Settled Hunter Gatherers (Part 2)

The original testing grounds for civilizations

Settled hunter-gatherer societies are known from all over the world. Some we only know about through archaeological discoveries. Others we have direct observations of even though they no longer exist. And a few we have been able to study first-hand in some detail.

The Calusa (meaning "fierce people") occupied the coasts and estuaries of Southwestern Florida where they lived off of fish and other marine resources which were harvested using sophisticated nets, traps and weirs. They also hunted animals and gathered wild berries, roots and nuts to supplement their diet, but did not engage in agriculture or cultivation. They were first encountered by the Spanish in the late 1500s, and by the late 1700s had either died off due to disease, or migrated and been absorbed by other tribes like the Seminoles.

One of their most clever adaptations was constructing large structures known as watercourts using a complex system of underwater walls and fences to trap and hold large amounts of wild fish. These "living aquariums" functioned as a storage system where fish could be harvested at will. According to the archaeologists who studied them, "these structures were engineered with knowledge of tidal systems, hydrology, and the biology of species to be stored in these courts." [1] They dug artificial canals that could extend for miles. They built artificial islands called shell mounds out of discarded shells, bones, earth, and pottery. The Calusa erected their temples atop these flat-topped shell-and-earth mounds, which also served as burial memorials and territorial markers. [2]

At their height, the Calusa numbered perhaps 10,000 people (some estimates are far higher) scattered in 50-60 villages throughout southwestern Florida under the rule of a hereditary paramount chief. The chief's power and influence extended throughout much of today's southern Florida, even into the eastern half of the peninsula. They traveled along the coasts as far south as Cuba in dugout canoes made out of hollowed-out cypress logs that could reach up to 15 feet in length.

Calusa houses were raised-platform chickees with frames of cypress logs lashed together and walls and roofs woven out of Palmetto leaves. The largest Calusa site was the "capital" of Mound Key rising thirty feet above the waters of Estero Bay, where the Calusa chief resided along with his retinue. The chief's "palace" could comfortably hold up to 2,000 people according to early Spanish explorers.

This Twitter thread provides additional details about Calusa society with images:

manvir singh @mnvrsngh

People often assume that hunter-gatherers only lived in nomadic, egalitarian bands. But throughout history, HGs built societies as complex & stratified as those of many agriculturalists. My new favorite example are the Calusa, who built a kingdom & state in SW Florida. [thread]

The Jōmon were a hunter-fisher-forager culture that flourished in stone-age Japan until around 400 BC. They lived in coastal villages where they harvested a wide variety of wild pelagic, littoral, riverine and terrestrial resources. While there is some evidence of plant cultivation in the late Jōmon period, their lifestyle was primarily based around wild food resources—especially seafood. The Jōmon culture was displaced during the later Yayoi period with the arrival of rice-cultivating farmers from the Korean Peninsula and China after 2,500 years ago.

Some of their villages could be quite large. The settlement of Sannai-maruyama— occupied from 5,000 to 3,500 BC—is spread out over 40 hectares (99 acres) and is estimated to have consisted of as many as 1,000 post-built structures including semi-subterranean pit houses, storehouses, and watchtowers, indicative of a highly complex sedentary foraging culture. Richard Rudgley writes of the settlement in Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age:

A truly enormous quantity of artefacts has already been unearthed from the excavated part of the site (only 15 percent of the total area), so many in fact that they fill over 40,000 cardboard boxes! Among these are many items made from organic materials that rarely survive in sites of this age, including a variety of wooden tools (among them a number of paddles, one of which is 1.6 metres long), bark vessels, basketry and pieces of woven material. Three separate cemeteries have also been found at this settlement. Two of the burial areas were close to the main centre of the settlement and contain only the remains of children who were interred in large earthenware urns. So far about 900 urns have been found at the site.

