adjust the sizes of their individual settlements— and thus maintain their overall population—in relation to hunting returns. Among the Hadza, maximum settlement size is set by the “number of persons who can share an average-sized game animal and feel that they have had an acceptable quantity of meat” (Woodburn 1968b: 106). When share size drops below this, people begin to move away, successful hunters particularly (Lee and DeVore 1968: 155). Thus, while the Hadza eat mostly plants, it is game that determines the size and density of their population. As Woodburn puts it, Although vegetable foods form the bulk of their diet, the Hadza attach very little value to them. They think of themselves and describe themselves as hunters. (Woodburn 1968a: 52)

In the same way, while the pre–a.d. 450 peoples of the Inyo-Mono region made extensive use of plants, it was the abundance of large game that determined their population. Less Efficient Technology Given the relatively specialized and demanding large game adaptation noted above, it is further conceivable that the pre–a.d. 450 Inyo-Mono population was directly held in check by technology, that is, there was plenty of large game but not the means to harvest them effectively. This, too, is in accord with the archaeological record, which documents a major improvement in hunting technology at a.d. 450: the introduction of the bow and arrow. The connection between the appearance of the bow and the emergence of energy maximizing and population growth, however, cannot be direct, that is, more effective hunting with bow leading to a larger population. This is because hunting did not directly produce the population growth observed after a.d. 450. There is widespread agreement that those population gains were realized almost entirely as a consequence of gathering, that is, from plant consumption, not animal consumption (Bettinger 1978b, 1994, 1999c; Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982; Elston 1982). The jump in population with increased plant use after a.d. 450 underscores that earlier populations were indeed held in check, not by overall environmental productivity, but by large game procurement, on which their specialized subsistence regime centered. Plant resources were substantially underused before a.d. 450,

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even though the technology and knowledge needed to harvest them at ethnographic intensities were in place well before 5050 b.c. Judging from the contribution of plants to the ethnographic diet (65%), once climate ameliorated at 3050 b.c., plant resources alone could have supported a population three to five times larger than was actually realized (13% of its ethnographic size) between 3050 b.c. and a.d. 450, as noted above. From this perspective, it is really the underuse of plants that limited population growth between 3050 b.c. and a.d. 450; taking plants out of the equation made large game and hunting technology limiting by default. The real question, then, is why plants were left out of the equation and how they came to enter it. This, evidently, is the key to understanding energy maximizing in Owens Valley, since whatever stimulated more intensive plant procurement seems also to have stimulated energy maximizing, the two developing hand in hand in the self-reinforcing feedback cycle that fueled the observed population growth. What prevented this from happening earlier must have to do with the things that make plant procurement different from large game procurement. Because plant gathering is much less productive than hunting, it is tempting to see plant intensification being delayed simply because of this. On that view, it was only when hunting had finally been pushed to its absolute limit that population pressure forced groups to take up plant procurement in a major way. This cannot be right for two reasons. First, plant procurement came into play following the introduction of the bow, which, by increasing hunting return rates, should have eased population pressure, making plant procurement less, not more, attractive. Second, as already mentioned, population had hit this critical pressure point much earlier, which is why population did not grow much before a.d. 450: it was under pressure. Human populations grow so fast (Richerson et al. 2001) that Owens Valley was probably under severe population pressure within 1000 years of its initial occupation, and certainly by 6550 b.c. That this population pressure was insufficient to cause intensive plant procurement is clearly shown by its persistent failure to do so in the 7000 years between 6550 b.c. and a.d. 450. The same logic holds for the delayed development of energy maximizing throughout western North America more generally. If population pressure were the only critical ingredient necessary to push them into energy maximizing, hunter-gatherers would have developed energy maximizing, and the large populations that energy maximizing supported at contact, very early, arguably by 5050 b.c. (Belovsky 1988), which they did not; population pressure cannot explain energy maximizing

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anywhere in western North America. The equally powerful forces of environmental change and technological innovation may explain energy maximizing in some of these places, but not in Eastern California, again for reasons already noted: the environmental conditions and technology necessary for plant-intensive energy maximizing in Owens Valley all seem to have been in place by at least 3050 b.c. Instead, the barrier to plant intensification leading to Owens Valley energy maximizing seems to be what might be called structural contradictions. Hunting and gathering are pursued in a variety of ways that differ with respect to the settlement patterns and structural poses (Gearing 1958) needed to make them work effectively and that are frequently at odds. Reliance on large game hunting generally requires access to a larger territory than gathering, for example (e.g., Kelly 1995: Figure 4–8). Certain kinds of hunting require cooperation, others do not, and gathering usually suffers when more than one individual is involved (Steward 1938: 230–231). When the requirements for coexisting modes of subsistence are in conflict, satisfying the requirements of the dominant mode may severely limit the productivity of lesser modes. The emphasis on gathering, for example, limited hunting efficiency in the ethnographic Great Basin, where access to plant resources governed site location (Steward 1938: 33). The reverse is also probably true. It is quite thinkable that the emphasis on large game hunting in Owens Valley before a.d. 450 was of a kind that hindered intensive gathering. It would follow that a change in hunting technology might promote more intensive plant procurement, simply by changing the mode of hunting from one less conducive to one more conducive to plant procurement. The introduction of the bow into the Inyo-Mono region at about a.d. 450 (Box 3.3) changed hunting enough to have this effect.

introduction of bow and arrow technology The bow replaced the atlatl, or spear thrower, a weapon that killed by shock. The atlatl favored the taking of relatively large prey, at fairly close range, by hunter groups that pooled and split their take among themselves and with other groups, evening out the chance effects of individual luck (Winterhalder 1986). Groups were required because the atlatl was comparatively inaccurate. The atlatl harnesses the joint rotation of wrist, elbow, shoulder, and upper body, multiplying their force and, at the same time, the potential for errors in aim. Multiple shots were therefore essential, and therefore multiple hunters, because the atlatl requires an explo-

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Box 3.3 Dating the New World Spread of Bow and Arrow Technology The appearance of the bow and arrow in western North America is generally dated by a clear shift in the weight of chipped stone projectile points: from large points, weighing more than 3 g, thought to be dart points used with the atlatl, to small points, weighing less than 3 g, thought to be arrow points used with the bow (Fenenga 1953; Lanning 1963; but see Hildebrandt and King 2012). The temporal shift from larger to smaller points marking this replacement is abrupt and, despite arguments to the contrary (Ames et al. 2010), relatively late. Quite apart from the question as to why the bow appears at such different times in Eastern and Western California, discussed in Chapter 5 (Table 5.1), it is surprising that the bow appears so late across western North America generally. Notwithstanding claims for an Africa appearance before 59,000 b.c. (Backwell et al. 2008), it was surely present throughout the Old World by 8000 b.c. (Bratlund 1991; Rust 1943). Despite this and evidence of population movement back and forth across the Bering Strait throughout the Holocene, the earliest New World evidence for the bow is 6000 years later, from Greenland at 1950 b.c. (Grønnow 1994). And this early Arctic bow technology, in turn, did not spread quickly south as one might expect; while dates from the Plateau (Hildebrandt and King 2012) suggest it must have spread into the Subarctic before 350 b.c., the oldest solid evidence for the bow and arrow there is about a.d. 750 (Hare et al. 2004; Hare et al. 2012). All of this suggests that bow technology is a true technological breakthrough, likely invented just once and spread globally by social transmission (Bettinger 2001: 152; Blitz 1988). Surprising as it might seem, it is evidently easier to invent a system of writing or learn to predict the eclipse of the sun than it is to invent the bow and arrow. It is clear, in any event, that wherever and whenever it appeared, the bow almost immediately replaced the atlatl—it was technologically superior. On this view, the most likely factor halting the diffusion of the bow into the New World was difficulty of maintaining a sufficiently large pool of individuals with the requisite knowledge to use it (Henrich 2001).

sive tennis serve launch that betrays the hunter’s presence, virtually eliminating the chance of a follow-up shot by the same hunter. Groups were less central to bow hunting success. The bow is nearly silent. Releasing stored energy with a minimum of motion, it can often be shot twice or more in succession without alarming prey, especially when its string is muffled

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with silencers. Killing by hemorrhage rather than by shock, the arrow does not kill as quickly as the atlatl, but struck prey are as effectively tracked by an individual as by a group. Above all, the bow was vastly more accurate. At any given distance, the bow can match the atlatl, hit for hit, on targets a third (65%) smaller in diameter, giving it an immense advantage in the taking of small prey—the kind less likely to invite claims that it be shared (Bettinger 2013). Naturally, this translates into differences in effective range. On targets of the same size, the bow can match the atlatl, hit for hit, from half again farther away (153.3% farther), affording an effective field of fire of more than twice the area (235% larger), hence access to nearly 2½ times the prey of any given kind, large or small. The bow is the more reliable weapon hands down; at any given distance a single arrow is more likely to hit any given target than two atlatl darts, its advantage increasing with distance. At 20 yd, for example, a single arrow is 2% more likely to score a hit on a 20 in target (p = .972) than are two atlatl darts (p = .953); at 40 yd the arrow is 10% more likely to do so, the corresponding probabilities being .592 (bow, 1 shot) and .534 (atlatl, 2 shots). In short, a single hunter armed with a bow is more than a match for two hunters armed with the atlatl.

effects of the bow Hunting The effect of the bow on hunting is unmistakable in the Eastern California faunal record (Hildebrandt and McGuire 2002: Table 1). Small mammals, specifically leporids (hares and rabbits) and marmots, nearly double in frequency, from 27% of the faunal assemblage in the period immediately before the appearance of the bow (1550 b.c.–a.d. 600; see Table 3.1 note) to 44% in the period immediately after (a.d. 600–1300). The frequency of smaller-bodied ungulates (deer and antelope) increases even more dramatically relative to the larger-bodied mountain sheep. These smaller taxa make up only 2% of ungulates in the period immediately before the appearance of the bow and jump to 20% in the period immediately after (Hildebrandt and McGuire 2002).

Group Size Greater hunting success with the bow diminished the need for group hunting and meat sharing and thus large social groups. Since one hunter

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armed with the bow could supply his group with more game (large or small) than two armed with the atlatl, the natural tendency would have been downsizing, for formerly large residential groups to fission into smaller, more isolated and kin-restricted units (Sahlins 1972: 95–99), culminating in the small, independent family-based households of ethnography. While smaller groups were the long-term trend, the bow also created opportunities for larger groups. Higher meat returns per hunter permitted the formation of groups larger than formerly possible. The archaeological record, specifically variation in house size, documents both tendencies. The CA-INY-30 site (CA meaning in California, INY meaning in Inyo County) provides solid evidence for the dominant downsizing trend. Its 3 pre-bow Cowhorn phase (1200 b.c.–a.d. 600) houses and 7 post-bow Klondike phase (a.d. 1300–1850) houses document a dramatic reduction in house and presumably household size. Mean house floor area decreased by a third in the thirteen centuries following the introduction of the bow, from a Cowhorn mean of 16 m2 (range = 18–13.9 m2) to a Klondike mean of 11 m2 (range = 14.5–8 m2) (Basgall and McGuire 1988: 346; Eerkens et al. 2008: Table 1). CA-INY-30 lacks reliably dated Baker phase (a.d. 600–1300) houses documenting the immediate effect of the bow on social group size, but a Baker phase house (Feature HF1; a.d. 550) at the nearby CA-INY3806/H site (Eerkens 2003) is similar in size to Klondike phase houses at CA-INY-30 and sites elsewhere in Owens Valley (e.g., Bettinger 1989), suggesting that household downsizing began immediately with the advent of bow and arrow technology. There is evidence, however, for a short-term trend in the opposite direction. Two semisubterranean Baker phase houses (Features HF2, HF3) dating between a.d. 550 and 790 at CA-INY-3806/H, and a third of the same age at CA-INY-3812, are larger than any pre-bow house at CA-INY-30 (< 5 m in diameter), hinting at social upsizing perhaps encouraged by the greater efficiency of the bow (Delacorte and McGuire 1993: 240–243, Figure 40; Eerkens 2003). Clay (1996) reports this large house pattern at Eagle Valley Village near Carson City, Nevada, during Baker phase times (a.d. 600–1300). Residential Mobility The introduction of the bow also changed settlement patterns, diminishing overall residential mobility. Improved hunting success (particularly with small game) reduced the incentive to move, and the parsing of

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table 3.1 site category (temporary camp, pinyon camp, lowland occupation site) frequencies through time in owens valley. Atlatl

Category Temporary Camp Pinyon Camp Lowland Occupation Site Total Sites

Bow

Cowhorn Phase (1200 b.c.–a.d. 600)

Baker Phase (a.d. 600–1300)

.87 .07 .07 15

.42 .42 .17 12

Klondike Phase (a.d. 1300–1850)

.59 .41 17

note: The dating of Owens Valley phases is slightly different than the chronological divisions used to track population through time elsewhere in this volume (e.g., Figure 3.1). The Owens Valley phase dates are crafted from data specific to Owens Valley (i.e., Bettinger 1977). The chronological divisions used to track population rest on the accepted time spans for time marker projectile points in multiple Great Basin locations (Bettinger 1999c). Note also that the the site numbers above differ from those in Bettinger (1977: Table 8), which combines sites dating 1200 b.c.–a.d. 600 (Cowhorn phase) with those from the Clyde phase (3500–1200 b.c.) preceding it. Blank cells indicate .00 frequency.

much of the population into smaller units reduced the latitude for doing so. The Owens Valley settlement record shows this (Table 3.1). In the Cowhorn phase (1200 b.c.–a.d. 600) immediately preceding the introduction of the bow, the settlement pattern was highly mobile, shortterm temporary camps accounting for 87% of all sites. With the introduction of the bow in the succeeding Baker phase (a.d. 600–1300), the frequency of such temporary camps immediately drops by half (42% of all sites), and then to nothing (0%) in the final Klondike phase (a.d. 1300–1850) (Bettinger 1977). Sharply diminished residential mobility is also reflected in Eastern California obsidian use, which becomes much more geographically restricted after a.d. 600–1300 (Eerkens and Spurling 2009). Language Perhaps the best gauge of the effect of the bow on subsistence, settlement, and society is in the differentiation of the Numic language family. There are 6 Numic languages (Mono, Northern Paiute, Panamint, Shoshone, Kawaiisu, Ute), all thought to derive from 3 protolanguages: proto–Western Numic (directly ancestral to Mono and Northern Paiute), proto–Central Numic (Panamint and Shoshone), and proto– Southern Numic (Kawaiisu and Ute). These three protolanguages are in turn thought to derive from proto-Numic, which is in turn thought

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ultimately to derive, along with the Takic, Hopi, and Tübatulabal languages, from a common ancestral language known as proto–Northern Uto–Aztecan (Fowler 1972; Miller 1966, 1986). The dating is hotly contested, but consensus has proto-Numic distinct from the rest of Northern Uto–Aztecan sometime after 0 b.c./a.d. The three branches of Numic (Western, Central, and Southern) are distinct after a.d. 450, and each modern Numic language is distinct within its branch after a.d. 950. In short, the consensus view makes Numic a post-bow language group. It appeared as society fissioned into smaller, more residentially stable units with the introduction of the bow and further differentiated as these trends continued. That hunting was central to this process is further suggested by Numic terms for mountain sheep and the development of representational Coso rock art in the Numic homeland (Box 3.4). Plant Procurement As noted earlier, that population increases after a.d. 450, that is, following the introduction of the bow, is due mainly to increased plant procurement (Bettinger 1999b, 1999c; Elston 1982). This was in some measure a natural result of the decrease in residential mobility that followed the introduction of the bow, which de facto entrained a pattern of more intensive land use. Nutritional requirements may also have been at work. Proportion of body weight made up by fat increases with body size (Cordain et al. 2000). Rabbits, rats, gophers, mice, and the like have too little fat to be important in any diet that does not offset their protein with inputs of animal fat, plant fat, or carbohydrates. That is, while the bow made more meat available, a disproportionately large fraction was small, fat-poor prey whose consumption would have had to have been offset by correspondingly greater inputs of plant carbohydrates and fat. The more fundamental cause of the increase in plant gathering, however, was a change in what Marx called the social relations of production affecting the circulation of resources, which occurred quite automatically because residential groups had become smaller and more independent. Explaining this requires a rather lengthy digression into the determinants of residential group size and how residential group size affects the circulation of resources, and how the circulation of resources in turn affects the incentive for individuals to intensify subsistence effort.

