Anarchy Meets Hierarchy: Sociopolitical Implications of Diachronic Variation in Exchange Indices from Central California’s Pecho Coast

ABSTRACT

For decades, it has been recognized that Chumash-speaking peoples of the Santa Barbara Channel had a highly complex society that featured sedentism, high population density, craft specialization, and chiefdom-like political authority. Among the material evidence indicating complexity are shell bead production centers on the Channel Islands and sewn-plank canoes. Chumash speakers to the north, including the yak tityu tityu yak tilhini, in what is now known as the San Luis Obispo area, lacked plank canoes and major bead-making workshops, so there has long been certain ambiguity about the nature of their sociopolitical organization and its origins. Here we briefly review the historic evidence for traits of complexity north of Point Conception. Then we evaluate the cumulative archaeological record of obsidian and shell beads from the Pecho coast, including new findings from CA-SLO-585. Patterns in the relative abundance of these commodities show striking differences over time, as obsidian disappears during the Late Period at the same time that beads increase. These trends raise the possibility that territoriality arose during or slightly before the Late Period at Pecho in tandem with hierarchical political authority.

RESUMEN

Durante décadas se ha reconocido que los pueblos de habla chumash del canal de Santa Bárbara tenían una sociedad muy compleja que presentaba sedentarismo, alta densidad de población, especialización artesanal y autoridad política similar a la de un cacicazgo. Entre la evidencia material que indica complejidad se encuentran los centros de producción de cuentas de conchas en las Islas del Canal y las canoas de tablones cosidos. Los hablantes de chumash en el norte, incluido el yak tityu tityu yak tilhini, en lo que ahora se conoce como el área de San Luis Obispo, carecían de canoas de tablones y talleres importantes de fabricación de cuentas, por lo que durante mucho tiempo ha existido cierta ambigüedad sobre la naturaleza de su socio- organización política y sus orígenes. Aquí revisamos brevemente la evidencia histórica de rasgos de complejidad al norte de Point Conception. Luego evaluamos el registro arqueológico acumulativo de cuentas de obsidiana y concha de la costa de Pecho, incluidos los nuevos hallazgos de CA-SLO-585. Los patrones en la abundancia relativa de estos productos básicos muestran diferencias muy llamativas a lo largo del tiempo, ya que la obsidiana desaparece durante el Período Tardío al mismo tiempo que aumentan las cuentas. Estas tendencias plantean la posibilidad de que la territorialidad surgiera durante o un poco antes del Período Tardío en Pecho junto con la autoridad política jerárquica.

KEYWORDS:

• Tribelet
• territoriality
• exchange
• obsidian
• beads
• political complexity
• Chumash
• Pecho coast

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the students of the Cal Poly field (ANT 310) and laboratory (ANT 311) classes from 2019, 2021, and 2022 for their hard work completing the field investigations and analysis of materials from CA-SLO-585, on the traditional lands of yak tit^yu tit^yu Northern Chumash. We thank Kelly Kephart and Mike Taggart from PG&E for facilitating that work. We also greatly appreciate the work by Kaelyn Bremer to produce Figures 1 and 2. We are especially indebted to Matthew Goldman and Mona Tucker, representatives of yak tit^yu tit^yu Northern Chumash Tribe, who consulted on the projects during the planning stages and participated in the field work. We are honored to be able to continue our collaboration with them.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Bettinger (2015, 12) used the term “anarchy” not to imply chaos, disorder, or lawlessness, but rather situations without a publicly enforced government. Our interpretation of his use of the term is that it refers to the absence of large-scale political integration and/or order beyond or above that of individual tribelets. This is similar yet different from the concept of anarchism discussed by Angelbeck and Grier (2012), who used it to describe large, highly integrated societies of the Northwest Coast that featured complex intergroup relations, with weak centralized authority and order maintained less by chiefly authority than by social stratification.

2 Dating for cultural periods follows Jones and Codding (2019): Millingstone/Lower Archaic = 10,000-5,700 cal BP; Early Period = 5,700-2,550 cal BP; Middle = 2,550-950 cal BP); Middle/Late Transition = 950-700 cal BP; Late Period = 700-250 cal BP.

3 Radiocarbon ages were calibrated with CALIB 8.2 (Stuiver, Reimer, and Reimer 2022) using the Marine20 calibration curve (Heaton et al. 2020) with an upwelling correction (ΔR) of 140 + 25 derived from open ocean samples in Monterey (n = 1) and Morro Bay (n = 1) reported in Robinson and Thompson (1981).

4 While the genus for the purple olive shell used to make beads in southern and central California has been changed by biologists to Callianax, we retain the historic genus name Olivella in reference to the beads made from the shell.

5 Obsidian distribution based on the Mikkelsen, Hildebrandt, and Jones (2000) dating scheme is referred to as “adjusted” in Figure 3.