There are a number of important features of the Sannai-maruyama site that demonstrate that Jomon culture was more complex than had previously been thought. Both the sheer size and the orderly arrangement of the settlement clearly indicate that it was carefully planned rather than simply a conglomeration of haphazard dwellings, rubbish dumps, burial grounds, storage areas and other buildings and constructions. This in itself shows that the community was well organized and that such planning could not have been undertaken without some kind of hierarchical organization. It is also clear that far from being a temporary camp site of mobile hunters, this was a long-term sedentary village of considerable size. Not only were its inhabitants able to sustain their own economic needs through their activities in and around the settlement but the greater number of ceramic vessels and clay figurines found there strongly suggests that they may also have been supplying other, smaller Jomon communities in the vicinity with such products.

The diversity of the items produces at Sammai-maruyama also points to the existence of craft specialization—in other words, certain sectors of the working community were involved in producing specific kinds of items for both the immediate community and surrounding ones. The presence of minerals such as obsidian and amber which are exotic to the region demonstrated the circulation of goods on a local level was only one aspect of the settlement's economic interaction with the outside world. The aforesaid minerals had come from other parts of Japan and are clear evidence of long-distance trading networks. Although there is no evidence that rice was cultivated at Sannai-maruyama in Jomon times, there are indications that millet and other plants were perhaps cultivated by the Stone Age occupants at the site.

The remains of one particularly striking structure were discovered on rising ground at the perimeter of the settlement. Six large post holes were found in the ground, four of them still having pillars in place. The holes are 2.2 meters in diameter and 2.5 meters deep, whilst the pillars themselves—made from cedar trunks—are approximately 1 metre in diameter. Investigation of the surviving pillars of this building shows that they were deliberately placed to lean slightly inwards and that were packed into the holes by alternate layers of compressed sand and clay. The depth of the holes and the care taken to secure the foundations of the building indicate that this was a high structure. The space between adjacent pillars is in each instance 4.2 metres, which may well indicate that some standard units of measurement were used by its builders. Its function and purpose remain unknown at present but it is thought to be a watchtower or perhaps a religious shrine. [3]

While plant cultivation was minimal, there is evidence of arboriculture: the deliberate and selective propagation of woody perennials—in this case chestnut trees—which were a staple food source:

At the 5,500-year-old Sannai-Maruyama site in Aomori Prefecture, evidence of large-scale cultivation of chestnuts has also been discovered — as well as a huge chestnut tree in the center of the settlement that was probably used for religious rituals — indicating their importance as a food source in the days before rice cultivation became widespread. The chestnut wood was valued as building material as well as firewood. Chestnuts are still used in Shinto rituals in some parts of the country, and they’re an important osechi (New Year’s holiday cuisine) dish: a concoction of mashed sweet potatoes with kuri no kanro-ni, chestnuts cooked in sugar syrup. Chestnuts cooked with a crushed gardenia seed are supposed to bring good financial fortune and help make you a winner in life. [4]

The Jōmon are known as the earliest culture anywhere in the world to regularly utilize pottery as far back as 12,500 years ago (which would have been of no use to fully nomadic people). Jōmon pottery achieved a remarkably high degree of sophistication thousands of years before the first pottery was used in the villages of Western Asia.

It is debated whether pottery was invented indigenously by the Jōmon or introduced from other parts of East Asia. Some of the oldest pottery found anywhere in the world* was discovered near the Middle Amur River in Manchuria. The Osipovka foragers who lived along the river between 16,000 and 12,000 years ago near the end of last Ice Age exploited the rich salmon runs in ways broadly similar to the natives of the Pacific Northwest coast of North America (see below). Analysis of pottery shards revealed that they used pottery not for storage, but rather for cooking—an early example of "hot pots." Nearby cultures were also using pottery to cook stews, except wild ruminants like deer, roe deer, and wild goat were on the menu instead of fish. The bones of animals would have been boiled to extract grease and marrow which would have provided an important source of fat and calories in the cold, inhospitable climate of the late Ice Age. Such discoveries show that ceramic technology long predated agriculture.

By analyzing the millennia-old leftover fats baked into the pottery, researchers at the University of York in England were able to identify differences between the diets of two ancient Russian cultures. The Gromatukha, who lived near the Middle Amur and the west bank of the Zeya River, mainly cooked land animals, while the Osipovka, who lived near the Lower Amur, preferred fish...