Box 3.4

Numic Terms for Mountain Sheep

As a result of their common ancestry, Northern Uto–Aztecan languages share cognate terms for many economically important plants and animals native to the postulated proto–Northern Uto–Aztecan homeland in Southeastern California (Fowler 1972). They do not, however, share a term for mountain sheep, the most important game animal. The proto–Northern Uto–Aztecan word for mountain sheep, **pa·-, is the root of the word used in all Northern Uto–Aztecan languages except Numic, which has no reconstructable common (i.e., proto-Numic) term for mountain sheep, that is, linguists have been unable to find the word from which Numic terms derive. Instead, each branch of Numic uses its own avoidance term instead of a word meaning literally “mountain sheep,” the use of which would alert its spirit, making it impossible to hunt (see the table in this box). Put another way, the differentiation of Numic from the rest of Northern Uto–Aztecan was attended by a major shift in Numic attitudes toward mountain sheep that required the use of an avoidance term, most likely the word “to kill,” Southern Numic subsequently adopting the even more obtuse reference term “to chase.” As Western and Central Numic languages diverged, their words for “to kill” likewise diverged, and so too the words referring to mountain sheep. That Numic terminology for this single most important Great Basin large game species changed wholesale between 2000 b.c. and a.d. 450 suggests that the way these animals were hunted changed wholesale during precisely the interval in which the bow arrived (Nichols 1981). Note that this coincides with the rise of representational (as opposed to abstract) Coso rock art (Gilreath and Hildebrandt 2003) depicting archers, arrow heads, and the distinctive life-size Coso-style mountain sheep, centered exactly in the Numic homeland. In sum, the bow changed the way mountain sheep were hunted—made the animal’s hunting more reliable, elevated its subsistence importance and that of individual hunters—developments attested in both art and language. numic terms for mountain sheep are what are known as avoidance terms, not referring to the animal itself, which would alert its spirit and make it impossible to hunt. Language Central Numic Western Numic Southern Numic

Term for Mountain Sheep

Meaning

*wasy *ko?i *naka(i)

to kill to kill to chase, to follow

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hunter-gatherer group size, subsistence risk, and resource pooling Steward (1936, 1937, 1938) long ago observed that hunter-gatherer social organization is substantially driven by technoenvironmental circumstances related to subsistence. Subsistence risk, for example, often pulls individuals together into groups. If resources are difficult to obtain by individuals, or obtaining them is uncertain, individuals may benefit by joining together and pooling their collective take, because in doing so they spread, and thereby diminish, the risk of going hungry (Winterhalder 1986). The economics of prey choice play directly into this, in particular the usual ranking of prey by size (large prey = high rank), which reflects economies of scale that generally make large prey more profitable. This is because subsistence risk varies directly with prey size. Large prey (large game) are risky because prey size varies inversely with prey density (Waguespack and Surovell 2003) and thus the chance of finding them. The larger the prey, the higher it ranks, the less frequently it is encountered, and the greater the risk that those depending on it will starve. The risk here is not a function of low mean encounter rates, as one might think; group size and population densities can shrink to accommodate that. Rather the problem with low encounter rates is the variability around the mean as a function of sampling error. The less likely an event, the greater the likelihood of very long gaps between its occurrence. For example, one expects heads to land faceup 1 time in 2 coin tosses, just as just as one expects the 1-spot die face to land up 1 time in 6 die tosses. The expected number of successes is the same for 2 coin tosses and 6 die tosses (1 in each case), but the rarer event (1-spot die face) is riskier. The probability of no heads (both tails) when tossing 2 coins is 25% (pno heads = .52 = .25), whereas the probability of no 1-spots when tossing 6 dice is 33% (pno 1-spots = [5/6]6 = .33). The only way to counteract this chance effect is by increasing the sample size, which reduces the size of chance departures. If individuals hunt alone and pool what they each get, increasing group size has exactly this effect. Individual hunters are no more successful than before, but pooling their take and splitting it evenly balances individual streaks of good and bad luck, keeping each hunter’s split close to the long-term mean. For this reason, an emphasis on large game (as characterized subsistence in Owens Valley between 1550 b.c. and a.d. 450) will favor large groups that pool resources. Resource pooling (sharing), however, entails a risk of its own, namely of nonreciprocation, that

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some individuals might benefit without contributing their fair share, or anything at all. Sharing Risk In both social and evolutionary biological theory, to minimize the risk of nonreciprocation requires that individuals vary the mode of sharing (more formally, the transfer of resources between individuals) on the basis of relatedness. In social theory, relatedness is defined in terms of group membership, resource transfers indexing perceptions of shared interest as the result of this (Sahlins 1965: Fig. 1; 1972). Giving freely without expectation of full (or indeed any) return, which is known as generalized reciprocity, characterizes transfers between individuals whose fortunes are inextricably intertwined, usually (but not always) relatives and members of small, closely knit bands that function as integrated socioeconomic units. For example, barter, trade, and the selfinterested haggling that goes with them are unseemly—indeed a waste of time—when conducted within groups whose members end up pooling and redistributing resources to maximize good for the group as a whole. Even when within-group splits are grossly unequal, low-ranking individuals will do best when they engage in transfers that move resources to where they can do the most good, as low-ranking Nootka do in giving sea otter pelts to their chiefs (Drucker 1951: 114). Of no value to individuals of low rank, the pelts are greatly valued by highranking chiefs, who trade them for potlatch goods or give them as potlatch gifts. In the exchange the commoner gets some trifle, much less than the chief but more than he would otherwise. As individuals increasingly identify with different subsets of a larger social whole, that is, as the social distance between individuals grows, their shared interests diminish, sharing (i.e., nonreciprocation) risk increases, and the character of resource transfer increasingly shifts from generalized to balanced reciprocity (i.e., evenhanded exchange); goods are given and accepted on the understanding that a debt of a given size has been incurred and must be repaid in the foreseeable future. Finally, sharing risk becomes most acute when individuals recognize no mutual selfinterest, common bond, or relationship, at which point resource transfers become adversarial, attended by barter, hard bargaining, and haggling, a pattern known as negative reciprocity. Individuals put their self-interest first on the assumption that their counterparts are doing the same, making the interaction if not hostile at least spiritedly competitive, the idea being

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to get the better part of any transaction. The interests of others enter here only to the extent they are known to be present and potentially at crosspurposes, thus threatening, to realizing one’s own goals. Evolutionary biology puts the same proposition—that sharing and reciprocity should index relatedness—more elegantly via Hamilton’s (1963) rule of inclusive fitness, which hinges on genetic rather than social relatedness between individuals rather than groups, measured by Hamilton’s r, the probability that two individuals share the same gene by virtue of common descent (e.g., r = .5 between siblings, r = .5 between parents and offspring, and r = .125 between cousins). Here the transfer of resources depends on cost to the donor of giving, the benefit to the recipient of getting, and degree of genetic relationship between donor and recipient; specifically, the degree of relationship between donor and recipient must be greater than donor cost divided by recipient benefit. Formally, r > c/b, where r is Hamilton’s r between donor and recipient, c is the donor cost, and b is recipient benefit. Costly transfers will be restricted to close relatives, just as in social theory. The element of group size enters here because, on average, social and genetic distance between individuals will decrease as group size increases. In short, both social and genetic theory predict that balanced or negative reciprocity should prevail when large groups form—which is to say that costly transfers will tend not to occur. For example, Steward’s (1938: 58–59) census for Deep Springs Valley, east of Owens Valley, on the California-Nevada border, shows 5 family bands that were independent but sometimes traveled and camped together. The within-group Hamilton’s r for these 5 bands ranges from r = .17 to r = .45 (rmean = .29), as compared to a betweengroup relatedness of r = .06 across all 5 bands collectively, predicting a propensity to share and engage in costly forms of subsistence about four to five times greater within these 5 smaller family bands than across the larger macroband into which they sometimes formed. Great Basin ethnography reflects exactly this. Relatives sought one another’s proximity. . . . Very small villages frequently consisted exclusively of related families. . . . This high degree of relationship between village members naturally enhanced village solidarity. . . . A very practical aspect of this solidarity was willingness to share food with relatives. . . . When single kin groups did not comprise the majority of the population, they ceased to dominate the village. (Steward 1938: 238–239)

Groups are always a balancing act of these countervailing forces, subsistence risk pulling individuals together, sharing risk pushing them

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apart. Groups form to lessen subsistence risk by pooling resources through generalized reciprocity—generous expenditures of individual subsistence effort. As groups grow larger, however, sharing risk increases because the benefits of one’s labor are so widely dissipated, often to non-kin and near-strangers, who may not reciprocate in kind, instead becoming free riders (Boyd and Richerson 1988; Schelling 1978). How these countervailing forces play out on the ground varies with circumstance. If subsistence returns are potentially high but uncertain, sharing risk will not prevent even large groups from forming to pool resources to decrease subsistence risk. Large groups, however, will tend to engage only in subsistence activities with very high returns. Return rates are critical in the free rider equation because they determine the sharing risk posed by free riders as measured by what is called the sucker’s payoff. Stated simply, in a simple 2-person game in which you and I are players, I get the sucker’s payoff if I work, you loaf, and we split my take, making me the sucker. This works both ways: if you work and I loaf, you get the sucker’s payoff. High payoffs nullify the risk. Even if I know you will loaf, in the short run it may still make sense for me to work if I earn a net profit after my work costs are subtracted from my split (sucker’s payoff >0), in which case I profit whether or not you forage. I will refuse to work, however, if what I earn on my own is so small that splitting it with you results in a net loss to me. Since the same risk of a net loss will similarly prevent you from working, nothing gets done (the standoff scenario that defines what is known as the prisoner’s dilemma). This is related to the problem of plant intensification because the caloric returns of plant procurement are considerably lower than for large game, making the sucker’s payoff too low to risk intensive investment. This leads us to expect a prevailing rule of generalized reciprocity and resource pooling in large groups that depend on high ranking resources like large game, because the returns make up for the occasional loafer without causing the whole risk-reducing arrangement to unravel. As an entirely unintended consequence, however, this large group generalized reciprocity acts as a disincentive to the intensification of low ranking resources like plants, where even a few freeloaders make pooling unprofitable. As Winterhalder (1993: 330), quoting Woodburn, puts it, “Sharing is . . . a powerful disincentive to individuals who might be inclined to extra work.” This parallels Marshall’s observations for the !Kung.

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If a woman gathered very much more than her family needed, would it turn out that she was working for others? Would she draw envious attention to herself and be blamed for not being more generous if she had an excess of food and kept it for herself? (Marshall 1968: 94)

In small family groups, of course, this freeloader problem lessens, as the above quote from Steward on food sharing shows; the rewards of extra labor go entirely to the individuals expending it, or their close kin. Thus, where large groups tend to discourage hard work for costly resources (intensification), small groups encourage it. In large groups, foragers will confine subsistence effort to high-ranking resources; they will expand subsistence effort to include lower-ranking resources— plants and the like—only when large groups fission into smaller kinbased units. Ethnographic hunter-gatherers lean in this direction. Consistent with the freeloader hypothesis, groups residing in larger social units rely less on plants than groups residing in smaller social units. The sample here is from Binford (2001). It is restricted to midlatitude (25–55°N, 25–55°S) hunter-gatherers, excluding horse-mounted groups, forest product mutualists, groups whose subsistence is agriculturally assisted, and groups the information for which Binford considered suspect, leaving a sample of n = 158, for only 80 of which microband size (Binford’s GROUP1 variable) is reported. The partial correlation (removing the effects of latitude and annual rainfall) between microband size and reliance on gathering is quite strong, r = −.33, p < .01, df = 76: as reliance on gathering increases, group size decreases. Hunting, on the other hand, is quite weakly correlated with microband size, r = −.18, p = 0.12, df = 76: hunting has no strong effect on microband size. Fishing, however, is strongly positively correlated, r = .37, p < .01, df = 76: as reliance on fishing increases, group size increases, probably as a consequence of the cooperation required for fishing.

the small group shift in owens valley This brings us finally back to Owens Valley, where before a.d. 450 the preference for large game, coupled with the inherent uncertainty of large game procurement and unreliability of the atlatl, required the riskreducing benefits of large group resource pooling and thus a strict rule of generalized reciprocity. In the interest of self-preservation, group members had to be willing to do their fair share, and sometimes more,

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to make up for those less able. These large sharing groups, however, limited the incentive for individuals to engage in more costly activities such as intensive plant procurement. This changed with the introduction of the bow at a.d. 450. The small groups that formed increased the incentive to engage in more costly forms of subsistence, explaining the plant-centered intensification and tripling of population that followed between a.d. 450 and a.d. 1250. In overall effect, the transformation was not unlike that described for the Subarctic Athabaskan and Algonkian (Leacock 1954; Murphy and Steward 1956; Steward 1955b: 144– 148), where, with the advent of the fur trade and access to improved technology, including traps and firearms, social organization shifted from large composite bands sustained by communal caribou hunting to smaller family units sustained mainly by fur trapping. In short, the bow made small groups possible, and small groups made intensive plant procurement possible—and eventually mandatory, groups not making this shift being replaced by more densely settled groups that did. The effect is particularly evident in the archaeological frequency of what are termed pinyon camps, sites connected with the procurement of pinenuts, the single most important ethnographic resource. Virtually nonexistent before the bow, pinyon camps increased dramatically with the introduction of that technology (Table 3.1). Plant intensification might have come about in other ways, however.

alternative routes to plant intensification Intensification can be achieved by any arrangement that provides individuals incentives for increasing labor by protecting the hardworking individual from the freeloader, that rewards individuals for working hard, or that punishes them for loafing (Boyd and Richerson 1992). One thinks here immediately of the Melanesian-style big man (Sahlins 1963), who uses a combination of talent, hard work, and charisma to attract and mobilize a following that does his bidding in return for a split of the shower of potential rewards. The aspiring big man initiates his campaign with a lavish giveaway of his own hard-earned resources, establishing a relationship of generalized reciprocity with potential followers, who are then obligated to return his generosity as best they can, through contributions to the pool of labor or resources (Hayden 1995; Sahlins 1972: 161–163, 201–296). By tipping the relations of large group production further in the direction of generalized reciprocity, the

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big man can establish conditions that might promote group level intensification. It is reasonable to suppose that among groups that depend heavily on hunting, big men would likely be hunters skilled and hardworking enough to attract multiple wives. If so, the labor of those wives could be turned, among other things, to procuring and processing plant products to be distributed to the larger group. The benefits of belonging to such an entourage, participating in its productive joint ventures, might well inspire families to increase their procurement effort, including the plant procurement needed to keep large hunting groups supplied when game was momentarily scarce. The requirements for such an arrangement are so minimal they must have appeared, if not frequently, at least routinely during much of the time humans have been living in Eastern California. That they did not precipitate much earlier the kind of wholesale shift to energy maximizing that is observed at a.d. 450 is likely in part due to the instability inherent to the big man arrangement (Sahlins 1972: 163– 164). The power that motivates camp followers to cooperate in big man ventures is personal and transitory, rising and falling with the influence of the big man himself, not passing to his sons or allies, absent the chance they possess all his extraordinary qualities. Before the advent of the bow, big man–type arrangements very likely sparked short-term experiments with intensive plant procurement throughout California prehistory, but not the lasting changes in the social relations of production needed to institutionalize it. The bow’s greater reliability probably encouraged larger, more stable big man organizations. Such arrangements would not likely lead to materially greater investment in plant procurement. The chief attraction of membership would clearly have continued to be the abundance of large game provided by the big man and his acolytes, not plants, and increasing group size would have only made the big man’s task of encouraging plant procurement that much harder. The lasting effect of the bow was the creation of smaller groups where the freeloading problem was absent, thus permitting—indeed encouraging—intensive, low-return plant procurement.

chapter 4

The Privatization of Food

Jorgensen (1980: 224–225) has called attention to the singular lack of social integration and political development that distinguishes much of the ethnographic Great Basin and California (indeed, much of ethnographic western North America). He attributed this to the stubborn independence of the relatively small, economically autonomous groups that dominated that cultural landscape. As we have seen, these family groups likely first became viable with the advent of the bow, whose superiority in subsistence and defense promoted isolation, protecting the kin-limited, small group payoff structure that encouraged the subsistence intensification that had caused population in Owens Valley to triple between a.d. 450 and 1250. The small economic units of which Jorgensen speaks ethnographically, however, were neither dispersed nor isolated. Even in California’s harshest environments, places like Panamint Valley and Death Valley, they were quite densely packed seasonally, settled side by side on the most favorable springs, saddles, and ridges (e.g., Dutcher 1893). This is what allowed the Owens Valley population to double after a.d. 1250, as it did in realizing its remarkable ethnographic size. This doubling was not the result of the work ethic prevailing in isolated small social groups, which already existed, but the successful packing of these groups together while maintaining that same work ethic, indeed expanding it, to extract the greater quantity of resources necessary to support these denser concentrations. It is this redoubling of effort that explains 59

