Models of Chiefdom Economy: Prehistoric Moundville as a Case Study.

As a form of sociopolitical organization, the chiefdom has received attention for being evolutionarily the earliest form of ascriptively ranked society and as being the form out of which the earliest states developed. In large part, this attention was generated by Elman Service's study of cultural evolution. In Service's definition, the chiefdom owed its origin and persistence to the presence of a central office controlling the redistribution of the products of specialized producers who exploited geographically diverse resources. Other research, however, showed that not all chiefdoms had redistributional economies, and several alternatives have been proposed. After reviewing the models of chiefdom economic organization, the models are compared with archaeological data from a prehistoric chiefdom centered at Moundville, Alabama, between A.D. 1050 and 1550. The hierarchically ranked nature of this society has been determined by mortuary analysis, and its geographic limits assigned on the basis of locational analyses. Extant excavation data from the paramount center and survey data from other sites in the chiefdom was complemented by excavation at one minor center, reported here. The data are consistent with local agricultural self-sufficiency and no large-scale movement of foodstuffs. Certain portions of deer carcasses, however, appear to have been preferentially provided to elite members of the society. Utilitarian craft items mostly were made domestically from local raw materials, and there is no evidence of specialization of production of these goods. Production of both utilitarian and non-utilitarian goods from non-local raw materials, in contrast, was specialized to some degree; nearly all the working non-local materials was restricted to the paramount center, usually to particular precincts within that site. Distribution of these goods, as well as goods made outside the chiefdom, apparently was determined by the items' function and social valuation rather than the fact that the raw material or manufacture was non-local. This economic organization is similar to the prestige goods model of Frankenstein and Rowl and s. Expectations about the dynamic behavior of an economy of this form are outlined, but limitations of the data preclude rigorous testing of the expectations.Ph.D.ArchaeologyNative American studiesUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161340/1/8702855.pd