“There is an abundance of fish in the Amur,” says Medvedev. “And all our finds pointed to [the people being] fishers. Academician Alexey Okladnikov even named the people of Lower Amur … ‘ichthyophages,’ as their life was based on fisheries.” Prior expeditions in the area have unearthed stone sinkers, or weights, the Osipovka likely used for net fishing in the river during salmon spawning season. According to Medvedev, archaeological evidence shows the ancient community smoked and dried a portion of their catch, preserving the fish for the winter season, and cooked the rest...

Chemical traces of ruminant mammals showed up on the Gromatukha pottery shards, but not on the Osipovka samples. Per the study, the analysis found that the Osipovka pottery actually has more in common with Japanese ceramics used to cook fish around the same time period. The people who invented these ceramic “hot pots” never met each other—but necessity is the mother of invention, and at the end of the ice age, warm food would likely have been a welcome treat. [5]

[Study] co-author Dr Vitaly Medvedev, leading researcher of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, said he was ‘incredibly lucky’ to find the ancient pottery which has now been studied within this study...

"I even think that they came up with the idea of permanent dwellings. One of the earliest permanent dwelling appears in the Osipovka culture as they allowed to stay at the same place during the winter season, having stored big amount of fish. They had no need to relocate together with migrating animals, as did hunters. Their dwellings were dug into the ground. They dug a round holes, put the pillars and covered them with roof of birch bark, turf. It is great that the resent research from our international team confirmed our suggestions and helped us to get closer to understanding of this unique and amazing culture." [6]

The Chumash Native American peoples of the Southern California coast and the Santa Barbara Channel lived in small hamlets, each with their own village council and headman. They relied on collecting acorns as a staple food source, which they laboriously shelled, pounded, soaked to leach out the bitter tannins, and ground into a paste which could be stored. They supplemented this activity by fishing and foraging. They built huge oceangoing plank canoes called tomols**, which they used to hunt pelagic fish and maintain a vast seaborne trade network up and down the California coast.

The native peoples living along the West Coast of North America frequently traded using shell money. The Chumash Indians used the shells of olive snails (Olivella biplicata) which were made into beads by specialists on Santa Cruz Island and strung together (the name Chumash means "beadmakers" or "shell people"). The natives farther north used the tubular shells of Dentalium molluscs as currency. Shell money was utilized by tribes from Alaska down to Baja California, and as far west as the Dakotas.

By far the best known and extensively documented settled hunter-gatherer cultures were those of the Pacific Northwest coast of North America such as the Tlingit, Salishan, Haida, Tsimshian, Nootka (Nuu-chah-nulth), and Kwakiultl (Kwakwaka'wakw) nations, who inhabited coastal regions ranging from the Olympic Peninsula to southern Alaska. These societies were based around the exploitation of a wide variety of coastal and riverine resources such as salmon, smelt, halibut, sturgeon, and large minnows; along with oysters, crabs, sea urchins, mussels, abalone, and clams—even whales were hunted on occasion by the Nootka in canoes with harpoons ranging up to 50 feet in length. They also hunted land animals like deer, bear, and rabbit and gathered wild plants such as berries, fern, and rhubarb.

Members of these tribes were organized into five basic units: the family, the household, the lineage, the village, and the "intergroup collectivity;" i.e. the tribe. Large households and families were the elemental units for producing food and goods; the other groups dealt mainly with issues of political economy such as trade, warfare, and religious ceremonies. Each household occupied a cedar plank house and owned their own productive apparatus including equipment to bulk process fish, drying racks, storehouses and sea canoes. Membership in a household was based on lineal descent. Villages ranged from a few dozen to over a thousand people.

Some sites in the Pacific Northwest were occupied for centuries by a couple hundred to nearly 2,000 individuals. The most developed of these were impressive indeed. Their longhouses and other residences could be enormous, the biggest on record extending 200 meters long and 15 meters wide. That's as spacious as the homes of many modern celebrities, though several families shared the building; a small settlement might occupy one longhouse, while a large village spanned several structures. (127)

Household members were ranked by their ascribed status, with the highest ranking members (Chiefs, or Big Men†) forming an elite dependent on slave labor, although they did not exercise coercive power over the rest of the tribe or authority beyond the local village. The carvings on the poles used to mark the location of villages along the coast were sacred crests representing the ancestral titles to which the chiefs of the village had claim.

