Orderly Anarchy: Sociopolitical Evolution in Aboriginal California

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 Hunter-Gatherers, 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—dc232014032694

Manufactured in the United States of America

23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

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

List of Maps

List of Tables

List of Boxes

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

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

5. Plant Intensification West of the Sierra Crest

Appearance of the Bow and Intensification

Acorns as a Resource

Archaeology of Acorn Use and Intensification

Medieval Climatic Anomaly

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

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.

List of Figures

FIGURES IN TEXT

FIGURES IN BOXES

List of Maps

List of Tables

List of Boxes

Box 3.1. The Seed Beater

Box 3.2. Time Minimizers and Energy Maximizers

Box 3.3. Dating the New World Spread of Bow and Arrow Technology

Box 3.4. Numic Terms for Mountain Sheep

Box 4.1. Hoarders and Sharers

Box 7.1. Principles of Yurok Law (Kroeber 1925: 20–21)

Box 9.1. All Is Trouble along the Klamath: A Yurok Idyll (Waterman 1922)

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 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 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, sometimes another (Bettinger 1978b, 1980). It is easy to overlook this evolutionary complexity, and as a consequence the latitude for hunter-gatherer 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 hunter-gatherer 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 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.

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 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.