The Prehistory of
Money:
Protomoney and the meaning of exchange
in precontact
Southern California
Christopher
Chase-Dunn, Eugene N. Anderson,
Hiroko Inoue, and Alexis Álvarez
Institute for Research on
World-Systems
irows.ucr.edu
University of California-Riverside
v. 4-25-13 7120 words
An earlier version was presented at the annual meetings of the International Studies Association, San Francisco, April 3, 4pm, 2013. Session on “Money in World History” under the auspices of the World Historical Systems subsection of the International Political Economy Section of the International Studies Association
This
is IROWS Working Paper #80 available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows80/irows80.htm
Abstract:
The evolutionary world-systems perspective sees semiperipheral
development as an important cause of human sociocultural evolution since the
Stone Age. In this paper we consider the roles that semiperipheral
polities may have played in the evolution of economic institutions in the stone age. We consider the emergence of protomoney
in a world-system of sedentary foragers in Southern California – an instance of
“money in world prehistory.”
Our theoretical perspective is the
institutional materialist evolutionary world-systems approach. This perspective
focuses on the ways that humans have organized social production and
distribution, and how economic, political, and religious institutions have
evolved in systems of interacting polities (world-systems) since the Paleolithic Age. We employ an underlying model in which
population pressures and interpolity competition have
always been, and still remain, important causes of social change, while the
systemic logics of social reproduction and growth have gone through qualitative
transformations (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: Chapter 6). Thus we are both continuationists and transformationists.
A
stylized model of evolution of economic institutions
This
paper will focus mainly on the evolution of economic institutions and the roles
played by semiperipheral polities in the long-term
commodification of goods, wealth, labor and land. It uses the results of a
research project that studies the development of settlements and polities by
comparing regional world-systems and studying them over long periods of time.[1]
Here
we start with a brief stylized overview of our version of the evolution of
qualitatively distinct economic institutions and then we will elaborate and
qualify this model by examining some particular cases. In small-scale and
egalitarian systems social production is mainly based on shared conceptions of
norms that designate obligations among members of kin groups. Anthropologists
call this the kin-based mode of
production (Wolf 1997). It is based
on consensual moral orders that are imbedded in the mother tongues that people
learn from childhood. The mobilization
of social labor is primarily organized by means of family obligations based on
sharing and reciprocity. In some of these small-scale societies there is also
ritualized (sacralized) gifting that reinforces
alliances across households, settlements and sometimes across the boundaries of
independent polities (Douglas 1990). Most of these small-scale systems are
egalitarian in the sense that there may be some gender and age inequalities,
but there are few inequalities across households.
As sociocultural systems become more
complex, hierarchical kinship distinctions emerge that allow elites to use
institutionalized power to accumulate resources and to regulate the uses of
land and other valuable natural resources. Classes, forms of property and
prestige goods systems emerge that make it possible for the chiefly elite to
appropriate some of the labor and goods produced by commoners. In some of these
systems prestige goods emerge as a mechanism for symbolizing alliances among
village heads. Under some conditions prestige goods can evolve into proto-money
that serves as a more generalized symbol of value in trade networks. The
function of such intervillage exchange is to allow
surplus food to be acquired by villages that are experiencing a temporary
shortage. Intervillage and interpolity
trade serves as a substitute for raiding. In some systems prestige goods are
monopolized by the elites and are used to reward subalterns and to regulate
marriage, reinforcing the political hierarchy. These are called “prestige goods
systems” in the anthropological literature. But some egalitarian systems have
prestige goods or proto-money that mainly functions to ensure the provision of
goods for the general population during periods of shortage (e.g. the Wintu – see Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998). Small-scale societies also differ in the
extent to which private property exists. Many have only the usufruct in which
procurement locations are reallocated yearly by group decision-making, whereas
others designate property rights to individual sites that are inherited. But
even when individual or household rights to sites exist these are not commodified because they cannot be bought or sold.