There were three basic classes of people in these societies: chiefs, commoners and slaves. One's rank and status was conveyed by the wearing of lip plugs; only slaves did not wear them. These lip plugs were a prominent example of the use of markers in anonymous societies:

[Settled hunter-gatherer] societies were neatly set apart by markers of identity, more exuberantly so than for people living in small bands. The differences were striking and well-documented in the Pacific Northwest. Most stunning were the labrets, ornamental plugs worn in perforations in the cheek or lower lip, ranging from ivory disks to multicolored beadworks. Labrets made their appearance 3,000 to 4,000 years ago and revealed much about he social and economic standing of the wearer, though their primary and original value was to connect people with a tribe...(127)...As tribes grew in intricacy, they adapted their markers accordingly, modifying them to display peoples' position in the hierarchy of prosperity and influence in addition to their tribal membership. Only slaves, who had no rights and were not considered members, wore no labrets. (135)

Ties to other villages were maintained through kinship and trade networks. Some villages specialized in particular crafts such as coppersmithing, canoe building, or wood carving. Specialists were economically important, and highly-regarded artisans could achieve a status rivaling those of chiefs.

Every March and April, people from separate local communities would gather together to harvest candlefish (eulachon) from seasonal candlefish runs. The oil was extracted by boiling and pressing and was stored in wooden boxes or in long tubes of hollow kelp gourd which were hung in storehouses like garden hoses in a garage. Fish oil was a preservative and an additive to dried foods, as well as a key source of calories during the winter. It was also an important item for trading with other native tribes, and "grease trails" stretched far into the interior.

In late spring and summer, people would scatter into small, mobile bands where they hunted, fished, and foraged; while coastal groups bagged marine mammals (seals, sea lions) and harvested shellfish, molluscs and seaweed. The summer period was described as one of "ease and plenty."

When the autumn came, the pace of production quickened as salmon runs and berries came into season. Both salmon and berries were harvested in large quantities and preserved by drying on racks or smoking (in the case of salmon) and keeping them in storehouses, watertight wooden containers, or in pits lined with rocks or maple leaves.

Fish could be caught in any number of different and creative ways. Nets ranged from small handheld fishing nets for smelt to large nets attached to poles which were driven into the ground. Additionally, they could be clubbed, speared, raked, harpooned, brought in on a line, or trapped using weirs. They also built tidal "gardens" of terraced rocks to encourage clam growth, and stocked artificial ponds with salmon for temporary storage.

While men did most of the angling, the processing of the catch was done primarily by women. Fish were sun-dried when possible, or else dried on racks and smoked in smokehouses. Dried fish were pounded into fish meal, and a kind of "cheese" was made by storing salmon roe in the stomach of a deer or other container and kneading it over time. Fish meal was used in soups and stews as a thickener and as a source of protein on long trips. Like fish oil, it was also used for trading with the interior.

During the winter months people settled along the shore in plank-house villages set in the midst of cedar and fir rain forests where they lived primarily off of stored foods. The winter was regarded as a time to engage in ceremonial activities (including potlatches), as well as building and repairing canoes, tools, clothing, storage sheds, and other productive apparatus. When the following spring came around again and the stored foods ran low, the cycle began anew. [7]

The role of chiefs was to organize and manage surplus production, to amass wealth, to acquire followers, and to build and maintain strategic alliances. Chiefs were beset by persistent insecurity, and were engaged in rivalries with the leaders of other clans and villages. To this end, chiefs held great ceremonial feasts called potlatches where they vied for status by giving away massive amounts of stored and accumulated items including foodstuffs, blankets, carved masks, copper plates, and other valuable items. Greater economic production led to higher status for chiefs and their affiliated households. Sometimes surplus wealth was even burned or destroyed.‡ Marvin Harris describes the potlatch ceremony based on the writings of anthropologist Ruth Benedict:

Each potlatch was given by a host chief and his followers to a guest chief and his followers. The object of the potlatch was to show that the host chief was truly entitled to chiefly status and that he was more exalted than the guest chief. To prove this point, the host chief gave the rival chief and his followers quantities of valuable gifts. The guests would belittle what they received and vow to host a return potlatch at which their own chief would prove that he was greater than the former host by giving back even larger quantities of more valuable gifts.

