Warfare and Engineering , Ostentation and Social Status in the Late Intermediate Period Osmore Drainage

Models of cultural evolution often link the need for leadership in warfare or communal projects with the development of social differentiation. Yet when we compare indicators of warfare, large construction projects, and social differentiation for three archaeological cultures in the Osmore drainage of southern Peru, a very different pattern emerges. This counter-intuitive example highlights a problem with common interpretations of evidence for social differentiation, while suggesting new ways of looking at these and other cultures. In many models of the development of social complexity, an important factor that leads to the appearance of social hierarchies and elites is the need or potential for leadership in warfare or in management of large group projects (Adams 1966; Carniero 1970; Conrad and Demarest 1984; Earle 1987; Johnson and Earle 1987; Kirch 1984; Wittfogel 1957; etc.). People who are successful at leading raids, organizing defense, or marshalling labor for infrastructure projects may achieve special status and power, and may reify their success into permanent and even heritable positions of privilege. In this way, both warfare and project management are means of creating, legitimizing, and maintaining social hierarchies from simple chiefdoms to states. One implication of this idea is that in cross-cultural comparisons, we should expect to find a positive correlation Owen: Warfare and Engineering, Ostentation and Status p.2 between the degree of warfare and/or group project management and the degree of social hierarchy. Societies which do not engage in warfare or manage group projects should generally have less elaborated social hierarchies, while those that frequently go to war and/or carry out large-scale, coordinated projects such as constructing long canals or circumvaling walls around settlements should generally have more developed hierarchies and elites. Does this positive correlation of warfare and project management to social hierarchy necessarily hold? Let us consider a surprising test case from the Osmore drainage in southern Perú. The setting is a single, narrow river system on the far south coast of Perú. The subjects are three distinct cultures that flourished in partially overlapping times and places in this drainage during the Late Intermediate Period, starting after the collapse of the Tiwanaku state around 1000 AD, and running up to the Inka conquest of the region around 1476. The earliest of these cultures is represented by the Tumilaca phase. The Tumilaca phase people were physical and cultural descendants of the Tiwanaku populace of the Moquegua region, dating from about 950 AD to around 1200 AD. When Tiwanaku collapsed, these inhabitants of the former state province split up into smaller, competing groups, and expanded from the Moquegua area both down to the coastal valley and up into the higher tributary drainages (Bermann et al. 1989; Goldstein 1989a,b; Owen 1993; Stanish 1985). The second test case is the Chiribaya culture. The Chiribaya appeared in the coastal and middle elevations of the drainage probably very shortly after the Tumilaca phase began, either immigrating from the south, or developing from groups of the Tumilaca phase in a rapid, profound transformation. The Chiribaya shared the coastal and middle Osmore with the Tumilaca phase groups, but outlasted them, persisting to about 1375 AD (Jessup 1991; Owen 1993). Finally, the Estuquiña culture developed in the middle and upper Osmore drainage a bit later, perhaps around 1200 AD, and persisted through the Inka conquest into early historic times. Owen: Warfare and Engineering, Ostentation and Status p.3 There is little or no temporal overlap between Estuquiña and the Tumilaca phase, but the Estuquiña and Chiribaya did occupy the drainage contemporaneously for a time. Their territories did not overlap much, however, with almost all the Chiribaya population living at the elevation of Moquegua and below, and the bulk of the Estuquiña living at the elevation of Moquegua and above (Goldstein 1994; Stanish and Rice 1989; Owen 1994, nd). These three cultures all existed within the 500 years of the Late Intermediate Period. They occupied a single coastal drainage in overlapping, albeit quite different territories. They were all part of Lumbreras's (1974) "tricolor del sur" ceramic macro-tradition. All three appear to have been organized as simple to complex chiefdoms, probably organized at the level of one to a handful of settlements. None is thought to have been part of a larger polity. These three cultures are a reasonably well-controlled set of examples for the cross-cultural comparison we are about to make. The strategy for the comparison is to rank the three cultures relative to each other on three scales: intensity of warfare, amount of group project management, and degree of social differentiation and hierarchy. Fortunately, the three cultures differ markedly, and can be ranked on these scales fairly unambiguously. Using the three rankings, we will check whether or not indications of warfare and project management correlate with evidence of social hierarchy. The rankings of the three cultures according to archaeological indicators of real or threatened warfare are shown in table 1. The numbers indicate a simple, unweighted ranking on each line of evidence, with 1 representing the lowest degree of evidence and 3 the highest. Ties are tallied as the lower ranking for both cultures. Tumilaca 950-1200 AD Chiribaya 1000-1375 AD Estuquiña 1200-1475 AD Defensible site locations 2 1 3 Defensive constructions (walls, etc.) 2 1 3