In some systems specialized institutions of
regional control emerged within polities[2]
that were separate from, and over the top of, the kin-organized subsistence and
political economy. These were the first states, and the larger political
economy came to be based on various forms of tithing, taxation,
labor-appropriation and tribute. The general term for this kind of political
economy is the tributary mode of
accumulation. In some of the early
states primordial versions of commodified exchange
emerged such as lending money at interest and letters of credit, but most
exchange continued to be regulated by customary or politically-specified rules
and rates of exchange. [3]Interpolity (foreign) trade was usually carried out by
representatives of the state – what Polanyi (1957a) called “state-administered
trade.” But there were also some city-states that specialized in trade. The commodified institutions that emerged within early
tributary states were surrounded by powerful state-based institutionalized
coercion that regulated most of the economy. For thousands of years commodified forms of wealth, land, goods and labor existed
within political economies in which institutionalized coercion was the
predominant mode of economic regulation. But these commodified
forms nevertheless spread and developed within and between the tributary
empires. Tributary states became semi-commercialized and more and larger semiperipheral capitalist city-states specializing in trade
and commodity production emerged.[4]
Eventually a rather highly commodified system emerged in Western Europe during the
period after the fall of the Roman Empire in which the power of tributary
states was weak. A large number of semiperipheral capitalist city-states concentrated first on
the Italian peninsula and then spread across the Alps to the low
countries and then to the North Sea and the Baltic. These were agents of
an expanding Mediterranean and Baltic market economy. When territorial states
again emerged the most powerful of them were shaped by the existence of this
strongly commodified regional market economy, and the
emergent political elites were dependent on support from merchants and bankers
to meet the costs of raising armies in this very competitive interstate system.
The first territorial core state (not a semiperipheral
city-state) that was controlled by capitalists was the Dutch federation in the
17th century. This signaled the arrival of a capitalist world-system
in which the logic of profit-making instead of tribute-gathering had moved from
the semiperiphery to the core.
Money
in World Prehistory
The above stylized overview depicts
the emergence of money and market exchange as first occurring in the context of
Bronze Age state-based world-systems. But we want to have a closer look at
something of interest that happened in some stateless systems. Our tendency is
to side with the substantivists in the debate over whether or not
market exchange existed in stateless world-systems but we are willing to be
persuaded if there is evidence to the contrary. The substanvists contend that there was no market exchange before the emergence of
states, while the formalists think that all societies use the same logic
with regard to the rational individual calculation of gain and loss. Since
Karl Polanyi and his colleagues developed the substantivist
approach to economic sociology in the 1950s a debate has waned and waxed among
archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and sociologists over the "substantivist/formalist" question. The substantivists argue that exchange relations are embedded
in social structures, and that markets are historically created institutions,
not timeless logics expressing the truck-and-barter instincts of "economic
man". Polanyi distinguished between three qualitatively distinct forms of
integration: reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange. Important
statements of the substantivist position by Polanyi
and his colleagues are contained in Polanyi, Arensberg
and Pearson, eds. (1957). Marxist
variants have been argued by Sahlins(1972) and Wolf( 1982).
The formalists argue that economic rationality has similar properties in
all human societies, and they emphasize the importance of rational choice
approaches for nomadic foragers as well as contemporary consumers. The
formalist perspective has been defended by Blanton , Kowalewski, Feinman and Appel( 1981).Curtin's(1984) study of cross cultural trade
improves the formalist position by adding some new concepts: trade diasporas
and trade ecumenes.
Before the emergence of states human polities were small and not very internally stratified. The kin-based modes of production worked best in small-scale polities in which decisions could be made by consensus. Normative order requires a lot of consensus, and this works best when there are few socially structured inequalities. Sedentism and some degree of social complexity often emerged among some of those foraging peoples (hunter-gatherers) who occupied environments that provided enough food to sustain a settled population. These sedentary foragers developed methods of storing food for the off-season. They also sometimes developed trade networks that evened out the distribution of resources during years of drought or other climatic variations that affect the food supply. And trade allowed resources to move from ecological zones in which they were more abundant to zones in which they were scarce. Trade networks of this sort can be understood as an institutional substitute for raiding (Vayda 1967). Some of these systems developed proto-money in which a standardized symbol of value (usually beads made from sea-shells) came to be used as a form of social storage that facilitated intervillage exchange and allowed for the accumulation of tradable value that was less subject to spoilage than stored food.[5]
Most hunter-gatherers did not utilize
a standardized and durable symbol of value. Exchange within settlements was
most usually organized as sharing (generalized reciprocity) and gift-giving
(balanced reciprocity). Inter-settlement exchange was usually either balanced
reciprocity between groups or “negative reciprocity” in which enemy polities
tried to steal from one another (Sahlins
1972:193-196). The model of economic man used by most economists does not work
well in helping us to understand the cultural meaning of most exchange in such
cases. It is rather a sacralized moral order that regulates exchange. Sahlins points
out that kinship distance (from close to distant kinship relations) is
the main explanation for the distribution of sharing, balanced reciprocity and
negative reciprocity. Sharing is within
the household and with close kin in other households. Negative reciprocity,
including chicanery and theft, are also explained because these are the
appropriate behaviors toward those who are outside the moral order – non-kin
strangers (Sahlins 1972:196-199). Sahlins
(1972:196) says: “The several reciprocities from freely bestowed gift to
chicanery amount to a spectrum of sociability, from sacrifice in favor or
another to self-interested gain as the expense of another.”