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the appearance of increasingly productive, but more costly, subsistence practices that continued to appear after the bow, and the supporting array of material refinements: seed beaters, milling tools, traps, snares, hooks, nets, and weirs, which (unlike the bow) merely elaborated long obvious or easily discovered principles, now brought into play because conditions suited. The packing together of these previously isolated groups required a restructuring of the social relations that prevailed by long-standing tradition among campmates. Most notable among these was the institution that individuals camped in the same place were, merely by virtue of that, members of a sociopolitical unit whose reason for being was cooperation and obligate food sharing for the common good. Sharing, however, was fatal to the small group work ethic. As we have seen in Chapter 3, for small groups to continue intensifying when packed together hinged on protecting their hard-earned harvests from the potential for freeloading by their prospective new neighbors. This problem was made more difficult by the decrease in foraging return rates that had to occur if subsistence was to become intensive enough to permit packing in the first place. Intensification is costly by definition; population density cannot double without increasing the cost of resource procurement. In any event, the obstacle to further intensification was the old institution that people residing in the same settlement should treat each other as close kin, bound by relations of generalized reciprocity; this encouraged hard work in small kin groups but discouraged it in larger ones with weaker kin relations. The small groups that formed with the introduction of the bow circumvented this obstacle through isolation, dispersal being “the best protector of persons and possessions” (Sahlins 1972: 97). The obstacle now reappeared automatically whenever population growth or resource pressure began to push these small groups back together. Storage figured centrally in this process. The population packing implied by ethnographic population densities (and large enough to trigger the Numic spread) hinged on large-scale food storage. The incentive of individual families or households to invest time and effort accumulating and storing food for future consumption hinged, in turn, on protecting that investment for families no longer living in the isolation that had protected their food stores during the initial stages of intensification. It was the solution to this problem that led to population growth in Eastern California after a.d. 1250. Population pressure did not produce this solution; innovative social arrangements did that. But population

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pressure prodded groups to find workable solutions and rewarded the ones that solved the problem first. As the Numic spread would show, groups that acquired the behavior first could spread at the expense of groups that lacked it. Of the many conceivable solutions to this packing–hard work problem, two come immediately to mind. One is the big man process already mentioned in Chapter 3. Big man systems are typically unstable, but if hunters were the most likely to become big men, the greater reliability of the bow might have provided greater opportunities for attaining and holding big man power, and perhaps for transferring it between generations consistently enough to become less the exception than the rule. Big man groups, then, might have been common enough to be a viable alternative to small groups, which they would tend to displace, having competitive advantages both in sheer size and in the intensity of subsistence procurement and storage promoted by the prevailing rule of generalized reciprocity that governed the flow of resources to the group’s big man for redistribution. If large groups became common enough for long enough, the arena of competition would rapidly shift to struggles for resources and manpower between them. Intensive plant procurement would not be the focus of these contests, but might be carried along as part of the process and ultimately decide their outcome. The winners would be the groups supporting the most people per unit of space over extended periods. And those would be the groups making the most effective use of plants, procuring and storing them in bulk. While it is unlikely that large game populations could have sustained such contests between large groups for very long (especially in Eastern California, where game densities are relatively low), it is conceivable that large game could have sustained groups just large enough and just long enough to trigger a transition to energy maximizing. At that point plant procurement, responding better to intensification, would have instantly bulked larger than animal procurement, leading to the ethnographic Eastern California subsistence regime. Unfortunately, this big man scenario is not in keeping with the evidence, the most convincing line of which is probably the fluorescence of representational, huntingthemed Coso rock art (Grant et al. 1968). Apparently connected with mountain sheep hunting, the spectacular anthropomorphic petroglyphs in the Coso Range lowlands can be interpreted as depicting big men, raising the possibility that big man arrangements attended by greater ritualization of mountain sheep hunting (including the distinctively Numic use of avoidance terms for mountain

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sheep) may have become more prominent with the appearance of the bow. However, these and the gaudy hunting scenes characteristic of representational Coso rock art in general are conspicuously underrepresented in the Coso Range uplands, especially in the pinyon zone, where late prehistoric plant intensification centered (Gilreath and Hildebrandt 2003). In the end, there is no evidence that big man type organizations promoted plant intensification. Ethnographic Great Basin sociopolitical organization certainly bears no mark of it. The only big man–type Great Basin organizations recorded ethnographically seem to have developed in response to Euro-American contact (e.g., Steward 1938: 149–150). Had big man organizations been the source of late prehistoric Great Basin plant intensification, one would expect more evidence of joint ownership and defense of natural plots, and greater collectivization, if not in procurement then perhaps in communal storage, as one sees, for instance, among the Klamath in Southern Oregon (Spier 1930: 167). There is no evidence for collective storage (Steward is emphatic on this point) and evidence for groupowned land only in Owens Valley, and perhaps the Reese River, in both cases existing alongside family-owned land, families holding tracts within larger group territories. It is possible, of course, that big man organizations were transformed by plant procurement, once it took hold of the economy and settlement firmly enough to promote more stable systems, perhaps promoting something like the patrilineal organizations to be described in Chapter 6: the patrilineal bands of the Southern Sierra Miwok, the patrilineal sibs of Southern California Takic groups (e.g., Cahuilla), or the patrilineal tribelets of the southern San Joaquin Valley (Yokuts). Again, with certain exceptions (e.g., the bilateral tribelets of Owens Valley), evidence of such organizational stability at any level above the nuclear family is notably lacking throughout the Great Basin, as Steward long ago noted. The prevailing ethnographic Great Basin sociopolitical unit was the residential kin group, in this case a small set of coresiding bilateral (i.e., husband’s or wife’s) kin, normally husband, wife/wives, children plus an assortment of the husband’s and wife’s elderly, incapacitated, or unmarried relatives. Termed the family band, or kin clique (Fowler 1966), this bilateral unit was in almost every respect antithetical to the big man program and its thesis that sociopolitical organizations should have a definable center, an individual through whom all goods and power flow. In fact, there could be no center above the family band, because above

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the family band there was really no organization at all—only a “live and let live” institution that permitted small, isolated family units to operate in relative safety, that is, without fear of predation at the hands of larger family or bands (Murphy and Murphy 1986). The Great Basin sociopolitical organization, the family band system, was predicated on this kind of anarchy, the autonomy of the small family band in almost everything. This argues that the intensification of plant procurement and storage was probably not accomplished through the binding of individuals into large groups by strengthening social ties and obligations, as happens when big men rise to power, but rather by the weakening of those ties to the point of rupture, which is the second solution to the packing–hard work problem. Effective food storage demanded the protection of the time and labor individuals had to invest to accumulate and store plants for future consumption. A charismatic big man might get that done by motivating people to work and by punishing those that didn’t (e.g., McKern 1922: 246), but a far simpler solution was simply to suspend the claims that large groups could place on the labor that individuals and families invested in stored plant foods, that is, by making gathered food private property (as opposed to public property). The idea is not new. Recognition that privatization of resources might be key to economic development dates back to the beginnings of anthropology and Morgan (1877), who saw the emergence of private property providing the incentive essential for agricultural intensification leading to civilization (Hickerson 1967: 315–316; Pearce 1988: 131), a concept that Engels almost immediately incorporated in his theory of Marxist historical materialism. All civilised peoples begin with the common ownership of the land. With all peoples who have passed a certain primitive stage, in the course of the development of agriculture this common ownership becomes a fetter on production. It is abolished, negated, and after a longer or shorter series of intermediate stages is transformed into private property. (Engels 1959: 190)

Largely unfamiliar with hunter-gatherers, Morgan, Marx, and Engels failed to appreciate the pivotal role played by the institution of private property, the privatization of stored resources specifically, in huntergatherer intensification. When several small kin groups camped together, the institution that made stored food private (i.e., belonging to each group separately), granted each of them the same autonomy and economic independence they had previously enjoyed while living separately, encouraging them to continue to intensify the procurement of

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resources thus protected. It permitted them, in short, to operate independently despite the presence of others, the characteristic most distinctive of the Great Basin family band system. Disputes and hostilities arising from such matters as murder, theft, wifestealing, and other violations of custom were settled between families. None of these was a “crime” against the community, for the community did not exist in any corporate or legal sense. (Steward 1955a: 115; see also Steward 1938)

pinyon intensification in eastern california That the rapid spread of Numic peoples out of California occurred several centuries after the bow and arrow came into general use throughout the Great Basin demonstrates rather clearly that neither the bow itself, nor small groups and the small group work ethic the bow promoted, was the immediate reason for Numic geographical expansion. Rather, the key seems to have been that Numic peoples were the first in the Great Basin to solve the population packing-storage problem via the institution that made stored food private property. Archaeological evidence illuminates some of the circumstances surrounding the development of this social innovation in connection with the intensive use of the pinenut, or pinyon (Pinus monophylla), the most important ethnographic plant staple in the Eastern California Numic homeland. Along with other plant foods, pinyon became more important following the introduction of the bow, as outlined in Chapter 3. However, the intensive ethnographic pattern of routinely acquiring and storing the nuts in bulk on the spot for winter use, and the consequent tethering of the fall-winter settlement to camps near these stores in the pinyon woodlands, did not immediately develop (Bettinger 1999c: 65). In Owens Valley, for example, archaeological pinyon camps, sites with house rings and storage features located in the pinyon woodlands, midslope between 7000 and 9500 ft in the Inyo and White Mountains (e.g., Bettinger 1989), constitute about 60% of sites dating to the Klondike phase (a.d. 1300–1850), a figure that probably approximates the quite substantial ethnographic level of intensity (see Chapter 3, Table 3.1). By contrast, during the preceding Baker phase (a.d. 600–1300), when the bow was first introduced, only about 40% of sites are pinyon camps and the bulk of them probably postdate a.d. 1000 (Bettinger 1977). In real numbers, the small but representative Owens Valley sample (Table 4.1) shows that there were only half as many pinyon camps in use between a.d. 600 and 1300 as between a.d. 1300 and 1850 (5 vs. 10

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table 4.1 number of archaeological pinyon caches observed at owens valley pinyon camps. Dated components (Cowhorn, Baker, Klondike) are shown by plus (+) sign. Thus, site CA-INY-1752 has 6 pinyon caches and components representing the Baker and Klondike phases. Atlatl

Site CA-INY-1782 CA-INY-1750 CA-INY-1749 CA-INY-1751 CA-INY-1752 CA-INY-1789 CA-INY-1744 CA-INY-1790 CA-INY-1754 CA-INY-1773 CA-INY-1769

Bow

Cowhorn Phase (1200 b.c.–a.d. 600)

Baker Phase (a.d. 600–1300)

+

+ + + + +

Klondike Phase (a.d. 1300– 1850) + + + + + + + + + +

Pinyon Caches 1 1 1 2 6 1 2 4 5 7 14

note: CA identifies the site as being in California. INY further identifies the site as being in Inyo County. The number that follows identifies the site within Inyo County.

camps), less than half if one corrects for the differences in the time spans between the two intervals (700 vs. 550 years). Perhaps more significantly, the earlier Baker phase camps have less than half as many pinyon storage caches as camps occupied only in the latter Klondike phase (2.2 vs. 5.5 caches per site). Eerkens and colleagues (2002–2004: Figure 6) used a larger sample of 38 radiocarbon dates from Inyo-Mono pinyon zone sites to more precisely quantify this inception-intensification lag. While the earliest of these dates, presumably dating the very inception of pinyon procurement, is a.d. 250 ± 60, fully 71% postdate a.d. 1450. In short, pinyon procurement did not become immediately important with the introduction of the bow. Rather, in the first centuries following its appearance, the peoples of Eastern California were tethered not to upland pinyon groves but to lowland marshes, and much more so than at any other time in the prehistoric record (Delacorte 1994; Nelson 1999). This wetland emphasis characterizes the settlement systems of early bow users across the Great Basin generally (e.g., Bettinger 1999a: 64, Table 5.8; Hemphill and Larsen 1999)—from the Stillwater Marsh, Nevada, in the west, where more than half the wetland sites and nearly

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half the wetland radiocarbon dates fall in this interval (a.d. 450–1250) (Kelly 1999: Table 7.10); to the Great Salt Lake, Utah, in the east, where nearly 90% of analyzed wetland skeletons date to this period (Coltrain and Stafford 1999: Table 3.1). The first bow users would not have been drawn to marshes by the birds, fish, and plants available there from spring through fall. In those seasons other microenvironments generally afforded resource opportunities just as good or better. What distinguishes wetlands are winter resource opportunities (Kelly 1990: 267). It is possible (barely) to eke out a daily living on wetland plants, fish, mollusks, and waterfowl in the dead of winter, when resources are even more scarce elsewhere. The wetland intensification that coincides with the appearance of the bow across the Great Basin thus suggests a fallback tactic resorted to by small, independent, bow-using groups who continued to pursue large game without the safety net formerly provided by large sharing groups and were as a result in winter frequently reduced to scrounging in marshes. The seemingly more sensible alternative of gathering and storing pinyon in bulk for winter in the adjacent mountain ranges, the practice eventually employed by spreading Numic groups, was at this time everywhere either lacking or only weakly expressed (as in Owens Valley), which is truly surprising because pinyon presents no major problems as a subsistence resource. People had long been aware that things like fish, nuts, and seeds would remain edible if stored in almost any kind shelter, in caves for example, as the archaeological record of caching demonstrates (e.g., Heizer and Krieger 1956). Pinyon keeps well and is not particularly difficult to store. The quite functional outdoor storage facilities of the Great Basin (and California) required neither remarkable skill nor labor. There were drawbacks, to be sure. Relying on stored resources compromised mobility and required stints of greater subsistence effort than foraging hand to mouth (because one had to gather more than just needed to eat). Nevertheless, one would think that any group that found itself starving in late winter just two years running would figure a way to fit storage into their lifestyle. The only conceivable barrier to Great Basin pinyon storage would appear to be social not technical. Unlike technical innovations, whose efficiency is largely independent of the number of individuals using them, social innovations require a minimum number of individuals to “buy in,” in this case to ignore the traditional relations of production that defined one’s campmates as sharing partners, which disinclined individuals to accumulate stores of

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pinyon that other families might claim, having stored less (or none) of their own. Again, the Hadza of Tanzania provide an apt ethnographic illustration. Though they have the technology to preserve meat by drying it, they seldom do so, since “to preserve it and store it would be largely wasted effort, other people would simply demand meat when their own was finished and it would be wrong to refuse them” (Woodburn 1968a: 53). Granting that the resource package here was individually small (a nut), the stakes were not. A day’s worth of nuts might not be worth quarreling over, but the half-ton cache one family had set aside to get through the winter would be valuable beyond measure to another family that had come into camp too late (or worked too few hours) to have any chance of meeting their own quota. If stored food is camp food, shared with everyone, families who had expended extra labor harvesting and storing pinyon in bulk would have wanted to keep to themselves, camping either in places not frequented by others with whom they would have to share or only with close relatives, which is in keeping with the nonintensive pattern of pinyon use observed a.d. 600–1300 in Owens Valley. However, continuing isolation would have been impossible if pinyon was to be relied upon as a winter staple because as Steward (1938: 27–28, 236, 254) observed, pinyon itself is unreliable. Crops are erratic and in most years available in just a few places, affecting not only procurement but also settlement patterns and social arrangements in ways related to the development of storage. Concrete evidence of this is provided in Tables 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4. Table 4.2 summarizes production (good, fair, fail) in 736 individual pinyon groves over 2 consecutive years as tabulated by Thomas (1973). While these data are for Pinus edulis from the Southwest (not P. monophylla from the Great Basin) and are less precise than I would like, they capture the inherent unreliability of pinyon crops and permit a heuristic model of this effect on social groups and population. Tables 4.3 and 4.4 show social and settlement responses and the net effect of these on the distribution and movement of population, assuming that population spreads evenly to match changing pinyon availability and that crops classified as “good” can support 2.5 times more people than those classified as “fair.” Note that results of this exercise would not differ qualitatively if some other population ratio (other than 2.5) was used. In Thomas’s Southwestern sample, 78.8% of all groves failed (i.e., no crop) in the first year, 84% in the second year, and 66.3% both years running. At these frequencies, making pinyon the dominant, make or

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table 4.2 crop size (good, fair, fail) in 736 pinyon groves over 2 consecutive years (thomas 1973). Years 1 and 2 Total Good (%) Good Fair Fail Year 2 Total

Fair (%)

Fail (%)

Year 1 Total (%) 14.9 6.3 78.8

1.2 0.5 9.0

1.1 0.7 3.5

12.6 5.0 66.3

10.7

5.3

84.0

note: The far-right column reports crop frequencies for year 1. Thus, as shown in year 1, 14.9% of groves produced a good crop. The bottom row reports crop frequencies for year 2. Thus, as shown in year 2, 10.7% of groves produced a good crop. The nonmarginal cells report grove production combinations for 2 years running. For example, as shown in the upper left cell, 1.2% of groves produced a good crop in year 1 and year 2 consecutively, as opposed to 66.3% of groves whose crops failed both years consecutively, shown in the bottom right cell.

table 4.3 year-to-year social and settlement responses to changes in pinyon crop size, assuming groves with good crops support 2.5 times as many people as groves with fair crops. Crop Year 1 Response

Crop Year 2

Response

Good →

Large group

Fair →

Small group

Fail →

No group

Good → Fair → Fail → Good → Fair → Fail → Good → Fair → Fail →

Large group stays put Large group shrinks by 60% (fission) Large group moves out Small group grows by 250% (fusion) Small group stays put Small group moves out Large group moves in Small group moves in Remains unoccupied

note: If a grove has a good crop in year 1, it will be occupied by a large group whose continued association depends on the productivity of the grove in year 2. If the grove again produces a good crop, the large group stays put and its members remain in association (large group stays put). If the grove produces a fair crop, it can only support 40% of the original large group, which shrinks by 60%, that fraction being forced to move elsewhere (large group shrinks by 60%). If the grove fails altogether, all of the large group must move out (large group moves out). Similarly, if a grove has no crop (fail) in year 1, no one will live there (no group). If that grove produces a fair crop in year 2, a small group moves in (small group moves in).

break winter staple would have funneled the whole of the population annually into the roughly 20% of groves where some crop was present, forcing people inadvertently into large groups traditionally bound by the kind of obligate sharing that made storage problematic. That groves were more than twice as likely to produce a good crop as a fair one

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table 4.4 movement and distribution of population in 2 successive years to match shifting pinyon production.

