Temporary Cities and Cyclical Hierarchies

David Graeber has received abundant praise this year for his new book Bullshit Jobs. It deserves the attention. For my money, though, the most intellectually exciting thing Graeber has written in 2018 was the essay he cowrote with David Wengrow in Eurozine, on the alleged origins of inequality and how its (false) history affects modern policy debates. “How to Change the Course of Human History” affects no false modesty. Wedding “big history” to radical social critique, the article offers both a new model of ethnohistorical interpretation and hope for the future of human societies. Not a lot of scholarship like that nowadays.

Wengrow and Graeber start by observing the sense of futility bred by modern studies of human social evolution. Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, and their imitators argue that social “progress” is both a one-way street and inseparable from the increasing concentration of wealth and power. Humans allegedly began their history as small, egalitarian bands, but as they developed agriculture, cities, and the rudiments of industry they necessarily embraced forms of specialization bound to enrich some and immiserate others. Moreover, these civilizational advances trapped human beings who developed them, much as a fishing weir snares a fish. Farmers, city-dwellers, or beneficiaries of an industrial revolution cannot abandon these innovations without depriving most of their enlarged population of work or food. As with human individuals, human societies cannot return to their historical childhood, even if doing so could alleviate poverty and inequality. Kings, robber barons, and one-percenters, in this framework, become necessary evils. The only alternatives to Pareto are Malthus or Hobbes.

The authors agree that this pessimistic, “realist” view of human history must appeal to at least some readers. To argue that struggles against inequality are futile or dangerous is to comfort the comfortable and empower the powerful. They also demonstrate, I think very persuasively, that this argument has little basis in historical reality. Go back to the Eurasian Pleistocene and one finds many of the features of more hierarchical, “civilized” societies: valuable luxury goods, like ivory beads, buried with (necessarily high-status) children, “micro-cities” where hunting bands came together to trade and feast and worship, and even monumental architecture, like the megaliths of Gobekli Tepe (9,000 BCE). Then come forward a few millennia to the early Holocene, and one finds early agricultural societies who retained their egalitarian social structure, and who, far from finding themselves caught in a Malthusian trap, were able to replace horticulture with gathering when it suits their interests. Examine early urban societies, like the Indus Valley culture and the Sumerians, and one finds little evidence of armies, personal monuments, or the other trappings of a political elite. Hunter-gatherer societies could develop gaudy hierarchies, and farmers and city-dwellers could pull them down. Civilization was not an antisocial trap but a social opportunity.

Graeber and Wengrow's thought-provoking article made one observation that particularly appealed to me: that societies can develop seasonal, cyclical hierarchies of rank and authority, and that we most commonly associate these shifting modes of social organization with Native Americans. At certain times of the year, usually spring and summer, the Inuit, Lakotas, and Pacific Northwest nations dispersed into small bands in order to fish and hunt. In the colder months, they assembled into large-scale winter meeting houses, massive hunting encampments, and chiefly towns, there to exchange gifts and contract marriages. Among the Inuit, the mobile hunting bands were patriarchal and the winter meetings more egalitarian; among Indians in western North America, the reverse held true. In each case, however, neither cities (or large-scale settlements, if you prefer) nor rulers were permanent parts of the physical and social landscape. This cyclical social pattern also pertained in the Ohio Valley during the Hopewell era (200 BCE to 500 CE). As I learned while writing my recent book, the Hopewell people lived most of the year in dispersed settlements, but assembled part of the year to hold ceremonies and build mounds and monuments for their elite. Their elite may have had considerable economic power, but according to Matthew Coons, commoners appear to have had the means to challenge their authority. The Hopewell culture lasted rather longer than later Native American cultures which built more permanent cities and towns and had less challenge-able ruling classes, like the Mississippian city-states exemplified by Cahokia. Given that the problems Cahokia encountered - resource exhaustion and an increasingly self-absorbed leadership - grew out of its fixed geographic location and fixed hierarchy, the more flexible arrangements of the Hopewellians may have contributed to their comparative longevity.*


* The Mississippian culture as a whole actually lasted for about six centuries, but larger cities had significantly shorter lifespans, about 200 years or so in Cahokia's case.  The Ancestral Puebloan culture (900-1300 CE) of western New Mexico is perhaps a better comparative example.