Sahlins’s
(1974) concept of ‘balanced reciprocity” includes both the exchange of
equivalent gifts but also “transactions which stipulate returns of commensurate
worth or utility within a finite and narrow period. … The parties confront each
other as distinct economic and social interests (194-5). His main effort is to differentiate balanced
reciprocity from generalized reciprocity, not from market exchange, which he
does not really consider because he is studying Stone Age Economics. He
includes a lot of things in his category of “negative reciprocity” some of
which could be arm-length market exchange in which there is no personal
relationship between the buyer and the seller. For the problem of comprehending
the institutional nature of the social economy in prehistoric California
discussed below we need to make a clear distinction between balanced
reciprocity and market exchange. The main difference seems to be intent. In
balanced reciprocity the main intent is to be fair and to give as much as you
get in order to reinforce a social relationship. With market exchange the
intent is to make a profit. But this also requires a category of others that
are more distant than kin, but not yet enemies. It is this category that
emerges as the notion of kin-based solidarity expands to include co-ethnics,
co-nationals and eventually the whole human species.
Most
of the band and tribal level groups that Sahlins is
studying do all these forms of exchange without the use of a standardized
symbol of value (money). But there are some exceptions. In some regions tribal
groups do develop and extensively use a standardized medium of exchange. Sahlins (1972:227) calls this primitive money, by which he
means “those objects in primitive societies that have token value rather than
use value and that serve as means of exchange.”[6] Sahlins (227) then designates a few regions in which
small-scale societies are known to have made extensive use of primitive money:
“western and central Melanesia, aboriginal California and certain parts of the
South American tropical forest.” Sahlins’s claims
that these exceptions constitute instances of balanced reciprocity, not market
exchange.
Sahlins
contends that the use of primitive money for balanced reciprocity occurs under
certain conditions: a course-grained ecology in which rather different
ecological zones are close to one another, which encourages exchange; an
intermediate level of segmentary tribal organization
in which intervillage trade is between politically
autonomous but culturally related groups, “transactions in durables, more
likely to be balanced than food transactions(230)”. And he also says, “But more important, the
proportion of peripheral-sector exchange, the incidence of exchange among more
distantly related people, is likely to be considerably greater in tribal than
in band societies” (228).
Our purpose here is to examine the
idea that there may be a relationship between semiperipherality
and the emergence of specialized production of proto-money in world-systems of
sedentary foragers.
We
define market exchange in the way that economists do – a price-setting market
is one in which the terms of trade (prices) are set by competitive buying and
selling among sets of purchasers and sellers who are trying to make a profit on
the exchanges. Sharing, reciprocity,
gift-giving, generalized exchange and the payment of tribute and taxes are not
market exchange. Non-market exchanges rates sometimes reflect transportation
and production costs, but this is usually because the exchangers are trying to
be generous, and generosity involves guesses about how much effort was needed
to obtain a valued thing. A market economy is one in which a majority of the
goods and services that are necessary to the everyday lives of average persons
are obtained by marketized buying and selling.
Most egalitarian world-systems of
sedentary foragers do not have stable core/periphery hierarchies in which some
polities are able extract surplus product from other polities (e.g.
Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998). But there is often a condition of core/periphery
differentiation in which polities with greater population density and larger
settlements frequently interact with polities with less population density and
smaller settlements, or with nomadic peoples.
Semiperipherality in a situation of core/periphery
differentiation is constituted by having relative middle-sized settlements with
middle-levels of wealth and that mediate relations between a core region and a
peripheral region.
