5 - The dimensions and dynamics of chiefdom polities

Summary

The study of relations among the cultural and ecological zones of the Quito region shows that the chiefdoms taken together form an emergent system, but it says little about the inner constitution of each one. How many people were nourished by the interzonal web, and on what scale were they organized into explicitly political units? How did ecological interdependency shape the practice of leaders and the conduct of political institutions? To what degree had political functions crystallized into specialties separate from the daily labor of the aboriginal masses?

Such questions matter more than locally, because they relate to the question of how nonstate sedentary societies in general function. Archaeologists, and to a lesser degree other anthropologists, regard the problem as important because the dynamic of state origins seemingly begins in some function or dysfunction of certain “intermediate” societies. If any such dynamic is to be reconstructed it can better be done from ethnographically valid descriptions of the prior condition than from retrospective deductions based on the later one. But one should bear in mind that “intermediate societies” seem to possess considerable stability and adaptive potential in their own right, and that the prehistory of South American peoples was played out in large part through relations among them rather than through processes transcending and obsoleting them. From either point of view, the Quito area data allow one to reconstruct at least the political and economic facets of several such societies with unusual clarity.