Crop Year 1 Good

Fair

Fail

Crop Year 2 Good Fair Fail Good Fair Fail Good Fair Fail

Population Year 1 (%)

Population Year 2 (%)

Stayed Put (%)

7.0 6.2 72.4 1.2 1.6 11.5

7.0 2.5

7.0 2.5

3.1 1.6

1.2 1.6

Moved Out (%)

3.7 72.4

1.1 21.7

11.5

73.7

Left Region (%)

1.9

51.4 8.1

100.0

Moved Locally (%)

3.5 51.4 8.1

12.3

87.7

61.4

26.3

note: The figures in the first two columns represent fractions of the year 1 population, which is larger than the year 2 population, because there were more grove failures in year 2, supporting a smaller overall population (73.7% of year 1), forcing 26.3% of the year 1 population to move elsewhere (e.g., Steward 1938: 70, Figures 7, 8, 9). In year 1, about 85.6% (= 7.0% + 6.2% + 72.4%) of the population wintered in groves with good crops. In year 2, 61.5% (= 7.0% + 3.1% + 51.4%) of the year 1 population is wintering in groves bearing good crops, 12.2% (= 2.5% + 1.6% + 8.1%) of the year 1 population is wintering in groves bearing fair crops, and 26.3% of the year 1 population has left the region altogether. The last four columns summarize the movement of population from year 1 to year 2. Only 12.3% (= 7.0% + 2.5% + 1.2% + 1.6%) of the year 1 population stayed put, living in the same grove as the year before.

made this unavoidable. Rather than distributing the population evenly in small, family-sized groups of close relatives, the boom-bust pinyon pattern would concentrate about 85% of the population in large groups where obligate sharing with non-kin made storage problematic. Further, the shifting location of production from one year to the next would preclude residential anchoring that would permit one or more groups to lay preemptive claim to a specific grove, or parts of it, which by excluding outsiders might otherwise have encouraged storage. About 88% of the groves that produced the first year failed or produced smaller crops the next, requiring 88% of the population to pick up and move. A total of 26.3% of the population would have had to move out of the region altogether (i.e., to groves in distant mountain ranges) (e.g., Steward 1938: 27–28, 114, 119, Figure 7). The remaining 61.4% would have stayed in the local area but had to move into groves to which they had no claim by virtue of prior use, nearly all of them into groves uninhabited in the previous year to which no group could lay prior claim and whose use rights had to be worked out from scratch, most likely in

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the traditional way: by communal harvesting and group sharing, which discouraged storage. That vagaries of pinyon production concentrated population in ways that compelled sharing and discouraged surplus acquisition likely explains why the first small bow-using groups of Owens Valley elected to winter in wetlands on the valley floor, where storage was not required and its attendant social complications were thus avoided, not in Inyo and White Mountain pinyon groves where storage was possible but problematic. It further explains why pinyon use was only about 70% as intensive between a.d. 600 and 1300 as between a.d. 1300 and 1850, which as it turns out is roughly the fraction of groves that produce a good crop as a fraction of those that produce any crop at all (good or fair) in the years documented in Table 4.2. I am disinclined to read much into this apparent equivalence, but the magnitude of the increase is consistent with the idea that early pinyon use (between a.d. 600 and 1300) concentrated in the best groves—the ones with good crops— which makes sense from an economic (foraging) standpoint. The pace of pinyon use picked up enough within this interval (most Owens Valley pinyon camps probably date after a.d. 1000) to suggest that by a.d. 1300 probably all groves that produced any crop at all (good or fair) were used. This makes it possible to calculate roughly the effect that the development of use rights permitting storage might have had on population size at this point in time. As I have said, in the absence of such use rights foragers choosing to store pinyon would have avoided sharing obligations by camping and storing in places not frequented by others, or only with close relatives, perhaps defending their right to do so by force. If so, at a.d. 1300 each pinyon grove producing any crop (good or fair) would have supported a single social unit approximating what is known as a family band: mother, father, children, and a small assortment of bilateral (i.e., husband’s or wife’s) relatives temporarily or permanently incapable of supporting themselves, mainly the elderly, widowed, or unmarried (Steward 1938). In such a pattern, pinyon is underused because groves with fair crops support as many people as groves with good crops, which are 2.5 times larger. Solving the sharing-storage problem, then, would allow population in groves with good crops to increase by a factor of 2.5 and total population to double ([69% × 2.5] + [31% × 1] = 203%)—exactly as the Owens Valley population did between a.d. 1300 and the historic period (Table 3.1). And as it turns out, Owens Valley pinyon camps dating after a.d. 1300 display twice as many pinyon caches as those before a.d. 1300

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(Table 4.1). Again, it would be foolish to read more into these numbers than that they are in the right direction and of about the right magnitude, and to that extent they are consistent with the kind of behavioral and demographic change likely accompanying the privatization of gathered food and large-scale storage as these practices ultimately developed in the pinyon woodlands. Even where true ownership of plots does not exist it is customary throughout the Shoshonean area for families to agree before harvesting begins to confine their picking to delimited tracts. . . . Trips were usually made by all members of the village. Harvested nuts, however, were family property. (Steward 1938: 65)

Public Game for Private Pinyon The details of the critical transformation from the institution in which all food was public property to one that made plants private property remain obscure, but the evidence permits plausible guesses about the broad trajectory of events. It is probably significant that the maximum availability of pinyon coincided with the maximum availability of prime large game, in autumn. This is when mountain sheep and mule deer have developed full pelts and substantial winter fat reserves and move out of the uplands, concentrated along known migration routes, down to their winter ranges. Pinyon is harvested at the same time, often in the same places, and men who took advantage of the opportunity to supply the pinyon camp with fresh meat were held in great esteem (Steward 1934: 428). Ethnographically, then, large quantities of both game and nuts were simultaneously acquired at pinyon camps, yet they circulated quite differently. Nuts (and all gathered food) were invariably a private good; large game was always a shared public good (Steward 1941: 254; 1943: 280, 300; Stewart 1941: 373; 1942: 240). She (a Shoshonean woman) frequently shared seeds with neighbors and especially relatives, but was not obligated to do so. . . . A hunter was obligated, however, to share large game with other members of the village. (Steward 1938: 231)

A reasonable speculation, therefore, is that gathered pinenuts might have become private property because meat brought back to camp was simultaneously abundant and more attractive, requiring less processing. To be more specific, with the appearance of the bow, the abundance of game in the vicinity of fall nut camps might have allowed a skilled,

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hardworking bow hunter to acquire and distribute highly valued meat in sufficient quantity to discourage additional claims to the unprocessed and less attractive nut stores independently acquired by his wife. This scenario recalls Steward’s description of the seed-meat exchange that followed the ethnographic rabbit drive in Owens Valley. Men put their rabbits in one pile; women put various seeds in another. Men took the seeds they wanted, and the women whose seeds were taken took their share of rabbits. (Steward 1933: 254)

Here, men short on seeds exchanged with women short on game, purchasing each other’s products. It is easy to imagine an early pinyon camp variation that might be termed public game for private pinyon, in which very good hunters with very industrious wives, having surpluses of both pinenuts and game, would give away all their game as a way of “purchasing” the right (generating enough public goodwill) to retain the pinenuts their wives had accumulated for private use. Other families would likely benefit more by claiming shares of the meat provided by a good hunter but not of the nuts gathered by his wife, for then the good hunter might simply quit hunting or decamp, as harried Hadza hunters often do (Lee and DeVore 1968: 155). That good hunters were handy with a bow perhaps encouraged restraint. The bow made it possible for individual hunters to defend food stores and to forestall the need for that by public giveaways of large game. In the years since this model was first presented (Bettinger 1999b, 1999c), Bogaard and colleagues (2009) have proposed a very similar argument for social relations at the Neolithic site of Catalhöyük in central Anatolia. In that case, bad blood that might have otherwise arisen from the accumulation of private storage by families was alleviated by the widespread sharing of highly valued cattle meat, permitting the setting aside of less desirable (but storable) seeds, nuts, and fruit. Nearer to home, the privatization process envisioned for Eastern California has close parallels in the contact-period change in social relations of production among the Canadian Subarctic Athabaskans and Algonkians mentioned in Chapter 3. Recall that the pre–fur trade Subarctic pattern featured large social groups reliant on communal procurement of caribou, moose and other large same, which as might be expected were widely shared as public property. With the shift to the more family-centered fur trade pattern, large game continued to be widely shared as public property, but localized smaller game, notably the fur-bearing beaver, came to be regarded as private property (Leacock

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1954; Murphy and Steward 1956; Rogers 1963; Steward 1955b: 147). As with the bow in California, then, newly available traps and firearms, and the trading posts that provided them and other valued goods, encouraged postcontact Athabaskans and Algonkians to live seasonally in smaller groups, trapping furs for private benefit, and to avoid the larger, more traditional lodge group pursuing large game to be pooled and shared for public benefit (Rogers and Leacock 1981: 179–180). In the upshot, trapping for private benefit became commonplace without displacing multifamily groups organized around sharing and cooperation. The larger hunting group owned and defended a hunting territory and its members and cooperated in large game hunting, sharing its proceeds and those from a variety of other subsistence pursuits but not furs, which remained family property (Rogers and Leacock 1981: 182). Firearms would have facilitated this, making it possible for hunters to acquire and distribute enough large game to justify the withholding of smaller fur-bearing game for private trade, some portion of the proceeds of which may also have been distributed to project the appearance of generosity. Making Privatization Permanent While the Numic institution in which gathered plant resources were private property may have developed from some kind of public game for private pinyon swap, there had to have been more to it. The arrangement is just too simple not to have cropped up many, many times long before a.d. 450, when the practice stabilized as an institution. The most likely problem behind the failure of earlier iterations was not enough like-minded people, that is, the idea was never regionally common enough long enough to persist. The parties to such local agreements would have thrived momentarily but the more general prevalence of sharing and the practice of punishing hoarders would have worked against wider adoption. Hoarding would have been relatively unpopular; and unpopular conventions tend to stay unpopular, even when they would yield higher payoffs if only they could become popular, owing to what is termed frequency dependence (Box 4.1). That hoarding produced higher returns when everyone hoards would not guarantee its spread to places where everyone shared and punished hoarders. It is in relation to this stalemate that the social isolation promoted by the advent of bow and arrow technology once again bulks large. Hoarding was able to spread after a.d. 1300 because social groups were very small.

Box 4.1

Hoarders and Sharers

An unrealistically simple model helps explain the evolutionary impediments to the local establishment and spread of food privatization in the Great Basin and California in terms of what is called frequency dependence. The assumption here is that as with most social conventions, the payoffs to different conventions governing use rights to food would have depended on their frequency, that is, the payoffs were frequency dependent. Frequency dependence can be either positive or negative. The payoffs to many criminal behaviors, for example, are negatively frequency dependent, decreasing as they become more common (e.g., more shoplifting means more in-store security, reducing payoffs to shoplifting). The payoffs to a great many more social conventions, however, increase as they become more common, their alternatives less common. This often reflects the benefits of coordination. Driving is safer, for example, when everyone drives on either the right or the left side of the road. It does not matter which, only that driving is socially coordinated, favoring one side exclusively over the other. Payoffs may also increase because as a social behavior becomes more common, it becomes less subject to sanctions levied by individuals with antithetical conventions interested in protecting the payoffs of those conventions. The two may work together, of course (traffic tickets are issued to individuals driving on the wrong side of the road). Whatever its cause, positive frequency dependence makes for behaviors that are either very common or very rare, not somewhere in between. When common enough, their payoffs are higher than any alternative, and individuals shift exclusively to them. When rare enough, their payoffs are so low that individuals abandon them for a higher-paying alternative. This makes frequency-dependent behaviors relatively stable: when they are rare, they tend to stay rare, and when common to stay common, and the trajectory from one to the other is abrupt not gradual. A rare behavior remains rare until its frequency for some reason increases all at once to the tipping point, at which it is common enough to make its payoff optimal, causing individuals to switch to it. A rare frequency-dependent behavior does not become common gradually, an individual at a time, but rather by wholesale jumps in frequency, first to the tipping point and then to fixation (everyone does it). The switch from stored food as public property to stored food as private property was probably like this. As noted in the chapter text, ethnographic hunter-gatherers who pool resources nearly always regard food as a public good and severely sanction individuals who hoard it for private use (e.g., Turnbull

1961: 94–108). In preventing hoarding, punishment also discourages low-return plant procurement. This precludes storage in bulk and keeps population low and highly mobile. If hoarding becomes common enough, however, punishment of hoarding will ease enough to encourage plant procurement and storage. In this model, sharers cooperate in liberating hoarder surpluses and punishing hoarders; hoarders defend their stores but, apart from avoiding further interaction, take no further punitive actions against sharers. Payoffs formalize this logic.

a b c p

sharer payoff = 1 + (a − b)(1 − p) hoarder payoff = 1 + a(1 − p) − cp where is the surplus food acquired but not freely shared by a hoarder is the cost a sharer incurs liberating that surplus is the individual cost of hoard defense, including subsequent punishment is the frequency of sharers

As shown in the table, with these payoffs hoarding will be favored anytime hoarder frequency (1 − p) is greater than c/(b + c), or conversely, when sharer frequency is less than b/(b + c). In the figure, for example, a = 1, b = .5, and c = .5, so the hoarder tipping-point frequency is .5, or 50%. When sharers are more than 50% of the population, their payoff is higher and hoarder frequency cannot increase. The rare mutant hoarder either switches to sharing or is replaced by more fit sharers, so the population stays all sharer. A chance event that increases the hoarder frequency all at once to

where payoffs are as described in box 4.1 text, hoarding will be favored anytime hoarder frequency (1 − p) is greater than c/(b + c). Sharer Payoff 1 + (a − b)(1 − p) 1 + a − ap − b + bp −b + bp bp + cp p 1 − [b/(b + c)] c/(b + c)

Hoarder Payoff < < < < < <
0, reciprocity score > −3). The weight of these two regional cases suggests that hierarchy and anarchy as defined here are exactly the evolutionary cultural fitness peaks predicted by motivation crowding.