In this paper we examine the
hypothesis that semiperipheral communities may have
been agents of the development of proto-money in small-scale world-systems. The
regional world-systems of indigenous northern and southern California are used
to test this hypothesis. In both regions the manufacturing of primitive money became
a specialized activity of households that were in settlements that were of
medium size relative to the sizes of those settlements that were larger and
those that were smaller in adjacent regions.[7]
Very
Small World-Systems in California
In both Northern and Southern California different kinds of proto-money emerged as important for intervillage exchange networks. In the north the Pomo villages located near Clear Lake in the Coast Range in between the Sacramento River Valley and the coast of the Pacific Ocean specialized in the production of clam disk shell beads.[8] They obtained clam shells from the coast near Tamales Bay by means of direct procurement and by trade with indigenes living on the coast,[9] and they labored to turn these shells into small disks with a hole drilled in the center. These disk beads were then strung and a standard length of strung beads came to serve as a symbol of value in an exchange network that extended both north and south in the Sacramento River Valley and the adjacent mountain ranges. The Pomo were hill dwellers living adjacent to the valley-dwelling Patwin, who had some of the largest settlements in indigenous California – up to about 1500 residents – along the lower Sacramento River. The Pomo villages were large but not as large as those of the Patwin. The Pomo were a linguistic group that spoke spoke different languages within the Pomo language family of the Hokan language phylum.[10] As with other indigenous peoples of California, they were organized politically as “tribelets” – politically autonomous villages or small affiliated groups of villages that occasionally made war on one another but that also engaged in extensive trade in which food and other valuables were exchanged (Kroeber 1925). Prestige goods moved rather long distances by means of down-line-trade, moving from group to group. There were no long distance traders because it was dangerous to pass through the territories of non-allied groups. Long distance procurement treks were sometimes undertaken, but they were also dangerous. The most common cause of war was trespass, in which resources that were collectively owned by a tribelet were used without permission by outsiders (Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998: Chapter 8).
In Southern California the Chumash
villages along the Santa Barbara coast, inland in the valleys and Coast Range,
and on the northern Channel Islands were the center of an exchange network that
connected them with the Southern Channel Islands as well as with people living
in the San Joaquin Valley (the Yokuts) and the
regions south of the San Gabriel Mountains and extending across the Mohave
Desert into what is now Arizona and New Mexico. This exchange network used disk
beads as a standardized medium of value. The beads were manufactured from Olivella sea shells mainly by residents of the Northern
Channel Islands. The Olivella shell beads were
drilled with chert drills that were also manufactured
mainly by people dwelling on Santa Cruz Island where there were quarries
containing a kind of chert that was particularly
appropriate for making the drills. The shells were cut and roughly shaped, and
then drilled and strung and then sanded to roundness by rolling on a rough flat surface
until they were small and uniform. This took a lot of work, and households on
the Channel Islands spent a good deal of their labor time producing these
beads, which they then used to obtain vegetable foods from the mainland that
were in short supply on the islands.
The
Chumash were a linguistic group that spoke related, but sometimes
unintelligible dialects of a family of related languages. The largest Chumash villages were located
near fresh water sources on the coast. Villages on the islands and in the
interior were smaller. We contend that
both the Pomo villages and some of the Island Chumash villages were semiperipheral in a system that had a settlement size
hierarchy as well as differences in wealth. The largest villages on the
northern Channel Islands were smaller than those on the mainland coast, but
there were also smaller villages on the islands. The villages on San Miguel
Island, the northern-most of the Channel Islands, were quite small (Figure 1
below from Gamble 2006:71 Figure 7). [11]
We contend that the Island Chumash in the larger villages on Santa Cruz Island
were in a semiperipheral position vis-à-vis the
smaller villages on the islands and the larger villages of the mainland coast.
And we also contend that the Pomo were in a semiperipheral
position vis-à-vis the smaller villages of adjacent Coast Range peoples and
vis-à-vis the larger Patwin villages in the lower
Sacramento River Valley (King 1978).[12] Population density is an important dimension
of power in systems in which warfare and production technologies are not very
different across groups. The winners in intergroup conflicts are those that are
able to quickly mobilize larger numbers of fighters to either attack or protect
from attack. Village size is the best indicator of population density in settlement
systems of the kind found in indigenous California.
Figure 1:
Population estimates of village size based on mission register documents.
Source: Gamble 2006: 71.
