Chiefdom

Within general theories of cultural evolution, chiefdoms are characterized by permanent and institutionalized forms of political leadership (the chief), centralized decision-making, economic interdependence, and social hierarchy.

[8] Service argued that chief rose to assume a managerial status to redistribute agricultural surplus to ecologically specialized communities within this territory (staple finance).

Pauketat argues that the evolutionary underpinnings of the chiefdom model are weighed down by racist and outdated theoretical baggage that can be traced back to Lewis Morgan's 19th-century cultural evolution.

Pauketat argues that the chiefdom type is a limiting category that should be abandoned, and takes as his main case study Cahokia, a central place for the Mississippian culture of North America.

Kinship is typically an organizing principle, while marriage, age, and sex can affect one's social status and role.

Anthropologists and archaeologists have demonstrated through research that chiefdoms are a relatively unstable form of social organization.

An example of this kind of social organization were the Germanic Peoples who conquered the western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE.

They had a complex social hierarchy consisting of kings, a warrior aristocracy, common freemen, serfs, and slaves.

The early Spanish explorers in the Americas reported on the Indian kings and kept extensive notes during what is now called the conquest.

[15] Most African traditional societies involved chiefdoms in their political and social structure before European colonisation.

In prehistoric South-West Asia, alternatives to chiefdoms were the non-hierarchical systems of complex acephalous communities, with a pronounced autonomy of single-family households.

Frantsouzoff (2000) finds a more developed example of such type of polities in ancient South Arabia in the Wadi Hadhramawt of the 1st millennium BCE.

In Southeast Asian history up to the early 19th century, the metaphysical view of the cosmos called the mandala (i.e., circle) is used to describe a Southeast Asian political model, which in turn describes the diffuse patterns of political power distributed among Mueang (principalities) where circles of influence were more important than central power.

The concept counteracts modern tendencies to look for unified political power like that of the large European kingdoms and nation states, which one scholar posited were an inadvertent byproduct of 15th-century advances in map-making technologies.

[17][18] Nikolay Kradin has demonstrated that an alternative to the state seems to be represented by the supercomplex chiefdoms created by some nomads of Eurasia.