Preparations for potlatch required the accumulation of fresh and dried fish, fish oil, berries, animal skins, blankets, and other valuables. On the appointed day, the guests paddled up to the host village and went into the chief's house. There they gorged themselves on salmon and wild berries while dancers masked as beaver gods and thunderbirds entertained them.

The host chief and his followers arranged in neat piles the wealth that was to be given away. The visitors stared at their host sullenly as he pranced up and down, boasting about how much he was about to give them. As he counted out the boxes of fish oil, blankets full of berries, and piles of blankets, he commented derisively on the poverty of his rivals. Laden with gifts, the guests finally were free to paddle back to their own village. Stung to the quick, the guest chief and his followers vowed to get even. This could only be achieved by inviting their rivals to a return potlatch and obliging them to accept even greater amounts of valuables than they had given away. Considering all the Kwakiutl villages as a single unit, potlatch stimulated a ceaseless flow of prestige and valuables moving in opposite directions.

An ambitious chief and his followers had potlatch rivals in several different villages at once. Specialists in counting property kept track of what had to be done in each village in order to even the score. If a chief managed to get the better of his rivals in one place, he still had to confront his adversaries in another. [8]

Thus, we see that hunter-gatherers were actually a wide spectrum of different peoples with many different forms of social organization, and not just the multilevel band societies that we typically associate with them. Prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies—even without domestication—were probably much more complex and sophisticated than the hunter-gatherer societies found around the world in our own time, and in many cases, more than some early agricultural societies.

It is understood, for example, that changing conditions must have caused a number of complex hunter-gatherer societies to fragment and dissolve over time into simpler band or village-level societies, with the original culture often being lost or dimly remembered only in legend. Such transformations could be due to a changing climate, species extinction, or disease. We've seen this demonstrated, for example, by the natives of the Amazon basin. The Maya, too, abandoned their great ceremonial centers and had settled in small horticultural villages by the time the Spanish arrived. The Mississippi culture that constructed Cahokia—one of the largest agglomerations of people anywhere in the Americas—had vanished by the time European settlers came to the area. the Yet another example is provided by the collapse of whale populations and its effects on the Thule culture of the Canadian Arctic:

manvir singh @mnvrsngh

Are small-scale, mobile hunter-gatherers the best models for the deep past? Increasingly, I doubt it. There are many reasons to suspect that people lived in larger, sedentary societies, one being the extinction of big mammals. Consider the Thule, ancestors of the Inuit. [thread]

The fact that so many settled hunter-gatherer societies around the world that we know of depended on marine resources is probably not a reflection that this mode of subsistence was necessary for settled hunter-gatherer societies to form. What it really reflects is that these were places where these settled hunter-gatherer cultures were able to hold out the longest.

[W]hile anthropologists traditionally lump tribes like those of the Pacific Northwest together with band societies under the rubric of hunter-gatherer, it was the reliability of the local harvest, rather than whether food was domesticated, that mattered most. Shifts from nomadism to settlement and from hunting and gathering to agriculture were gradual. The hunter-gatherers of the Fertile Crescent stayed put in villages for centuries before gradually domesticating the sheep and wheat that they ate...

If people have been open to adopting the customs of specialization and status for a very long time, whey then did so many hunter-gatherers in recent centuries live in egalitarian bands rather than in settlements? I expect that hunter-gatherers hiked less and settled more before agriculturalists laid claim to the world's choicest, and most fertile real estate. (136)

The fact that the vast majority of hunter-gatherer societies documented by anthropologists were found in remote and marginal areas of the globe is probably a case of survivorship bias. We only see the hunter-gatherer societies that survived into recent times; we don't see the ones that transformed into agrarian societies or simply disappeared altogether over the last ten-thousand years or so. Most of the large, complex hunter-gatherer societies that have ever existed throughout human history (aside from some of the ones we talked about) either transitioned to fully-fledged agriculture over time; were eliminated and absorbed by neighboring societies who did; or transitioned to simpler forms of social organization—and thus are mostly "invisible" to history.