It is in dispute as to whether or not the core polities with larger villages were exploiting the non-core regions in this Southern California system. Sahlins contends that the institutional nature of exchange among polities of this kind is usually balanced reciprocity, which requires equal exchange. Clarence King (1976) and Lynn Gamble (2008) contend that an important part of the Chumash economy was based on market exchange, which may also imply equal exchange. But Mikael Fauvelle (2011) contends that the island/mainland Chumash relationship was “asymmetrical exchange” because the mainlanders were able to use their alleged monopoly of asphaltum, a necessity for the building and repair of plank canoes, to skew the terms of trade in their favor. Both the institutional nature of the exchanges and the question of equal or unequal exchange are at issue in the case of the Island/Mainland Chumash political economy. Whether or not the trade was unequal, all agree that villages were larger on the coast than they were in the interior or on the islands. And Gamble (2006:188) says that the islanders were poorer and held fewer and smaller trade feasts. [13]
It is widely agreed in the
anthropological literature that generalized reciprocity (sharing) and balanced
reciprocity (gift-giving) were the major institutional
forms of exchange in both Northern and Southern California. Proto-money (clam
disk shell beads) in Northern California was primarily owned and exchanged by
village headmen who wore it to symbolize their status (a prestige good) and
used it to trade for food and other needed materials from the head-men of
nearby villages. Exchanges of this kind took place primarily at trade feasts in
which groups from the surrounding region were invited to eat, dance and gamble. This was mainly balanced reciprocity in which
headmen were striving to demonstrate their generousity.
Anthropologists contend that the
complexity and stratification in Chumash society was reproduced by a system of
redistribution in which chiefs and members of the elite ‘antap
societies and canoe-owners were able to extract food and other resources from
non-elites. The Chumash trade feasts required chiefs from other villages to
bring substantial amounts of food to the celebrations to help feed the
attendees and to pay the dancers. The feast-holders’ reputation for hospitality
was an important product of these events, but there was also an element of
coercion. For mortuary ceremonies the ‘antap society
allegedly appointed a “poisoner” whose job it was to poison one of the
attending wealthy men from another village in order to motivate the provision
of substantial contributions (Gamble 2008:198). Redistribution was also evident
in the Brotherhood of the Tomol, the craft guild that
both constructed and owned the plank canoes (tomol)
that made it possible to fish in the ocean and to carry out the trade with the
Channel Islands. When a load of fish was brought home, the whole load was taken
to the canoe-owner who then distributed it to his subalterns. So both reciprocity
and redistribution were important parts of the Southern California political
economy.
But what about market exchange? Clarence King (1976) and Lynn Gamble (2008)
contend that market exchange was a significant component of the Chumash
economy. Of course it is easy to suppose that observers from a highly
commercialized economy (ours) might project their own institutional meanings on
to a system that was in reality quite different from their own. The very existence of proto-money suggests
market exchange. But did market exchange really exist in the indigenous Chumash
system, and if it did, was it a significant component of the whole
economy? The archaeological evidence
clearly shows the emergence of the shell bead industry and trade network and
the concentration of production on the Channel Islands. Archaeologists also note that there was a
trend over time toward the increased production of callus beads, in which a
harder and thicker portion of the Olivella shell was
used to produce a distinctive kind of bead with a bump that was easily
perceived when the beads were strung together (Pletka
2004). This bead was perceived as more valuable in the Chumash system.
Figure 2:
Part of the process of making Olivella disk beads
using a stone drill
The standard length of strung beads
was the “ponco” which was two turns of the string
about the wrist and the extended third finger (Gamble 2008:223; see also King
1976:297). Jose Longinos Martinez wrote in 1792: “The
value of the ponco depends on the fineness and color
of the beads, ours being held in the greatest of esteem; it also depends on
their abundance and their price relative to ours” (quoted in Gamble 2006:223).
Martinez is referring to the glass beads introduced by the Spaniards for
purposes of trading with the Chumash as “ours.”
But this quotation implies that different kinds of beads had different
exchange values and this was likely to have been the case before the arrival of
the Spaniards as well. This would explain why the islanders shifted production
from the bead made from the thin part of the shell wall to the thicker callus
beads. It was like printing five dollar bills instead of one dollar bills. Or
at least this is what we would tend to assume.
Gamble specifies what she thinks
would have to be the case if true market exchange were to be present in the
Chumash system: “Were the principles of supply and demand present in Chumash
transactions both within their boundaries and beyond? Were individuals free to
exchange beads for goods that they needed and desired, or was the release of
beads controlled?” (2008:227).