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Remaining Variation The majority of western North American groups, 69% (n = 111) of Jorgensen’s WNAI sample, are neither hierarchies nor anarchies, and nearly three-quarters of those (n = 82) fall in the upper left quadrant cells A, B, E, and F, denoting minimally kin-structured group systems characterized by balanced or generalized reciprocity. A plausible interpretation is that most ancestral western North American societies were scattered in this ABEF region and that intensified resource use, working through a variety of cultural evolutionary processes, pushed some of them along a trajectory of increasing individual autonomy to the anarchy peak (cell M) and others along a trajectory of increasing organizational authority to the hierarchy peak (cell D). That ABEF groups represent an equilibrium, and that both the anarchy and hierarchy trajectories entailed significant costs that normally kept groups within this ABEF equilibrium, and must have periodically pulled groups moving toward anarchy or hierarchy back into it, is suggested by the lower frequencies of the negative reciprocity and kin-ranking behaviors that define the anarchy and hierarchy trajectories (Table 9.9). Groups with balanced or generalized reciprocity (reciprocity score > −2) are almost 2 times as common as those with strong negative reciprocity (102 to 60). Similarly, groups without kin ranking (kin structure score < 2) are more than 4 times as common as groups with kin ranking (130 to 32). The numerical dominance of ABEF groups is mainly the result of these individual frequencies rather than the fitnessenhancing properties of specific reciprocity–kin structure combinations. This, in turn, suggests substantial mix and match flexibility for different behavioral combinations, allowing for the development of a wide range of largely egalitarian, nonauthoritarian systems characterized by substantial interpersonal cooperation. For example, while most of the strongly bilateral and residentially flexible groups that dominate the “representative” hunter-gatherer sample compiled by Hill and colleagues (2011) fall somewhere within this ABEF quadrant, so do the much less flexible patrilineal-patrilocal organizations found along the Southern Coast and in the Southern Interior of California.

chapter 10

Conclusion This is anarchy. —Kroeber 1925: 38

I started in Chapter 1 with the relatively simple assertion that the ethnography of California contradicts conventional wisdom that the natural course of cultural evolution always leads from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from less to ever more complex and hierarchical systems. In the following chapters I showed that this transition, to agriculture and more hierarchical social organization, assumed in unilineal culture evolutionary schemes did not occur in aboriginal California, and might never have occurred without some cataclysmic change originating outside western North America, as happened with European colonization. I further argued that these patterns were not limited to California, that they applied to much of the Great Basin, and that for all their environmental differences and separate evolutionary trajectories, the hunter-gatherers living in these two places, California and the Great Basin, ended up on quite similar adaptive peaks. In neither region can the aboriginal absence of agriculture be laid to environment. California and the western Great Basin were less suited to dry farming than the eastern and southern Great Basin but were blessed with perennial streams admirably suited to even the most primitive forms of irrigation, shallow ditches of the kind scratched out by the earliest Great Basin agriculturalists (cf. Talbot and Richens 1996), by ethnographic groups in the Great Basin (Steward 1941: 281, 333) and even California (Lawton et al. 1976), and by all agricultural groups in the adjacent Southwest. Corn needed watering (except perhaps along 223

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the Colorado River), but this would have entailed no more effort than was regularly expended in other communal constructions (e.g., fish weirs, dance houses) (Steward 1938: 128). Yet maize agriculture lasted scarcely 900 years in the eastern and southern Great Basin (a.d. 300–1200) and never made it into California or the western Great Basin at all. Neither did environment preclude development of more complex sociopolitical organizations than were observed at Euro-American contact. The Great Basin could have supported patrilineal bands, as Steward originally believed (see Kerns 2010: 8–11). It probably did support them, and perhaps more complex social forms, in the past (Basgall and Delacorte 2012); but the Numic spread erased them all, the simpler family band proving more efficient. Organization was obviously more complex in California, yet save for perhaps groups along the Santa Barbara to Los Angeles coast, the late precontact California trajectory trended more in the opposite direction, away from complexity—at least from structurally coherent hierarchy toward family-centered systems more generally associated with the Great Basin. The instability of California tribelet organization deserves mention in this regard. It is evident, on the one hand, that some tribelet-organized California groups (e.g., Yokuts, Patwin, Pomo) featured expansive, multivillage tribelets whose capitals might number a thousand or more inhabitants, drawn there by concentrations of resources, mates, wealth, exotic foodstuffs, craftwork, and entertaining ritual displays (e.g., Kuksu and mourning ceremonies) that were the occasion of even greater, albeit temporary, concentrations of all these. It is equally clear, however, that for each major tribelet there were a dozen or more minor ones numbering no more than 2 to 5 families living in 1 or 2 villages, and as many more isolated family homesteads, many groups displaying only these smaller forms (e.g., Yuki and Eel River Athabaskans). All these formations were phases of the same tribelet phenomenon. I have throughout this volume referred to the concept of ideal free distribution (IFD), the movement of individuals and families from places where conditions were worse to places where they were better, in a way that equalizes fitness. The stages of tribelet succession show how this was physically accomplished as the land filled with people. Locations favored for geographical or other reasons—for example, river mouths, major trail intersections, a cataract where salmon habitually schooled—were occupied perennially but with varying intensity. Those momentarily blessed with plentiful resources, a wealthy and

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affable citizenry, charismatic political leaders, powerful but benevolent shamans, and such increased in size, prominence, and scope and duration of ritual performances. So long as these conditions held, more families moved in than out; movement was centripetal. Reversals of these— depleted resources, community feuding, feckless headmen, malevolent shamans—generated social fission and the opposite, centrifugal effect; families moved away, to communities where they had relatives or conditions were more promising, or they went off on their own. Intertribelet strife (Kroeber 1925: 238) and dynamics peculiar to individual families helped fuel this movement. Quarreling siblings split up camp; large families left crowded settlements to make new ones (Goldschmidt 1951: 331); death of key personnel forced formerly solitary families to join for protection or economic viability (Goldschmidt et al. 1939: 141, 144; Kroeber 1962: 33; 1925: 229, 238). Unattached individuals—the orphaned, widowed, divorced, and enfeebled—moved most freely, into households where they were the most wanted or least burdensome. The California tribelet, then, was larger and more complicated (with more individual components) than the Great Basin family band, but hardly more stable; families and individuals joined in and opted out as conditions dictated. The situation recalls the one in highland Burma, where Leach (1965) describes a constant oscillation between two quite different but equally unstable sociopolitical organizations: hierarchical gumsa organization, with paramount chiefs, ranked lineages, and chiefly tribute; and egalitarian gumlao organization, with village headmen lacking real power and exacting no tribute, and lineages of equal rank. “Gumlao-type communities have a general tendency to develop gumsa-type characteristics, while gumsa-type communities have a tendency to break up into sub-groups organized on gumlao principles” (Leach 1965: 227). Hierarchical gumsa organization is unified by kinship, organized by lineage ranking, and undone by their contradiction, widening differences of rank eventually overwhelming the ideology of kin group unity. Gumsa chiefly excesses that emphasized rank over kinship and transformed low-ranking kinsmen into a serf-like underclass resulted eventually in revolt and the establishing of egalitarian gumlao organization. Conversely, the traditional flow of bridewealth and the attendant ideology that wife-giving lineages were superior to wife-taking lineages generated uneven distributions of wealth, causing putatively egalitarian gumlao organization to drift rapidly back to ranked and hierarchical gumsa organization. The traditions reinforcing the legitimacy of these forms

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once they became established show developmental lags paralleling the social organizational ones that interested Murdock (1949). Where today we find communities of gumlao-type—i.e., no chiefs, each village a politically independent unit, a mung nat (regional spirit) which is not exclusive to any one particular lineage—we find a tradition that “formerly, x generations ago, we had chiefs,” and then there was a rebellion in which the chiefs either got killed or were driven out. On the other hand, if we look today at those localities which are, by tradition, the focal points of the gumlao system, we usually find communities of the gumsa type. (Leach 1965: 210)

The same kind of back and forth shifts are evident in California sociopolitical organizations described in Chapters 6 and 7. On the one hand, growing shortages of land and increasing importance of female labor worked to undo California tribelet organization, producing smaller and less coherently organized social units. Formerly patrilineal tribelets evolved into bilateral tribelets (Table 7.3), and in the extreme into the bilateral family band/household organizations that one sees in Northwest California. On the other hand, the size and less unified character of these organizations made them vulnerable to encroachment by larger, better organized groups, as one sees in Wintu expansion in the Sacramento Valley at the expense of the Miwok, Athabaskan expansion into the North Coast Ranges at the expense of the Yuki, and most recently the Mono expansion across the Sierra crest at the expense of the Yokuts, causing formerly bilateral groups with Hawaiian-type organization to shift back into patrilineal-patrilocal tribelet organizations (Kings River Mono, Kaweah Yokuts, Lake Yokuts; Table 6.11). Of course, even on the hierarchical Northwest Coast, settlement was unstable and people “voted with their feet” this way. Nootka commoners, for example, were probably as mobile as, say, the Pomo; Nootka families regularly moved from the house of one chiefly relative to another. But movement was mainly in pursuit of the privilege, prestige, and flow of goods that could be obtained only from house chiefs, who were correspondingly dependent on their lower-ranking tenants, without whose support they amounted to nothing (Drucker 1951: 278–279). In short, Nootka mobility was rationalized in relation to an existing sociopolitical structure determined by kinship, rank, and privilege, which dominated the system; mobility revolved around chiefs and the things they owned. The tribelet system, by contrast, lacked this organizing structure. Tribelet organization was nowhere celebrated (in myth, for example) as a

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cultural ideal or norm as was, for example, the caste-like Northwest Coast sociopolitical system of the Nootka, where relations of power were established at the time of creation (Drucker 1951: 244); or tribal organization among the Cheyenne, for whom the office of chief, and tribal authority more generally, was derived from the supernaturals (Hoebel 1968: 142–143, 145). Tribelet organization did not drive mobility; it was the other way around. Mobility determined the size, even the presence, of tribelets; and mobility was a family or individual affair, rationalized in relation to family and individual self-interest. Tribelets only existed where individuals and families found it in their interest to join forces to defend what they wanted to keep for their own. It is symptomatic of the situation that the Yurok-Karuk-Hupa, whom Kroeber (1925: 1; 1936: 104) regarded as having achieved the highest level of cultural refinement in California, had refined their political organization—their tribelets and chiefs—entirely out of existence. In short, the western North American persistence of hunting and gathering and family band social organization does not reflect failure to evolve but merely evolution in a direction different from that predicted by traditional culture theory. Indeed, by accepted biological standards, California–Great Basin hunter-gatherers were more highly evolved than their more complexly organized hunter-gatherer and agricultural counterparts; at least they were able to outcompete and replace them. There were no major agricultural expansions in western North America after a.d. 1200, only minor ones (e.g., River Yumans) (Jorgensen 1980: 241– 242), mainly at the expense of other agriculturalists. The major population expansions were by hunter-gatherers at the expense of agriculturalists (e.g., Jorgensen 1980: 148) or other hunter-gatherers (e.g., Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982). Hunter-gatherers were also winners if one measures by ethnographic population density. Agriculture supported the absolutely highest North American ethnographic population densities, but only in the Rio Grande Pueblos (and probably Mississippian and southeastern agriculturalists before their late prehistoric collapse). California hunter-gatherer densities substantially exceeded those for the agricultural Southwest as a whole as well as the rest of ethnographic North America (Driver and Massey 1957: Map 9; Ubelacker 2006: 697). Sociopolitical complexity provided no decisive advantage here. Within California, Chumash and Gabrielino chiefdoms boasted very large populations, but their villages were no larger than those of neighboring Yokut tribelets (Cook 1955: 43, 44, 46), their densities no greater than in the North Coast Ranges

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(Baumhoff 1978: 20). Of course, competitive success and population density are not what most theorists have in mind when speaking of cultural evolution. Culture theorists have been mainly concerned with sociopolitical complexity and status differentiation (inequality), which are taken as measures of evolutionary development: evolved systems are hierarchical and organizationally complex; unevolved systems are not (Carneiro 1967, 1985; Carniero 1970; Service 1962: 172–173). On this count, competitive success and population density are epiphenomenal to the evolutionary process. The complexity perspective implies that cultural evolution should be viewed as a process the logic of which unfolds from the “top down,” that is, that hierarchical sociopolitical structures provide a framework that supports and enforces the myriad behaviors that account for the gains in productivity and population density, which in turn are the signs of cultural development. The outlines of this argument are familiar and do not require extensive review. Briefly, development occurs through processes that increasingly concentrate and channel resources and power from lower levels (individuals and families) to higher levels (headmen, big men, and chiefs) (Carniero 1970; Flannery 1972; Johnson 1982; Peebles and Kus 1977; Rappaport 1970). Flannery (1972) mentions as examples “promotion” and “linearization.” Promotion is when a position of situational or part-time authority is promoted to full-time authority, as when for instance, during a prolonged period of war, a war chief becomes a chief pure and simple. Linearization is when tasks previously assigned to lower authority become the domain of higher authority, as envisioned for the formation of Chumash chiefdoms, when decisions formerly made at the band level came to be made by higher-level authorities at the chiefdom level. Production at the lowest level increases in response to demands from higher levels or by incorporating additional lower-level units, by force if necessary. Inequality equates with complexity, and political development equates with behaviors that increase inequality (e.g., warfare). Hayden (1995) argues that ambitious, strategizing men (aggrandizers) are behind all this, but a multitude of other explanations have been ventured over the years: technological change (e.g., Childe 1951), warfare (e.g., Carniero 1970), irrigation (e.g., Wittfogel 1957). The top-down mode of cultural evolution has merit among huntergatherers, as the Northwest Coast and probably Chumash and Gabrielino examples show. The vast majority of California–Great Basin

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hunter-gatherers, however, suggest an alternative mode of evolutionary development that proceeds not from the top down through organizations but from the bottom up through less formalized cultural institutions, themselves evolved through frequency-dependent group selection (as in the privatizing of food) and like forces (e.g., motivation crowding) that coordinate interactions between very small political units in beneficial ways. Hierarchical sociopolitical organization had only limited hold over aboriginal Californians, arguably no more than in the Great Basin and more in connection with ritual than subsistence or trade. It was precisely this lack of higher-level intervention that propelled household subsistence production to levels exceeding those where claims on household production by individuals, kin groups, or organizations disincentivized production. The trick was to protect hard-gotten household resources by privatizing subsistence production essentially by mutual consent, without recourse to third-party authority, that is, the development of an orderly anarchy. The motivation crowding argument, that less hierarchy can produce more order, furnishes a sound theoretical explanation for this laissezfaire system. Limits on this development had mainly to do with information. Orderly anarchy requires that individuals have enough information to discriminate good from bad partners. Errors can be critical; mistaking good behavior for bad, or bad for good, can prevent development of orderly anarchy, the probability of this varying with the quality of such information, which in turn varies with population size and social interaction. Anarchy is unlikely to evolve where small, thinly spread, and isolated social groups lack the information needed to evaluate reputation, making them less trusting of strangers and thus limiting the possibilities of beneficial interaction. If population grows and becomes more sedentary, however, and comes into closer contact, there will be more opportunities to observe social conduct and more individuals who observe, remember, and recount their observations. Once a formerly small, socially fragmented population grows to some critical level, where the quality of social information is good enough that good partners do better than bad partners, the payoffs from social interaction, frequency of social interaction, quality of social information, and population will all increase as a feedback system. At this point anarchy can be stable, that is, self-correcting, with any tendency toward organization and punishment lowering payoffs.