Mound Builders Playtest Update

Your humble narrator recently attempted to play-test Mound Builders, the new solitaire game of Mississippian-era exploration and survival. After two hours of set-up, re-reading (and re-re-reading) the rules, and slow, methodical play, I managed to make it into the early Mississippian era, the game's second epoch. My cultural empire extended deep into Shawnee and Caddo country, generating regular surpluses of hides and mica, before enemy war parties – notably the Cherokees, whose homeland I never managed to incorporate – began battering Cahokia's palisades.

Then I noticed I'd made it through the Hopewell era without remembering to trigger the revolts specified on the game's first set of history cards. I apparently misread a paragraph on page 9, column two of the rulebook (like you do). Well, so much for being methodical! And so much for trying to write a legitimate session report. I'll make another attempt to play the game correctly, but it will have to wait until June, as I'll be traveling and Mound Builders requires more play area than the average hotel table or airline tray-back provides.

(The image at right shows the game board at the start of the first [Hopewell] era, shortly before I began to screw everything up. Not sure where I placed the fifth peace-pipe marker; I suspect it's out-of-frame. The mug on the right edge of the board, used to hold chiefdom counters, was one I picked up at the 2012 meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory.)

A First Look at Mound Builders

My copy of Victory Point Games' Mound Builders arrived a short while ago, and having just dug my way out of a pile of editing I thought I would give my readers my initial impressions of the game before working on a more detailed review or session report.

Victory Point Games' motto is “The Play's the Thing,” which refers to their production of games with interesting rules or settings and inexpensive components. Mound Builders, however, represents a significant improvement in the physical quality of VPG's products. The event cards (“history cards”) are sturdy, trading-card sized, and well-illustrated; the counters are nearly twice as thick as those in previous VPG titles; the rule book has a glossy cover and is formatted like an actual book; and the board is large – 11 by 17 inches – and adorned with images and icons that immediately set the tone for the game. I can't imagine what the deluxe boxed edition must be like, though I suspect the counters are of gold-pressed latinum.

As in other States of Siege games, the game board of Mound Builders features a central city, Cahokia, that the player must defend from adversaries who advance against it on numbered tracks, or warpaths. These adversaries are the Shawnees, Cherokees, Natchez, Caddos, Ho-Chunks, and, eventually, the Spanish. One might quibble with some of the names here: the Shawnees were actually the Fort Ancient culture in the pre-Columbian era (they didn't acquire their historic name till later), the Natchez didn't coalesce as a nation until the seventeenth century, and the Cherokees were a pretty minor nation until the eighteenth century (though the designers note that they use the word as a catch-all for the southeastern Indians). There's something to be said, though, for using historic tribal names, which remind players of the continuity between pre- and post-Columbian Indian cultures.

The game tokens include six markers representing hostile armies, each of which has a stand to keep it upright on the board, indicating that VPG is moving away from its strict devotion to flat cardboard counters. Most of the other game counters represent the chiefdoms that the player can exploit or conquer during the game, chiefdoms identified by an exotic trade good they produce – copper, mica, feathers, seashells – and a numeric battle value. Once the second phase of the game, the Mississippian era, begins, the player can flip the chiefdom counters to the side displaying a mound, indicating they've been incorporated into one's civilization. As a whole, the counters indicate that Mound Builders is an unusual offering for VPG, with both military and resource-management elements. We will see whether or not these make for a rewarding game; I suspect they do.

Gamers identify those elements of a game that establish it in a particular setting or historic era as “chrome,” and Mound Builders has lots of it, particularly on its event or History cards. In the States of Siege game series, these indicate how many actions the player may perform on a given turn and which enemies' armies move up (and, in MB, which chiefdoms might revolt). In Mound Builders, all of the cards are beautifully illustrated with color images or photographs, displaying the Aztalan palisade, Hopewell pottery, an artist's reconstruction of Cahokia, and the like. Each also contains a paragraph of text describing the archaeological site or culture or development featured on the card, and I think they contain a fair amount of information that would be news even to seasoned American historians. Were I to use MB as a teaching tool, these History cards would be one of the principal reasons.