Early settlements in prehistory would be hard to detect if early homesteads were rudimentary or made of ephemeral materials. The stone walls of the canals and homes near Mount Eccles have been mainly reduced to rubble, in spite of the fact that some were occupied a mere two centuries ago. However, vestiges of huts a few tens of thousands of years old, which look to be suitable for long-term stays, have been unearthed in Europe. Structures possibly dating back hundreds of thousands of years, well before humans evolved to their present form, are reported at sites such as Terra Amata, France. Some claim these are remnants of edifices made by tree branches braced with stones. If this is true, those dwellings would have been big enough to house many people. (143)

The archaeological evidence is all the more scarce because hunter-gatherers had no reason to overbuild objects that would withstand the ravages of time as we do today, by manufacturing bottles that will last an eternity for sodas gulped down in minutes. The survival of their art in deep caves makes plain that those places held a significance, probably spiritual, to the people. However, we only have those works, some up to 40,000 years old, because the conditions in the caves proved ideal for preservation. (142-143)

By the time anthropologists began to formally study them, most hunter-gatherer societies around the world had long ago been pushed into marginal areas by food-producing peoples. But prior to the advent of agriculture, the richest and most fertile lands on the planet were occupied exclusively by hunter-gatherers. Many of these societies likely attained a very high degree of sociopolitical complexity and cultural sophistication, which subsequently paved the way for true domestication, which in turn led to even larger populations and consequently more dramatic social, cultural and political changes in an unyielding ratchet. It is now widely accepted that the first peoples in Western Asia to domesticate plants and animals were complex hunter-gatherers who had lived a semi-sedentary existence in villages with some degree of political hierarchy for thousands of years before the intensification of plant cultivation and animal husbandry that have come to be known in retrospect as "agriculture:"

Beyond semantics, what is potentially wrong with our reliance upon the ‘classic’ notions of hunter-gatherers? There are two major limitations, both of which constrain significantly or channel our understanding of past cultural systems.

The first is that there is substantial variation between hunter-gatherer societies in terms of subsistence strategies and economic organisation, type of socio-political system, group size, degree of mobility and many other key factors...

The second is that most of what we know about these small-scale, non-agricultural societies is based upon groups living in relatively marginal environments (i.e. the Arctic, the Great Basin, the Kalihari, the Western Desert of Australia and tropical rainforests), and thus these will not be representative of their counterparts living in more temperate environments.

In other words, before they were displaced by horticulturalists thousands of years ago or impacted by colonialism and disease more recently, hunter-gatherers occupied the most attractive places in the world, not just the marginal locations they were inhabiting in the last century. [9]

While pre-agricultural settled hunter-gatherer cultures were, Moffett informs us, "the original testing grounds for civilizations," they were ultimately, he says, "a civilizational dead-end." (137) This was because these societies were permanently tied to the region where their main food supply was concentrated, such as the coastal areas of North America or Japan, and thus could not expand beyond these locations. A rich salmon run isn't portable, after all. Neither could fish be easily domesticated, since they require water to survive and their reproductive cycle is difficult to control. This prevented many settled hunter-gatherer cultures from settling or expanding outside of their home territories.

More importantly, they could not scale up their resource base much beyond what nature provided. This put a hard limit on population growth, even in superabundant regions. The Pacific Northwest Coast tribes reached a density of perhaps two people per square mile, which is considered to be the maximum achieved by a foraging group anywhere in the world. [10] It was a very different story for agricultural civilizations, however, who could scale up their resource base still further, and transform almost any landscape in the world to suit their needs:

Once people had agriculture, however, they could increase food production far beyond the yields of nature...many domesticated crops and livestock can be taken from their ancestral habitat by locating or creating environments to suit them. Shepherds found pasturage for their sheep and farmers terraced and irrigated the land until their communities lived everywhere.