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The limits on further development will then center either on economic externalities (e.g., technology and resources) or, once again, on informational limits, in this instance information overload, as in a population too large to monitor accurately. Closed-minded provincialism made this problematic, as among the Yurok who “love a small, snug, known, unchanging world, and in imagination often contract their universe, even short of the bounds of their actual knowledge” (Kroeber 1959a: 238). And as I have already quoted Powers in Chapter 1 for California more generally, So contracted were their journeyings and their knowledge that they do not need a complicated system of (tribal) names. If there are any people living twenty miles away they are not aware of their existence. (Powers 1877: 315)

Money permitted intensification and population growth beyond these self-imposed limits and ever-changing sociopolitical landscape.

money Because it makes it increasingly difficult to keep tabs on everyone, population growth diminishes effectiveness of the reputation-based interaction on which orderly aboriginal anarchy rests. Organizational remedies are no solution because increasing law decreases order (i.e., encourages dealing with cheaters, leading to more cheating). California money use circumvented this limit; transactions conducted on the spot using shell money reduced the importance of reputation. Money was a perfect fit to anarchy. In a system made up of many small but fiercely independent property-holding social units who were covetous of territory and resentful and deeply suspicious of their neighbors, money facilitated the transfer of a broad range of goods across social boundaries without social entailments or obligations; in short, without significant sociopolitical overhead. No organization issued this money. No organization dictated the price structure that developed around it or shored it up when prices sagged. Money was universally accepted in transactions between total strangers that routinely crosscut political and ethnolinguistic boundaries. Indeed, that seems to have been the point: to make exchange impersonal, strictly business, without social or political implications or obligations. In short, this most sophisticated of economic instruments developed in the absence of the kind of complex and hierarchical sociopolitical structures that traditional culture evolutionary theory assumes

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are necessary for such things. As with individual private property in Northwest California, generalized money use represents development by a behavioral convention coordinated by group-level processes and selection of the kind discussed in Chapter 4 (Box 4.1) and that transcended organized sociopolitical groups.

the importance of subsistence economy Environment did not determine the evolution of California–Great Basin anarchy, but it is clear that subsistence, which was strongly determined by environment, favored the development of small, nuclear family– centered groups. Gathering (by women) of abundant but difficult to process plant foods was the cornerstone, dominating California–Great Basin subsistence. In the Jorgensen (1980) sample, gathering accounts for more than half of the diet of nearly two-thirds of the groups holding territory in California (41 of 66) and in the Great Basin outside California (11 of 17). Just as importantly, hunting (by men) ran a strong second. Rarely the most important resource and never accounting for more than half of the diet in any California–Great Basin group, hunting still bulked large enough to keep men occupied, contributing more than either fishing or agriculture in more than half (35 of 66) of California groups and almost three-quarters (12 of 17) of Great Basin groups. This gathering-hunting combination made the nuclear family self-sufficient and economically competitive. The gathering > hunting > fishing  /  agriculture combination favors nuclear-family autonomy. Gathering, which is dominant, does not benefit and may suffer when more than one individual is involved (Steward 1938: 230–231), and hunting is just productive enough to justify its more or less full-time pursuit, mainly by individuals, making each wife-husband team a fully functional subsistence unit. As hunting and gathering decline in importance, labor is channeled to less solitary forms of subsistence that benefit from cooperation, favoring formation of larger sociopolitical units, either fishing (as on the Northwest Coast) or agriculture (as in the Southwest). Binford’s (2001) sample underscores these relationships among western North American hunter-gatherers. As gathering and hunting decrease in importance, fishing increases (rhunt-fish = −.63, rgather-fish = −.68, n = 187). And as noted in Chapter 3, as fishing increases, group size increases. With gathering it is just the opposite; gathering decreases group size. The above aside, that any mainland California groups excepting perhaps the Chumash and Gabrielino were as fish dependent as those of

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the Northwest Coast is worth questioning, because fish dependence is costly and risky enough to make alternative specializations like gathering attractive. Fishing is heavily front-loaded, requiring significant investment of labor in procurement technology (e.g., nets), in procurement, and in postharvest handling for storage (e.g., filleting, drying) (Tushingham and Bettinger 2013). This and negligible poststorage costs make fish stores an obvious target for freeloaders, thieves, and raiders. Fish are equally problematic nutritionally, dependence on them being possible only with species that are naturally fat rich (e.g., candlefish, Thaleichthys pacificus; sardine, Sardinops sagax) or fat rich owing to size (fat percentage increasing with body size). To an even greater extent than small-bodied mammals, smaller-bodied fish are normally too protein rich (fat poor) to be eaten in quantity without significant inputs of fat or carbohydrates from other sources (Cordain et al. 2000; Speth and Spielmann 1983). Even Chinook and silver salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, O. kisutch) and steelhead (O. mykiss), the species key to Baumhoff’s (1963: 222) lower Klamath fish adaptation, are marginal on this count. To avoid severe protein risk, complete dependence on salmonids would require consumption only of individuals weighing well over 20 kg (Cordain et al. 2000). This gives weight to Kroeber’s (1925: 84) statement that even in salmon-rich Northwest California, the Yurok, Tolowa, Karuk, Hupa, and Wiyot “ate very largely of the acorn.” This is likely why Waterman’s (1920: Map 3) one full-family property listing shows a prominent Yurok family holding 15 acorn grounds and only 4 fishing places. This is probably also why the Yurok rated the value of acorn places at 1 to 5 strings of dentalia and fishing places at 1 to 3 strings (Kroeber 1925: 27); and why the Hupa word for “human being” (vs. “spirit”) is k’iwinya’n-ya:n, literally “acorn-eater,” and the word for “acorn” (k’iwinya’n) translates literally as “what one eats, makes a meal out of” (Golla personal communication 2009). Isotopic evidence supports this picture, at least for Northern California. It shows that while marine resources became increasingly important through time in the Santa Barbara Channel area (Walker and DeNiro 1986), they became less important relative to terrestrial resources in the San Francisco Bay region (Bartelink 2009), and they were never important anywhere in the Sacramento Delta or along the Sacramento River (Bartelink 2006). The archaeological data from sites farther north show much the same thing, along the lower Smith River in Northwest California (Tushingham 2009).

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The process leading to acorn specialization along rivers so rich in salmon is unclear but selection, both individual and group, may have been involved, centering especially on the problems posed by freeloaders, thieves, and raiders, for whom, in comparison to salmon, acorn that could be scrounged, stolen, or plundered represented little in the way of prestige or saved labor. Woodburn (1980) has made much of the difference between immediate-return and delayed-return huntergatherer systems, arguing that delay between the acquisition and consumption of a resource increases the possibility that it will be distributed inequitably, some getting far less than others in proportion to their investment in its procurement and processing. California groups are invariably classified as “delayed return” because they store and are thus presumably prone to development of inequality. Close reading of Woodburn makes clear, however, that the immediate-delayed distinction hinges not on storage per se but on the extent to which the acquisition of a stored resource represents potential for “getting something for nothing,” that is, a savings of labor; and this, in turn, hinges on the degree to which the resource is front-loaded. Because salmon is so heavily front-loaded, in seizing it one effectively seizes the effort expended in its procurement and processing, saving that much time and labor, with the further ability to gift that time and labor to others to curry favor, a situation abounding with possibilities for developing inequality. On that logic, Northwest Coast hierarchical organization, the Northwest Coast propensity for raiding as a source of plunder and prestige, and the positive correlation between fishing and group size discussed in Chapter 3 all seem due at least in part to reliance on front-loaded resources, in particular, raiding to seize the costly frontloaded resources that dominate Northwest Coast fishing economies (e.g., candlefish oil) and the need to defend against raids aimed at seizing them. The acorn has some front-end costs but is so very back-loaded that its capture as stores represents little saved time and thus minimal gift value—on the order of the difference, say, between gifting a finished basket or the raw materials needed to make one, with correspondingly less potential for developing inequality, likewise for attracting raiders or developing organizational means to defend or retaliate against raiders. It is thinkable, then, that for many Californians, and most of all those living in small groups, acorns were a safer choice than salmon. A relevant albeit more extreme example comes from the North American Plains, where the horse rendered the sedentary Plains Village

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adaptation centered on maize farming and bison hunting untenable for all but the largest systems. Even moderately sized villages full of frontloaded maize were too susceptible to massed attack by mounted horsemen during the fall when men were away hunting buffalo (Hoebel 1978: 8–9; Secoy 1953: 30–31). In consequence, many formerly sedentary maize-buffalo groups became full-time horse nomads (Secoy 1953: 31–32), not because it was more productive than maize farming, which it was almost certainly not (Shimkin 1947: 280), but because it was less subject to raiding. The selection process envisioned here for Northwest California requires only that families and individuals specializing in salmon suffer more from freeloading, theft, and raids than those specializing in acorns until the advantages of acorns become obvious enough for the pattern to spread and become general by imitation, as argued by Boyd and Richerson (2002). And once that pattern became general, the path to anarchy was clear, waiting only for the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, and if not for European colonization, perhaps much of California to follow it.

orderly anarchy more generally It seems appropriate in closing to consider the institution of orderly anarchy more generally: what it is, how it evolves, and its relevance to hunter-gatherers beyond California and the Great Basin, to simple and complex agriculturalists, and perhaps even to modern society.

What Is Orderly Anarchy? Even in most extreme form, for example, among the Yurok-KarukHupa, orderly anarchy is not the absence of institutions altogether. It is more narrowly the absence of organized institutions with defined membership and fixed (and usually named) positions of authority capable of intervening in the affairs of it members, quite different from the extraorganizational institutions of orderly anarchy, which lack well-defined membership and facilitate interpersonal interaction without direct, third-party organizational interference. The more extreme absence of institutions altogether seems a recipe for chaos, disorderly anarchy or Hobbes’s (1962) “war of all against all,” probably more amenable to the imposition of order by force than the evolution of orderly anarchy.

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How Does Orderly Anarchy Develop? Theory and data weigh against the idea that orderly anarchy arises easily enough to be commonplace among hunter-gatherers or simple agriculturalists. By the reciprocity and kinship proxies employed here (Chapter 9), orderly anarchy characterizes less than a quarter of the Western North American Indians (WNAI) sample, and probably none of the “representative” worldwide hunter-gatherer sample developed by Hill and colleagues (2011). Adding the Great Basin Paiute and Shoshone groups in the WNAI and Hill and colleagues samples, which should have been but were not counted as orderly anarchies (see Chapter 9), does not materially change this. That orderly anarchy is uncommon makes it more likely a derived than original form of hunter-gatherer organization. The same is probably true for hierarchical organization, which characterizes only about a tenth of the WNAI sample and none of the Hill and colleagues (2011) sample. As noted in Chapter 9, the default organizational form out of which both normally evolve is presumably what is left: minimally kinstructured groups where generalized reciprocity is maintained by the frequency-dependent group-level processes discussed in Chapter 4 (Box 4.1), which are the majority of the WNAI sample (the ABEF groups in Table 9.10) and seem to be virtually 100% of the Hill and colleagues sample. Granting that neither sample represents the full range of ancestral Pleistocene-Holocene hunter-gatherer organization, the WNAI sample comes closer, including the Northwest Coast hierarchies, Northern California tribelets and orderly anarchies, and Southern California patrilineal bands (e.g., Cahuilla) unrepresented in the Hill and colleagues sample. The WNAI sample suggests that orderly anarchy is most commonly a secondary institution, not a stand-alone, general-purpose institution of the kind one sees in the Great Basin and Northwest California, which are exceptional. As described in Chapter 7, Yurok-Karuk-Hupa anarchy seems to have developed by the shifting of responsibility for wergild settlement from groups to individuals in a region packed with many more different ethnic groups than any other in western North America. And as described in Chapter 4, Numic anarchy probably developed with the institution that made stored pinyon private property, permitting intensive use of this notoriously unreliable resource. This kind of extreme anarchy, where anarchy is the dominant institution, is much less common than where anarchy is a secondary institution and develops in

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response to emerging complexities in existing sociopolitical organization. In much of California, for example, anarchy was probably a response to increasing heterarchy (Crumley 1995), a complexly overlapping power structure that developed to deal with contradictions in tribelet organization. These developments had to do with the combination of self-interest and subsistence economy that encouraged tribelets to become smaller, as detailed in Chapter 7. This made tribelets more productive, encouraging entrepreneurial innovation and development of innumerable craft specialties and accumulation of surpluses of a growing variety of exotic foods (Gifford 1926a: 327–328; Davis 1961; McKern 1922: 246–250). Goldschmidt enumerates the following crafts and professions among just the Nomlaki. Shamanism, necromancy, message running, fishing, trapping squirrels, trapping rats, bow making, arrow making, flint chipping, breaking of flint blocks, stone-pipe making, stonebead making, tattooing, cutting of ear and nose septum, haircutting, skirtmaking, climbing for pine nuts, preparing buckeyes, salt leaching (from a weed—used in the valley only), and fire making. (Goldschmidt (1951: 331)

The contradiction lay in the access to the markets for these things, which was limited by circumstances mentioned in connection with the development of money in Chapter 8 and the development of anarchy in Chapter 9, notably tribelet isolationism and a generally inward-looking worldview, which increased as tribelet size decreased. This invited the development of extra-tribelet organizations that facilitated social interaction and trade mainly between individuals across tribelet boundaries, producing the kind of complexly overlapping structures of power, influence, and obligation termed heterarchy. The result was quite different from the increasingly coherent, hierarchical effect that happens when organizations restructure from within. Innovations to improve existing forms of sociopolitical organization are nearly always vertical in reach, increasing hierarchical structure and organizational coherence, lines of authority, and connections from one level to the next, as in promotion and linearization mentioned above, for example (Flannery 1972). On the other hand, extra-organizational innovations that develop to circumvent obstacles imposed by existing sociopolitical organization usually work in the other direction, horizontally, by connecting entirely new networks of interaction that increase heterarchy and decrease structural coherence. A prime example is the

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expansion of private property and development of the California wealth complex (e.g., Goldschmidt 1951: 339–341): this increased the ability of ordinary individuals to achieve social prominence and eroded the importance of ascribed status and purely hereditary elites, replacing a more coherent organization having one center of power with a less coherent organization having two complexly overlapping centers of power. In addition to money and the wealth complex, Kuksu secret society (Kroeber 1932; Loeb 1932, 1933) in Northern California, possibly Chumash ’antap secret society on the Southern Coast (Blackburn 1974: 104–105), and California moiety organization (see Chapter 6) all seem to have developed to circumvent limitations inherent to late prehistoric California tribelet organization. As discussed in Chapter 6, Kuksu developed outside and at odds with existing tribelet organization. Corroding tribelet chiefly power, it cultivated relationships that extended horizontally between individuals across tribelet and even ethnic divisions (e.g., Kroeber 1932: 325, 340; Loeb 1932: 123), accounting for its expansive Northern California distribution. That the motive for Kuksu participation was strongly economic seems clear (Kroeber 1932: 389; Loeb 1933: 156), permitting opportunities for trade and financial gain that tribelet organization normally inhibited. The less well-documented Chumash ’antap secret society (Blackburn 1974: 104–105) seems to follow similar lines, possibly in response to similar barriers to trade and interaction in Chumash sociopolitical organization. California moieties were likewise heterarchical in consequence, as in the Yokut office of “moiety chief,” wherein tribelets needed to have two chiefs, one from each moiety, rather than just one, forcing a sharing of power that would not otherwise have occurred and decreasing the structural coherence of Yokut society. All of the preceding leads finally to the hypothesis that most California anarchies developed as responses to the increasingly chaotic heterarchy that characterized late prehistoric sociopolitical organization in California. Anarchy rationalized social interactions between individuals intertwined in ambiguously overlapping and conflicting relations of power and obligation that had become increasingly incomprehensible. This explains how groups like the Maidu, Pomo, and Nisenan, with so many and varied kinds of social, political, and ceremonial organizations, can still be characterized as orderly anarchies. As these systems became complex they became increasingly incoherent. It is precisely because of this organizational complexity and incoherence that Maidu,

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Pomo, and Nisenan individuals found it less efficient to interact as members of tribelets, kin groups, or ceremonial groups than simply as individuals via systems of orderly anarchy. Orderly anarchy was not as dominant among these groups as it was among the Yurok. Tribelets, kin groups, and ceremonial groups still bulked large. Orderly anarchy, however, was the institutional default. Anarchical tendencies in other western North American groups, the Coast Salish, for example (Angelbeck and Grier 2012), may parallel such developments in California, emerging in response to increasing heterarchy in outwardly hierarchical sociopolitical organization.

hierarchy versus orderly anarchy: alternative adaptive strategies What is perhaps most surprising about the organizational contrast between hierarchy and orderly anarchy is that it applies to so many large-scale cooperative endeavors that are simply assumed to require formal organization and therefore to explain the presence of hierarchical sociopolitical organization. For example, the northernmost Northwest Coast shows that hierarchical political organization is remarkably efficient at mobilizing a wide range of complex economic activities, including large-scale anadromous fish procurement using large and elaborately constructed weirs (e.g., De Laguna 1990: 210; Drucker 1950: 221; 1951: 42, 247–248, 250–253); some have argued that the two are related, hierarchy evolving to coordinate large-scale salmon procurement (Schalk 1981; Suttles 1968). However, hierarchy may not be the best, and is certainly not the only, solution to such problems. As the Yurok show, orderly anarchy can be equally efficient. The Yurok organized the construction of large-scale fish weirs no differently than did the Shoshone their rabbit drives (Chapter 7), by orderly anarchy: situational cooperation directed by situational leaders. The same alternatives (hierarchy and anarchy) apply to the much larger-scale form of hunter-gatherer cooperation in western North America associated with horse-mounted buffalo hunting and warfare on the Plains. While both equestrian warring and hunting could be organized and regimented by highly formalized authority, as among the formerly agricultural Cheyenne (Hoebel 1978), this was by no means essential as many have assumed (Secoy 1953: 88). An anarchical version was equally efficient. The Eastern Shoshone of the Rockies (Murphy and Murphy 1960; Shimkin 1947) and the Comanche of the