The only thing discouraging me from using Mound Builders in the classroom is the rulebook, which is very complex – less so than for a game like Advanced Squad Leader, but more than other States of Siege titles or “gateway” games like Ticket to Ride. MB covers three historic periods, or eras, and is almost a different game in each. In the Hopewell period, the player focuses on exploring and trading; in the Mississippian era, the emphasis is on empire building and defense; in the Spanish era, the player will be struggling just to survive. Players also need to keep track of a large number of action options: building mounds, improving Cahokia's palisades, powwowing with the Great Sun, engaging in diplomacy to acquire chiefdoms, and attacking hostile armies, and that's not including the additional options in the advanced game. I suspect, though, that it is easier to keep track of these options once one has actually playtested the game, which I plan to do shortly.

A Mississippian Board Game?

Update: My copy of Mound Builders has arrived, and my first-impressions overview can be found here.

Victory Point Games is a small, California-based company that manufactures inexpensive designer board games, usually strategy games or historical war games. One of their more popular product lines is “States of Siege,” a series of solitaire games in which the player must defend a central point – usually a capital city – against enemy armies that advance on numbered tracks. Each turn the player draws an event card indicating which armies advance, any special events that occur, and how many actions the player may take, including attacks on enemy forces (which, if successful, drive the targeted army back a space or two on their track). Most include additional resources or political elements that the player must manage while defending the capital. Levee en Masse, for instance – a simulation of the wars of the French Revolution – requires players to maintain (through die rolls) a correct balance between Republic, Monarchy, and Despotism ratings, which shift during the game in response to historical events. Some have special “chrome” that distinguishes them from other titles in the series. Ottoman Sunset, for example, has a game-within-a-game that begins when Britain's fleet tries to run the Bosporus-Dardanelles gauntlet, for which players can prepare in advance if they spend their scarce actions to build fortifications. Other games in the series cover the English Civil War, the defense of Canada during the Seven Years' War, and the Battle of Roarke's Drift, inter alia.

I mention this here because VPG has just released a States of Siege game on what I had thought was an impossible subject for a game, and one highly relevant to this blog and my readers: The Mound Builders. Yes, it's a war game about the Mississippian civilization! Here's an excerpt from the catalog:

“Until the arrival of the Spanish late in the game, you will expand your control across the map of North America, extending it over the various chiefdoms encountered, incorporating them into your economic and religious sphere. Your domain will grow and shrink, but be aware that rather than a military advance and retreat, this process represents the rise and decline of culture, religious ideology, and an economic way of life, [all] threatened from outside by competing ideologies and lifestyles as much as by hostile armies.”

In other words, it's a bit of a departure from previous States of Siege war games, in that it covers several centuries of time and simulates socio-economic as well as military conflict. And it's nothing like Risk, and thank goodness.

Needless to say, your humble narrator plans to order a copy of Mound Builders in the very near future, and in a forthcoming blog entry will let you know how it plays, and whether it is suitable for team play in a classroom setting.

Whatever Became of Cahokia?

Several years ago I wrote a blog entry about the rise of Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian settlement in North America, and the stresses and compensations of living in that extraordinary city. My entry did not, however, address the reasons for the city-state's decline, which began just a century after Cahokia's founding, in 1150 CE. Research for another project has introduced me to several articles which provide reasons for Cahokia's eventual disappearance (except as a cluster of mounds and a museum). One of the principal causes for the decline, according to Timothy Pauketat, Larry Beacon, and Edward Cook, was environmental: a series of droughts that afflicted Indian communities in the Midwest in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, leading to the abandonment of the farming villages that supplied Cahokia with food. The city already suffered from resource depletion: the American Bottom, fertile though its soils were, had a natural shortage of mineral resources, and the construction of Cahokia and its satellite communities produced severe shortages of firewood by 1150.