Not that agriculturalists were always driven to scale up their production. North America was occupied in part by corn-planting farmers, but even after centuries those tribes were hardly more elaborate than those of Pacific Northwest hunter-gatherers. (137)

This meant that the domestication of plants and animals was the only way for societies to move past the boundaries and limitations set by nature, even in the very richest environments. But this development—although seemingly beneficial at first— eventually led to many societies falling into what Moffett calls the Plant Trap. That's what we'll be talking about next time.

###

* Clay figurines dating from 26,000 years ago were discovered at Dolní Věstonice in modern-day Czechia. Interestingly, these figurines were apparently intentionally designed to "pop" when heated! This suggest some kind of ritual/divination use.

Rudgely writes in Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age: "The ritual use of this ceramic technology has been likened by its investigators to the early use of prehistoric metals; for example, the manipulation of copper (which can be traced back to at least 10,000 years in the Near East) was initially undertaken to make ornamental objects and only some 4,000 years later was its use extended to the making of utilitarian artefacts. Thus in the case of both fired clay and copper technology non-utilitarian uses precede its practical applications by millennia." (p. 153)

** Tomols appear to have been invented around 1500 BC. There is a theory that they were introduced by Polynesian seafarers who reached North America due to similarities with Polynesian construction techniques, but this is not widely accepted.

† From an anthropological perspective, these leaders were actually Big Men, not true chiefs. Strictly speaking, chiefs are hereditary leaders occupying a formal office with a degree of coercive control over at least a single village, which was not the case for most of these cultures.

Timothy Earle writes, "We retain the use of the term Big Man...because it is clearly appropriate for the vast majority of communities on the Northwest Coast, where leadership is local (usually appertaining to a large household and only occasionally a village), where 'hereditary' rights are nearly always contested, and where emblems of rank are readily bought and sold. Even the Tlignit word for chief is lingit tlien, 'big man'." In The Evolution of Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, p. 215. I retain the term for the sake of clarity, however.

‡ As in other parts of the world, raiding and warfare between rival villages appears to have been an additional source of status for Big Men in the Pacific Northwest prior to pacification by larger states.

The wanton destruction of goods so noted by outsiders like Benedict appears to be a result of the vast proliferation of goods that came about after these tribes started trading with white settlers on a regular basis, and was not a customary feature of the potlatch ceremony. It's a good reminder that even "traditional" cultures have been altered by contact with other societies.

All citations in parentheses from The Human Swarm by Mark W. Moffett; Basic Books, 2019. Emphasis mine unless noted otherwise.

[1] Ancient engineering of fish capture and storage in southwest Florida (Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences)

[2] The Calusa Native Americans (Mound Key State park)

[3] Richard Rudgley, Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age; The Free Press, 1999; pp. 31-32. Emphasis mine.

[4] 'Kuri': The nutty staple of ancient Japan (The Japan Times)

[5] Siberian Hunters Cooked in ‘Hot Pots’ at the End of the Last Ice Age (Smithsonian Magazine)

[6] Cooking secrets of the Neolithic era revealed in groundbreaking scientific tests (The Siberian Times)

[7] My account of the Pacific Northwest Coast tribes is based on the following sources: The Human Swarm by Mark W. Moffett; The Evolution of Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State by Timothy Earle and Allen W. Johnson; Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America by Jack Weatherford; and The Northwest Coast: Complex Hunter-Gatherers, Ecology, and Social Evolution by Kenneth M. Ames.

[8] Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs Wars and Witches; pp. 114-115

[9] Wetland Archaeology and Environments: Regional Issues, Global Perspectives, edited by M. Lillie and S. Ellis; Oxbow Press, Oxford, pp. 46-52. , 2006

[10] Timothy Earle and Allen W. Johnson; The Evolution of Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, p. 205. Earle notes that the Calusa may have achieved even higher densities.

If I don’t get another post out before Christmas, I’ll take this opportunity to wish everyone a wonderful holiday!

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