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southern Plains (Hoebel 1968; Wallace and Hoebel 1952) hunted buffalo and pursued war on a much more informal and ad hoc basis (Bettinger 2013). Leadership and authority did not bulk large in either of these orderly anarchies. For the Eastern Shoshone, “each individual is his own sovereign master, and acts from the dictates of his own mind” (Meriwether Lewis quoted in Murphy and Murphy 1960: 330). This is certainly why the Murphys found that their “Wind River Shoshone informants showed more confusion over chieftainship and patterns of leadership, in general, than on any other subject. . . . It was not even necessary that a Shoshone chief be a Shoshone” (Murphy and Murphy 1960: 313, 314). Concepts of leadership were similarly vague among the Comanche, for whom “the individual is supreme in all things” (Hoebel 1968: 131). In commenting on the office of headman, one of Hoebel’s (1968: 131–132) most astute Comanche informants remarked, “I hardly know how to tell you about them; they never had much to do except hold the band together.” The Comanche headman was neither elected nor even consciously chosen, “he just got that way,” and as with the Great Basin “rabbit boss,” anyone who disliked his decisions simply ignored them (Hoebel 1968: 132). The Cheyenne, on the other hand, perceived the individual to be subservient to tribal authority. Because “the authority of the tribal council is derived from the supernaturals and is supreme over all other elements in the society” (Hoebel 1978: 104), leadership loomed very large indeed. In contrast to Comanche and Eastern Shoshone headmen, Cheyenne chiefs were not individuals who “just got that way.” They were formally appointed to be chiefs, the position of which had been created by the supernaturals (Hoebel 1968: 144–145). It is no accident that the Eastern Shoshone and Comanche speak closely related Numic dialects, having formerly been generalized Great Basin hunter-gatherers organized as orderly anarchies. Operating subsequently outside the Great Basin as equestrian hunters and raiders, both groups nevertheless maintained their orderly anarchies that featured impromptu but highly effective forms of cooperation. Exactly as they once had for rabbits in the Great Basin, they now assembled temporarily in groups numbering in the hundreds under the aegis of temporary leaders, often chosen on the spot, to war or hunt buffalo, afterward melting effortlessly back into their constituent family bands to search out scarce, thinly spread resources, not primarily seeds as during their Great Basin hunter-gatherer existence, but graze for horses too numerous to pasture

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for long in any one place (Shimkin 1947). Aptly termed Lords of the South Plains (Wallace and Hoebel 1952), the Comanche demonstrated orderly anarchy to be more than a match for the formally regimented Cheyenne-type hierarchies. In the upshot, the institution of orderly anarchy, which developed to intensify plant procurement in the Great Basin, proved just as effective when applied to a lifeway of equestrian big-game hunting and warfare on the Plains, and there seems no reason why it would not be equally effective in a wide range of pastoral adaptations, as the Nuer so aptly show (Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 1940b). Agriculture, Irrigation, and Anarchy There is nothing about agriculture preventing its organization either way, by hierarchy or orderly anarchy. Certainly maize agriculture was practiced on a small scale with irrigation by the anarchical Kaibab and San Juan Southern Paiute (Kelly 1964: 39–40, 170); and wild crops were irrigated on a much larger scale by the Owens Valley Paiute (Lawton et al. 1976; Steward 1930; 1933: 247–250), organized along exactly the same lines as their rabbit drive, with situational leaders directing communal labor to improve production of stands of wild plants that might be freely harvested by anyone (Steward 1933: 247). The classic case for irrigation and hierarchy, of course, is Wittfogel’s (1957) Oriental despotism, in which the construction and maintenance of large and complex irrigation systems demands organization and leadership, leading to a hierarchical hydraulic state. While there may be limits on what orderly anarchies can accomplish in regard to irrigation systems, absolute scale matters less than complexity. The most densely settled agricultural communities, for example, tend to bimodal extremes with respect to the level at which irrigation is organized, either by the state (hierarchical alternative) or by households (orderly anarchy alternative) (Kappel 1974: Figure 13.2). Along these same lines, Spooner (1974: 44) argues that efficient irrigation, even on fairly large scale (certainly on scales as large as anywhere in ethnographic North America), “not only does not require explicit centralization or control, but no one person need be aware of the full details.” Netting (1974: 73) is more specific on this count: “Small-scale irrigation systems which grow essentially without plan and are maintained with a minimum of cooperative effort can function on the basis of an intricate series of water-sharing agreements, each meshing with the others but known to individuals only insofar as their own use rights are exercised.”

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It is relevant here that Netting was referring specifically to irrigation in 1970–1971 in Törbel in the Swiss Alps, whose practice he described as “an acephalous system of ordered anarchy” (Netting 1974: 73).

orderly anarchy now and in the future It is important to note in closing that orderly anarchy is not an institution of the ancient or ethnographic past but is alive and well and all around us. The hierarchy and orderly anarchy styles of organization one sees evolving in Jorgensen’s (1980) Western North American Indians sample have reflections clear into the urban, first-world societies of today. Vincent Ostrom and colleagues (1961), for instance, had the idea that, at least in an idealized democracy, the principle of individual sovereignty, or anarchy, trumps hierarchical principles in the organization of society. He and Elinor Ostrom (2010) developed an idea of “polycentric” political power akin to the concept of heterarchy as it is used here, arguing that the American political system permits most any group of citizens to organize to provide collective benefits. Elinor Ostrom argued particularly that the heterarchical patchwork of “special districts,” such as there are in California for managing water supply (Ostrom 1965) and in many states for organizing police and public safety (Ostrom and Parks 1973), were actually good public policy, allowing for highly situational bottom-up provision and control of important public goods. Flannery (1972), following Rappaport (1970, 1971), long ago argued along similar lines that hierarchical organizations were prone to the maladies of “meddling,” where higher levels of organization interfere in local matters of which they have little understanding; and of “hyper-coherence,” where organization becomes so tightly integrated that what would otherwise be local problems occurring in one sector immediately reverberate upward, disrupting the whole system. Contradicting the prevailing idea in the public-administration literature that such an anarchic and heterarchical patchwork was somehow bad just because it looked very untidy on paper, “not a single case was found where a large centralized police department outperformed smaller departments serving similar neighborhoods” (Ostrom 2010: 644). Elsewhere, and particularly in the presence of powerful and hierarchically organized third-world states, there will continue be a place for orderly anarchy at the margins: in the rural and peasant societies either too remote, too poor, or both to bother with. Under the umbrella of the state in name only, more interesting to anthropologists than to

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government officials living in cities, these communities will continue to be forgotten and ignored and will as a consequence develop, and conduct business using, very simple and acephalous systems of orderly anarchy. If the Ostroms are right, such communities will be better served as a result.

Glossary

ambilocal postmarital residence Where a family lives with either the wife’s or husband’s relatives as conditions suit, but not either one preferentially. anarchy In its literal sense, “without rulers.” Used here to refer more broadly to a system without formal authority or publicly enforced government. In an orderly anarchy, order is preserved via informal institutions that permit productive interaction between individuals that recognize no common social or political bond that would guarantee goodwill in the course of such interactions. bilateral descent Where descent is traced through both mother and father and male and female relatives. Purists prefer the equivalent term, nonunilineal descent, noting that while it is possible to trace lines of relationship ascending upward bilaterally, descent by definition proceeds downward to one’s descendants as a group, that is, without regard to side. Bilateral descent is the more common usage and is followed here. chi-square A statistic that measures the probability, p, that an observed association between variables is the result of chance. In all the cases here, the test asks whether variation in one variable (e.g., type of polygyny) varies closely with variation in a second (e.g., geographical area, subsistence pattern, etc.). The probabilities given here are 1-tailed, indicating the test of a specific hypothesis that predicts not merely that there is a relationship between the variables but also the nature of that relationship, for example, not merely that polygyny has some connection with subsistence, but more specifically that sororal polygyny is strongly related to the importance of gathering. The probability of an observed distribution is affected by the number of values that are free to vary, or degrees of freedom (df). For instance, in a 2 × 2 table, with 2 rows and 2 columns, there is only 1 df 243

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table g.1 summary of major cousin terminologies found in california. Father’s Brother’s Daughter Called:

Mother’s Sister’s Daughter Called:

Eskimo Hawaiian Iroquois Omaha

Cousin Sister Sister Sister

Cousin Sister Sister Sister

Crow

Sister

Sister

Terminology Type

Father’s Sister’s Daughter Called: Cousin Sister Cousin Niece (sister’s daughter) Father’s sister

Mother’s Brother’s Daughters Called: Cousin Sister Cousin Mother Daughter

table g.2 forms of social organization found in ethnographic california (murdock 1949: table 60). Social Organization Type Eskimo Hawaiian Yuman Fox Guinea Omaha Dakota

Descent

Cousin Terminology

State of System

Bilateral Bilateral Bilateral Bilateral Patrilineal Patrilineal Patrilineal

Eskimo Hawaiian Iroquois Crow, Omaha Eskimo, Hawaiian Omaha Iroquois

In equilibrium In equilibrium Out of equilibrium Out of equilibrium Out of equilibrium In equilibrium In equilibrium

because the row sums and column sums are fixed; once any of the 4 cells in the table is filled, the others are determined automatically. crow terminology A form of cousin terminology in which the father’s brother’s daughter and mother’s sister’s daughter are called sister, the father’s sister’s daughter is called father’s sister, and the mother’s brother’s daughter is called daughter. The different forms of cousin terminologies represented in California are summarized in Table G.1. dakota social organization Following Murdock (1949: Table 60), an equilibrium form of social organization characterized by patrilineal descent and Iroquois cousin terminology consistent with unilineal descent. Murdock social organizational types represented in California are summarized in Table G.2. demonstrated kin group A group of individuals who recognize themselves as a group by virtue of being able to demonstrate their descent from a common ancestor.

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district A group of otherwise autonomous villages or tribelets allied into a confederacy usually for war or defense. In California, characterizing only the Mohave and Yuma, possibly the Nisenan. eskimo social organization Following Murdock (1949: Table 60), an equilibrium form of social organization characterized by bilateral descent and Eskimo cousin terminology consistent with bilateral descent. Murdock social organizational types represented in California are summarized in Table G.2. eskimo terminology A form of cousin terminology in which father’s brother’s daughter, mother’s sister’s daughter, father’s sister’s daughter, and mother’s brother’s daughter are all called “cousin.” The different forms of cousin terminologies represented in California are summarized in Table G.1. family band A small set of coresiding kin (normally husband, wife/wives, children, plus a bilateral assortment of elderly, incapacitated, or unmarried relatives). A residential kin group also termed kin clique (Fowler 1966). fox social organization Following Murdock (1949: Table 60), an out-ofequilibrium form of social organization characterized by bilateral descent and either Crow or Omaha cousin terminology inconsistent with bilateral descent, suggesting that descent was formerly unilineal. Murdock social organizational types represented in California are summarized in Table G.2. guinea social organization Following Murdock (1949: Table 60), an out-of-equilibrium form of social organization characterized by patrilineal descent and Eskimo or Hawaiian cousin terminology inconsistent with patrilineal descent, suggesting that descent was formerly bilateral. Murdock social organizational types represented in California are summarized in Table G.2. hawaiian social organization Following Murdock (1949: Table 60), an equilibrium form of social organization characterized by bilateral descent and Hawaiian cousin terminology consistent with bilateral descent. Murdock social organizational types represented in California are summarized in Table G.2. hawaiian terminology A form of cousin terminology in which the father’s brother’s daughter, mother’s sister’s daughter, father’s sister’s daughter, and mother’s brother’s daughter are all called sister. The different forms of cousin terminologies represented in California are summarized in Table G.1. heterarchy Reference here is to an incoherently structured sociopolitical system of complexly overlapping authority and webs of relation in which individuals have the potential to be related and ranked relative to each other in a number of different ways. Unlike hierarchical organizations, where rank relationships are generally coherent and transitive, relationships in heterarchical organizations are much less coherent: individual A may be more highly positioned than individual B in one context, and individual B may be more highly positioned than individual A in another. Among the Clear Lake Pomo, for example, one individual might recognize another as his “chief” and as his superior in that sociopolitical relationship, but the same individual might be a Kuksu society head and the chief merely an initiate and thus in that relationship his inferior.

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hierarchy Reference here is to a coherently structured sociopolitical system in which power and authority are unequally distributed among individuals, some of whom rank higher than others. In hierarchical organizations, rank relationships are generally coherent and transitive. That is, if individual A ranks higher than individual B, and individual B ranks higher than individual C, then individual A ranks higher than individual C. household group A nuclear family–centered assortment of bilateral kin, averaging roughly 7.5 individuals, equivalent in size and composition to the Great Basin family band. The dominant sociopolitical unit in much of Northwest California. kindred An ego-centered set of bilateral kin relations extending through both the mother’s and father’s side. Except for full siblings, kindreds are unique. To see this, note that while my kindred is the same as my brother’s, my kindred is different from both my mother’s (which does not include, for example, my father) and my father’s (which does not include, for example, my mother). matrilineal descent Where descent is traced through the mother and female relatives. matrilocal postmarital residence Where a family lives with the wife’s parents. neolocal postmarital residence Where a family establishes a residence separate from either the husband’s or wife’s relatives. nonunilineal descent See bilateral descent. omaha social organization Following Murdock (1949: Table 60), an equilibrium form of social organization characterized by patrilineal descent and Omaha cousin terminology consistent with patrilineal descent. Murdock social organizational types represented in California are summarized in Table G.2. omaha terminology A form of cousin terminology in which the father’s brother’s daughter and mother’s sister’s daughter are called sister, the father’s sister’s daughter is called niece or sister’s daughter, and the mother’s brother’s daughter is called mother. The different forms of cousin terminologies represented in California are summarized in Table G.1. patrilineal band A residential kin group made up of male relatives, generally a father, possibly his father and mother, his father’s brothers and their spouses, and his sons and their wives and children. patrilineal descent Where descent is traced through the father and male relatives. patrilocal postmarital residence Where a family lives with the husband’s parents. residential kin group A political unit whose members are a group of coresiding kin. The Great Basin family band, the Northwest California household group, and the patrilineal bands and sibs of Southern California are examples of residential kin groups. stipulated kin group A group of individuals who stipulate a kin relationship without actually being able to demonstrate descent from a common ancestor. sib A stipulated unilineal kin group. The patrilineal sibs of the Cahuilla are an example.

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tribelet The Kroeber (1962) term for a political unit made up of two or more different kin groups, usually residing in a major village and a few outlying hamlets. uxorilocal postmarital residence Where a family lives with the wife’s relatives. virilocal postmarital residence Where a family lives with the husband’s relatives. yuman social organization Following Murdock (1949: Table 60), an out-of-equilibrium form of social organization characterized by bilateral descent and Iroquois cousin terminology inconsistent with bilateral descent, suggesting that descent was formerly unilineal. Murdock social organizational types represented in California are summarized in Table G.2.