To these environmental stresses we may add a cultural one: Cahokia's religious and social elite began pursuing individual display and military glory in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a shift from more communally-oriented behavior that is demonstrated in the archaeological record by increased burials of exotic, even unique, "prestige goods" like copper jewelry and shell cups, and by the abandonment of mound-building in favor of constructing defensive palisades. This increased individualism undermined the elite's authority as mediators for the community, while increased drought and resource depletion made it clear that both the spiritual and material worlds were angry with the priest-aristocrats. By the middle of the 1100s Cahokia had lost about half of its peak population, and the rest of the city's inhabitants had dispersed by the early 1300s, just in time for the Little Ice Age to shut down the other Mississippian settlements in the Midwest.

Sources:  Larry Benson, Timothy Pauketat, and Edward Cook, "Cahokia's Boom and Bust in the Context of Climate Change," American Antiquity 74 (2009): 467-83; Mary Beth Trubitt, "Mound Building and Prestige Goods Exchange: Changing Strategies in the Cahokia Chiefdom," ibid, 65 (2000): 669-690.

Niall Ferguson Is Still a Douchebag

A few weeks ago I took Niall Ferguson to task for an essay, excerpted in part from his book Civilization, that he published in Newsweek, arguing that when empires fell they did so rather suddenly and that the United States might be on the verge of doing so. I asserted both in my comment and title that Ferguson was something of a "dolt," insofar as his essay betrayed considerable ignorance about the way historical events actually happen. I now wish to apologize to my readers for referring to Ferguson as a dolt, which turns out to be an inadequately pejorative epithet. He is, in fact, a douchebag.

I base this judgment on a kerfuffle that has arisen in the London Review of Books, where Pankaj Mishra reviewed Ferguson's Civilization and several of his earlier books in a long review essay ("Watch This Man," 3 Nov. 2011.) Mishra compared Ferguson to Theodore Stoddard, a purveyor of white-supremacist fantasies from the 1920s, and like Ferguson a writer who warned of the decline of the West relative to a vaguely sinister East. While not calling Ferguson a racist, he did accuse him of stoking the "racial anxieties" of the Euro-American elite and of writing at least one "Stoddardesque" book (The Pity of War, 1998) bemoaning the crippling impact of World War One on the British Empire, for which empire he later wrote at least one avowed apologetic, Empire (2003).

Regarding Ferguson's latest book, Mishra noted that not all of the author's "killer apps" were confined to Western Europe in the early modern era; Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, and India all had strong work ethics, abundant trade, and strong consumer economies until 1800. Perhaps more importantly, "killer apps" weren't necessarily the keys to the West's conquest of the "Rest"; in the case of the Americas and Australasia, epidemic diseases and Eurasian livestock were (as Alfred Crosby and Jared Diamond have argued) probably more important than technology and hard work in effecting English and Spanish colonization. And once the West conquered the Rest, its empires left behind a legacy that was ambiguous at best and often ghastly - vide the serial famines and economic devastation that the British left in India, the destruction of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere and the South Pacific, and the mountain of bodies that the Belgians left in the Congo in the early twentieth century.

Mishra's review, it is fair to say, is a hostile one. I cannot judge whether it is an accurate treatment of Ferguson's book, not yet* having read Civilization, but I can say that Ferguson has overreacted to it. In the LRB's November 17th issue Mr. F. wrote an angry letter (scroll up to read), claiming Mishra had engaged in "character assassination" by insinuating that Ferguson was a racist, and owed Ferguson a public apology. In his reply, Mishra did not exactly apologize - he said Ferguson was guilty of the same "pathology" that George Orwell diagnosed in James Burnham, power-worship - but he did write that Ferguson was "no racist" and went on to argue Ferguson had misrepresented his review essay.

This was unacceptable to Professor Ferguson, who replied (scroll down) that Mishra's "mealy-mouthed" assertion and the "smear" that followed it vitiated any apologetic intent in Mishra's reply. He closed his second letter by noting that "the freedom of the press does not extend to serious defamation, at best reckless, at worst deliberate and malicious," and upped the ante, demanding apologies from both Mishra and his editor and insinuating that he planned a lawsuit. In his second reply, Mishra noted that Ferguson has long defended "the innate superiority, indeed indispensibility, of Western civilization," and offered the following Ferguson quote (from earlier this year) as evidence:

"The Apache and the Navajo had all sorts of admirable traits. In the absence of literacy we don’t know what they were because they didn’t write them down. We do know they killed a hell of a lot of bison. But had they been left to their own devices, I don’t think we’d have anything remotely resembling the civilisation we’ve had in North America."

So the subjugation and dispossession of the Apaches and Navajos, and I assume that of many other Native Americans, was justified in Ferguson's view by the great civilization that Anglo-Americans built in their former homeland. I might wonder if Ferguson is aware of the civilizations that some Native North Americans, like the Chaco Canyon peoples (Anasazi) and Mississippians, actually built on this continent prior to European contact, or what the Good Professor would say about the Native peoples, notably the "Civilized Tribes" of the southeastern U.S., who made a concerted effort to "download" Western Europe's "killer apps" in the 19th century and were still squashed by the U.S. government. But I doubt Ferguson gives a damn; he's too busy bursting with anger over an unfavorable book review and preparing to sue the reviewer in the name of freedom of the press.

* I guess I'll have to read it now, and possibly review some of its content. Stay tuned.

[Note: An earlier version of this post erroneously referred to Prof. Ferguson as "Andrew Ferguson." His real, full name is "Niall Campbell Douglas Elizabeth Ferguson."]

Guest Star

While the massive July 1054 supernova which produced the Crab Nebula was visible throughout the world (one could see it in the daytime for three weeks), it made little impression on the written records left by observers in the Eastern Hemisphere, apart from an entry by an astronomer in Song China. However, according to Timothy Pauketat's new book on Cahokia (pp. 20-21), Native North Americans left ample non-written records of the event in this hemisphere. Indians in Missouri and New Mexico represented the supernova in pottery, petroglyphs, and rock paintings, sometimes placing it near a crescent moon or an image of a rabbit (which some identified with the moon). The Chaco Canyon culture, also known as the Anasazi, identified the supernova in a painted star map and may have built of their largest underground temples, or kivas, in its honor. Pauketat believes the founders of Cahokia may have begun constructing their ambitious new city shortly after - and in consequence of - the supernova. If true, Cahokia would be the largest "record" of the astronomical event this side of the Crab Nebula.

The News from Cahokia

In Salon.com, Andrew O'Hehir reviews, at length, Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi, Timothy Pauketat's new book about the largest pre-Columbian city in North America. Cahokia was the largest of a group of Native American city-states which flourished in the greater Mississippi Valley between 900 and 1300 CE, then rapidly declined, leaving behind enormous earthen temple mounds and immense archaeological remains. Pauketat's book makes at least three observations about the enigmatic metropolis that I hadn't read before. First, rather than growing slowly over time, Cahokia appeared quite rapidly: its founders built it around 1050 CE on the (razed) remains of a previous agricultural village. Second, the Cahokian priesthood and nobility practiced mass human sacrifice: excavations of Mound 72 in the late 1960s revealed the remains of more than 80 young men and women who were all killed at approximately the same time and buried with two high-status men, probably members of the nobility. Third, the sacrifices were probably linked to massive public feasts: another excavation in the 1960s uncovered a 900-year-old midden, so deeply buried that the contents were still decomposing (one can only imagine the smell), filled with the remains of several thousand deer, various plant foods, and millions of tobacco seeds. The feasts that generated this garbage probably consisted of several days of communal gorging and smoking, and helped prop up Cahokia's civic morale – and palliated the hunger and hardship that otherwise were the lot of most of the city's residents. In sum, these excavations help explain why so many Indian "commoners," even those not held in slavery, were willing to live in a setting that must (given the Cahokians' lack of running water and concomitant problems with sanitation) have been unpleasant for them: it was a place of "pomp and pageantry," drama, excitement, and periodic excess, just like any other big city.