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Index

Achomawi, Western, 181, 190 acorn, 7–9, 12, 30, 35–36, 88, 90–91, 93, 95–96, 99–101, 104, 108, 110–17, 143–44, 151, 232–34 intensification, 115 macrofossils, 113–14 mush, 112–13 processing, 111, 114–15, 151 passive leaching, 113–114 stores, 115 theft, 115 agriculturalists, 3, 15–16, 20–21, 23–29, 144–45, 227 agriculture, 3, 15, 17–22, 25–29, 31, 223, 227, 231, 240 anarchy, 12–13, 63, 169, 174, 199, 201, 203, 208–9, 211, 219–21, 223, 229–30, 234–38, 240–41, 243 disorderly, 204, 207, 234 extreme, 2, 150, 205, 219, 235 orderly, 2–3, 12–13, 199–205, 207–9, 211–17, 219–21, 229, 234–35, 237–43 of Tillamook Salish, 219 Anasazi Virgin and Virgin-Kayenta, 22 Virgin Branch, 26 ’antap secret society, 237 atlatl, 44–48, 55, 65, 98–99, 142–43 Australia, 15, 19–20, 168

back-loaded resources, 90–91, 151, 159. See also front-loaded resources bow and arrow technology, 42–50, 56–57, 59–62, 64–66, 71–73, 80, 83, 95–110, 115–16, 141–43, 179, 181, 194–95, 198–99, 236 bride-price, 89, 126, 137, 151, 153, 155–57, 159, 161, 163–66, 168–69, 175–76, 184, 191, 198 bride service, 83, 89, 126, 137, 151, 153, 157, 161, 163–66, 168–69, 175 Cahuilla, 62, 101, 119–21, 123–24, 127, 131, 144, 168, 235, 246 lineages, 124 California defining, 3 regions of, 7, Map 1.1, Map 1.3–9 territory vs. culture area, 6 California culture area, 4, 6–11, 122, 132, 146 Central Coast, 10, 98, 100–104, 108, 116, 143, 191 Central Valley, 8, 10, 34, 95–96, 105–6, 109 Chayanov’s rule, 81, 151 cheaters, 202–3, 207, 230 Chemehuevi, 10–11 chiefdoms, 138–41 chieftainship, 52, 127, 129–31, 139–40, 147, 156–57, 170, 180–81, 192, 196, 225–28, 237, 239, 245

281

282

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Index

Shoshone, 239 Chumash, 5, 10, 108–9, 136, 139–40, 156–59, 191, 193, 231, 237 Obispeño, 100 Ventureno, 109 Clear Lake, 103, 107, 110, 113–14, 160 Comanche, 239 Coso Range, 61–62 crowding theory, 208–9, 212, 214 cultural evolution, 16, 18, 30, 223, 228 demonstrated kin groups, 210–11, 244 dentalium bead money, 181–82, 184, 191, 232 descent bilateral, 86–88, 128, 149, 160–61, 164–66, 243, 245–47 matrilineal, 82, 86, 88, 125, 137, 158, 160 nonunilineal, 82, 85, 87–89, 149, 152, 159–61, 168–69, 175 patrilineal, 3, 82, 86, 88, 120–21, 124–25, 129, 138, 149–50, 152–53, 158, 160–61, 164, 166–67, 244–46 unilineal, 82, 152, 157, 159, 168, 245, 247 Diegueno, Western, 10

Gini Coefficient, 197–98 Great Basin culture area, 19–20, 28, 30–37, 62–67, 77–78, 80–83, 87–88, 92, 114, 150–51, 174, 219, 223–24, 231, 239–40 Hadza, 42 heterarchy, 159, 236–37, 241 hunter-gatherer economy delayed-return, 233 immediate- vs. delayed-return, 188 hunter-gatherer group size, 51 hunter-gatherer intensification, 3, 30–31, 35, 63 Hupa, 5, 7, 135, 147, 150, 153, 182, 185, 205, 208–9, 212, 214, 232, 234 ideal free distribution (IFD), 32, 36, 224 individual autonomy, 179, 208–10, 214–15 intensive plant procurement, 43–44, 56–57, 61, 77–78, 92, 116, 136, 159 irrigation, 24, 223, 228, 240–41

family band, 53, 62–63, 70, 81–83, 87–89, 129, 150, 171, 227, 245 Deep Springs, 167 Great Basin, 141, 150, 170, 219, 225, 246 fishing, 15, 55, 108, 143, 145–47, 173, 231–33, 236 freeloaders, 54, 56, 90–91, 93, 115–16, 232–33 front-loaded resources, 90, 115, 233. See also back-loaded resources

Karuk, 5, 7, 135, 147, 150, 153, 170, 178, 182, 204–5, 232, 234 Kawaiisu, 10–11, 48 kindreds, 89, 137, 163, 169, 175, 210, 246 kin groups bilateral, 146–47 unilineal, 146–47, 151 landholding, 152 patrilineal, 137 kinship, 82, 84–85, 198, 210, 215–16, 225–26 kin terminology, 84–88, 152, 160, 167, 244–46 Crow, 84, 86–87, 160, 244–45 Eskimo, 84–87, 152, 160–61, 244–45 Hawaiian, 86, 245 Iroquois, 84, 86, 88, 125, 160, 244, 247 Omaha, 84–86, 125, 138, 160, 244–46 Omaha/Iroquois/Crow, 161 Kroeber, Alfred L., 19, 26, 123, 131, 134–35, 140–41, 144, 170–72, 174, 201, 215, 223, 227, 230, 232 Kuksu, 130, 200, 224, 237, 245 Kwakiutl, 78, 144, 170, 188, 209–10

Gabrielino, 5, 10, 136, 138–39, 158, 219, 231 gathering, 3, 15–16, 22, 24–25, 27–49, 51–57, 66, 120–21, 143, 145–47, 223, 227, 231–32, 243

large game, 41–43, 51, 54–55, 61, 66, 71–73, 101 leaching, 111–16, 236 leadership, 81, 130, 239–40 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 150, 170, 177

Eastern California, 23, 31–33, 36–38, 41, 44, 46, 57, 60–61, 64–65, 72, 82, 92–93, 95–98, 100, 116 egalitarian, 139, 181, 211, 221 energy maximizers. See time minimizers and energy maximizers evolutionary landscape, 17, 208–9, 214, 216

Index Little Ice Age, 32 Los Vaqueros Reservoir, 102 Madera phase, 143–44 Maidu, 237 Northern, 131 Northwest Hill, 135 Maiduans, 109 maize agriculture, 19, 22–30, 224, 234, 240 front-loaded, 234 traditional Southwestern, 26 marriage, 78, 80, 83, 129, 136, 144, 155, 157, 168–69, 206 marshes, 66, 99, 103 matri/uxorilocal, 83, 155 Medieval climatic anomaly (MCA), 100–101, 108, 116, 143, 179 Miwok, 36–37, 121, 124–25, 144, 168, 226 lineages, 124 nena, 144 patrilineal bands, 123 Sierra, 120, 125, 143–44, 183 Southern Sierra Miwok, 62 mobility, 226–27 Modoc, 4, 6–7, Map 1.3 Mohave, 12, 129, 138, 187, 245, Map 1.9 moieties, 124–25, 129, 237 money, 3, 35, 140, 171, 178–96, 198, 230, 237 California money, 153, 181, 185–86, 190, 196, 230 dentalium, 178, 184 development of, 184, 186, 236 disk beads, 183, 193 loans, 190–91 money use, 183, 186, 192–93, 195–96, 198 Mono, 48, 109, 130, 201 Kaweah (Gawia), 138 Kings River, 136, 138, 226 Western, 111, 138 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 16–18, 22–23, 32, 63 culture stage scheme, 21 mountain sheep, 49–50, 71 Murdock’s theory of social organization, 83–84, 152, 160–61, 215, 226, 244–47 negative reciprocity, 52–53, 186, 188–89, 215–16, 219, 221 Nisenan, 111, 129, 138, 237, 245 headmen, 130

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283

individuals, 238 Nomlaki, 111, 120, 136, 138, 157, 184, 187, 190, 236 goods, 194 organization, 120–21 valuations, 195 Nootka (Nuu-chah-nulth), 180–81, 209–10, 227 chiefs, 185 commoners, 180, 226 families, 226 low-ranking, 52 mobility, 226 North Coast Ranges region of California, 6, 8–9,103, 110, 130, 132, 189, 200, 226–27, Map 1.5 Northeast region of California, 6–7, 97, 106, 109, 184, 189, 191, Map 1.3 Northwest Coast culture area, 6, 8, 20, 78, 80, 134, 144–46, 148, 170–71, 177–78, 180–81, 188–89, 208–10, 219–20, 231–33 Northwest region of California, 2, 6–8, 104–5, 145, 147, 150, 169, 172, 176–77, 181, 194, 231–32, 234, 246, Map 1.4 Numic, 23, 28, 30–33, 35–36, 49–50, 60–61, 64, 81–82, 92–93, 106–7, 174, 224 expansion, 31–32, 38, 66, 92 family bands, 32, 93 languages, 36, 48 proto-Numic, 48–50 rabbit drive, 176 Nuu-chah-nulth. See Nootka obsidian blades, 153, 178, 180, 184, 194 organizational authority, 170, 201–3, 205–12, 214 Owens Valley, 34, 36, 38–41, 43–44, 47–48, 51, 53, 55, 62, 64, 66–67, 70, 72, 91–92, 141–43 Klondike phase, 47–48, 64–65, 142 population, 39, 41, 59, 70, 97 Owens Valley Paiute, 10–11, 35–36, 240, Map 1.7 districts, 35 pinyon-using, 37 Paiute, 167–68 Northern, 48 Surprise Valley, 7, Map 1.3 Wadatöka, 93 patrilineages, 126, 137, 140, 147

284

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Index

patrilineal organizations, 62, 120, 123, 125, 136, 138 band, 3, 62, 88, 91, 117, 119–21, 123–27, 130–36, 138–48, 168, 171, 246 sibs, 62, 119, 147, 246 Patwin, 136, 140, 155, 157, 159, 168, 224 chieftainship, 140 half-marriage, 159 household, 156 tribelets, 140–41 payoffs, 74–76, 202–3, 229 sucker’s, 54 Pima, 23–25 pinyon, 30–31, 35, 37–38, 64–67, 70–72, 82–83, 87–88, 90–93, 96, 100–101, 110, 114, 116–17, 119, 141–42 caches, 65, 70 camps, 48, 56, 64, 71, 91–92, 141–42 intensification, 36, 64 Pinus edulis, 67 Pinus monophylla, 30, 64 use, 31, 65, 67, 70, 82, 87, 141 pinyon woodlands, 64, 71 plant intensification, 36, 38, 44, 54, 56, 80–81, 92, 95, 125, 199 Plateau culture area, 6–7, 24, 45, 78, 93, 97, 132, 219, Map 1.3 polygyny, 77–80, 151, 243 general, 78 nonsororal, 78 sororal, 78–81, 144, 151, 243 Pomo, 37, 111, 119, 167–68, 183, 191, 200, 224, 226, 237–38 Southern, 2 Southwestern, 153 population, 32–34, 39–43, 48–49, 53, 59–60, 67–70, 75, 98–99, 103, 105–8, 110, 120, 150–52, 202, 229–30 growth, 33, 39–42, 60, 95, 99, 105, 119, 124, 127, 155, 230 pressure, 40–41, 43, 60, 138 size, 40–41, 70, 152, 229 postmarital residence, 83–87, 89, 121–22, 126, 137, 151–54, 157–59, 161–62, 166, 175 ambilocal, 83, 85–87, 89, 126, 137, 152, 158, 160–61, 163, 175, 243 in California, 152 Chumash, 156, 159 matrilocal, 85–86, 89, 126, 135, 137, 153, 155–56, 158–59, 163, 169, 175, 246

matri/uxorilocal, 153 nonunilocal, 159 patrilocal, 85, 89, 120–21, 126, 137, 149, 153, 155–56, 159–60, 163, 167, 169, 175 patri/virilocal, 83, 86–87, 121–22, 154, 158–59 permanent, 153 temporary initial, 161, 165 unilocal, 152, 157, 159, 161, 168 uxorilocal, 247 virilocal, 85, 89, 126, 135, 137, 152, 163, 175, 247 potlatches, 180, 188, 196 prestige, 78, 130, 133–34, 185, 213–15, 226, 233 prestige economy, 184–85 private property, 63–64, 71–74, 82, 88, 91–93, 132, 145–46, 235, 237 individual, 177, 231 privatization, 63, 71, 77, 82, 88, 90–92, 104, 115, 125, 135–36, 151, 179–80 food, 3, 59–74, 76–84, 86–88, 90–93 punishment, 75, 172, 201–5, 214, 216, 229 rabbit boss, 174, 176, 239 rabbit drive, 174, 176, 240 rabbits, communal, 81 raiding, 24, 82, 125, 132–34, 213–14, 233–34 intragroup, 121, 125 residential kin groups, 62, 126–29, 245–46 risk, 51–52, 54, 171 freeloading, 96 protein, 232 risk-reducing pooling, 55 subsistence, 51, 53–54 rock art, 49, 61–62 roots, 7, 50, 90–91, 93, 141, 146, 171 Sacramento Valley region of California, 6, 8–10, 97–98, 119, 121–22, 128, 130, 132–33, 138, 147, 154–55, 189–90, 212, 217, Map 1.6 salmon, 8, 176, 224, 232–34 fishing, 140 Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, 232 use, 8, 104 San Francisco Bay area, 97–98, 102–3, 232 San Joaquin Valley region of California, 6–7, 10–11, 32, 97–98, 105, 121–22, 128, 132–33, 147, 154–55, 183, 189, 212, 217, Map 1.7 Santa Barbara area, 97, 108–9, 135, 224

Index Channel, 107–8, 110, 232 Channel Islands, 107–8 seed beaters, 34, 36–37, 60, 92 seeds, 31, 66, 72, 93, 95–96, 104, 143, 151, 194, 239 small-seed use, 91, 95–96 settlement patterns, 44, 48, 67, 92, 98, 141–44 shamans, 35, 130, 170 sharing risk, 52, 54 shell beads, 106, 183, 191–97 disk, 181 Olivella, 183, 191–92 production, 106, 191–92 Shoshone, 48, 167–68, 174, 238–39 area, 71 Battle Mountain, 88 Eastern, 238–39 Nevada, 35 Panamint, 10–11, Map 1.7 Reese River, 88 Wind River, 239 sibs, 3, 119–21, 123–25, 127, 130–36, 138–48, 168, 171, 246 social organization, 51, 56, 82–83, 85, 87–89, 121, 125–26, 137–38, 142, 163, 170, 174–75, 215, 223, 227 Murdock’s theory of, 83–84 organizational types, 244–47 sociopolitical organization, 1, 62–63, 101, 124, 129, 139, 157, 174, 179, 226, 229, 236–38 Southeastern California, 50, 106, 111 Southern California, 24, 119, 124–25, 127, 187, 235, 246 Southern Coast region of California, 6, 10–11, 107, 116, 121, 133, 147, 167, 189, 221, 237, Map 1.8 Southern Interior region of California, 6, 12, 121, 133, 147, 167, 189, 221, Map 1.9 Southwest culture area, 6, 12, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 67, 78, 134, 231, Map 1.9 status, 80, 180–81, 191, 196, 228, 237 Steward, Julian H., 25, 35, 51, 53, 55, 62, 64, 67, 71–72, 120–21, 142, 144, 150, 167, 174 storage, 35, 38, 60–61, 63, 66, 68–70, 75, 77, 80, 88, 90–91, 93, 95, 116, 232 food, 63–64, 67, 74, 93, 127 technology, 1–2, 5, 27, 30, 38–39, 41–44, 56, 67, 83–84, 90, 113–14, 179, 230

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285

time minimizers and energy maximizers, 39–40, 42–44, 57, 61 Tolowa, 7, 153, 156, 181–84, 188, 200, 232 commodity economy, 184 prestige economy, 184, 188 tomol, 158, 191, 193 trade, 36, 52, 129, 147, 181–82, 187, 193, 195–96, 204, 216, 219, 229, 236–37 between-group, 185 fur, 56 intracommunity, 216 long-distance, 187 privatization and, 73 trade fairs, 187 tribelet, 3, 119–21, 123–25, 127–36, 138–43, 145, 147–51, 155, 157, 171–72, 187, 227, 236–38, 245, 247 bilateral, 62, 91, 119, 141–42, 149–50, 152, 160–62, 166–67, 171–72, 226 California tribelets, 135, 140–41, 148, 224–25 as defined by Kroeber, 140 formation, 144, 157 organization, 127, 129, 136–37, 145, 149–50, 226–27, 237 patrilineal, 62, 91, 119–21, 136–42, 144, 149, 226 Tübatulabal, 155, 189 Ute, 23–24, 48 Vacant Quarter, 23 Vandenberg area, 107–8, 110 violence, 109–10, 130, 135, 143, 176, 204, 215 Wappo, 160, 167 Warm Springs, 103–4 Washo, 9–10, 35–37, 189, Map 1.6 wealth, 139, 155, 157, 169, 176–78, 180, 191, 196, 198, 224–25, 237 wergild, 153, 171, 176, 195, 235 between-group settlement, 171 White Deerskin Dance, 177, 194 Wintu, 111, 131, 136 chieftainship, 131 expansion, 226 Trinity River, 200 Wintuans, 109 wives, 57, 72, 80, 89, 130, 136, 157, 160, 246 Wiyot, 232

286

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Index

women, 27, 72, 81, 129, 133–34, 151, 188, 231 Woodburn, James, 42, 54, 188, 233 World Renewal, 170, 177, 188, 204 dance owner, 150, 171 performances, 194 Yahi, 1 Yana, 111 Yokut, 4, 36–37, 109, 119, 130, 136, 138, 140, 153, 157–58, 190, 196, 200, 224, 226 chiefs, 156, 196 Kaweah, 4, 226 Kings River, 11 Lake, 10–11, 226 organization, 138, 237 postmarital residence, 159 Tachi, 4, 11, 137–38

tribelets, 144 Wowol, 4, 11, 137–38 Yauelmani, 4 Yuki, 195, 226 Yumans, 12, 129, 138, 245, Map 1.9 River, 227 Yurok, 5, 7, 135, 153, 155–56, 170, 174, 182–83, 189–90, 198, 200, 204–5, 215, 232, 238 anarchy, 215 families, 184, 232 fish dam, 174, 176 half-marriage, 153 law, 170, 207 towns, 173 Yurok-Karuk-Hupa, 168–71, 177–78, 182–83, 198, 200, 207, 227, 234 Zuni, 24