Recall that Polanyi (1957b) conceives of a
market system as one in which average persons can purchase everyday goods and
services. Both King and Gamble claim that this was the case in the Chumash
system, but what is the evidence that they use to support this claim? Gamble mentions “early ethnohistoric
accounts” and then goes on to quote John P. Harrington’s informants such as
Fernando Kitsepawit Librado a VentureÑo Chumash who Harrington befriended in about
1910, more than 100 years after the Chumash system had been radically
transformed by Eurasian epidemic diseases, Franciscan missionization,
the establishment of a Presidio in Santa Barbara, and the founding and
expansion of haciendas that employed the Indians as vacqueros (cowboys). Librado
had worked for a hacienda
in Ventura. Harrington’s latter-day informants provided valuable information
about the Chumash languages, and the stories they told about the old times were
suggestive, but disentangling indigenous versus colonial institutional forms of
economic exchange from the statements of such informants is exceedingly
difficult because the “memory culture” is likely to have gotten distorted by
the institutional structure of the colonial culture.
Of
greater value are the reports of observed behavior by the early explorers and
observers in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Both Gamble and King quote
instances in which Spanish soldiers were able to purchase food and prestige
goods such as carved soapstone bowls from the Chumash using glass beads. These
events support the notion that some market exchange did exist in the in the
Chumash system.
Gambling is mentioned by Jose Longinos Martinez (quoted in Gamble 2006:223) and is an important
activity in Chumash mythology (e.g. Blackburn 1975: 91-3). This may be relevant
to the issue of whether or not protomoney was used by
other than chiefs in both Northern and Southern California. In Northern
California games of chance were an important recreational activity that was
engaged in by the general population during trade feasts. This is relevant for
the question of whether or not proto-money was used for market exchange by
non-chiefs. If it was used for gambling
by non-chiefs it may have also been used at least some of the time for the
purchase of goods and services from non-kin or distant kin.[14]
King (1976:293) quotes Harrington’s
statement from Fernando Librado as follows:
At many of the villages on
the coast of the mainland, as many as half of the population talked the Santa
Cruz Island language. The Santa Cruz Island people lived permanently in
these villages, like permanent colonists. During the time of harvest, when the
acorns, etc. were ripe, many Indians came from the island to the mainland and
went inland to gather the wild fruit.
Librado’s
statement may mean that there were members of the same kin groups residing on
both the islands and the mainland. If this were true much of the
island/mainland exchange could have been sharing or gift-giving among close
kin, like the celebrated “vertical archipelago” in the Andes (Murra 1980). And the practice of direct procurement on the
mainland by islanders also demonstrates another alternative to provisioning
beside either market exchange or balanced reciprocity.
The questions is how significant was
the existence of some market exchange for the whole nature of the social
economy? Unfortunately it is probably impossible to even make an educated guess
about how much of the food and everyday raw materials of average persons were
obtained by means of market exchange.
The contention by Gamble and King that the Chumash system was more
commercialized than was the system in Northern California is quite plausible,
but Gamble also says “I believe that the Chumash in many ways were close to
being a capitalist society despite the fact that they were non-agriculturalists
and lacked a state-level political organization (2008:234). While we are
sympathetic to a broader definition of capitalism than that used by Marx
(commodity production by means of wage labor) we are not willing to stretch the
notion to include the kind of economy that existed in Southern California
before the arrival of the Europeans. Gamble (2006:234-235) use Dalton’s (1965)
distinction between “marketless, ”“market-dominated”
and “peripheral markets “ in which some market exchange and money exist but
they do not constitute a major proportion of the whole of production and
distribution. She adopts the position that the Chumash social economy was an
instance of “peripheral markets.” Gamble
(2006:235) also notes that other anthropologists agree the production of disk
beads by households on the Channel Islands was probably not monitored or
directly controlled by political elites.
Regarding the issue of supply and
demand, we have already mentioned Sahlins’s
discussion of how transportation costs and labor time can play a role in
gift-giving exchanges because a successful performance of hospitality requires
knowledge of the scarcity and labor exerted to produce the goods that are being
given. Both gift-giving and market exchange require knowledge of the relative
value of goods. This can be manifested as the functioning of supply and demand
even in the absence of market exchange.
The existence of even a small degree
of market exchange in Southern California would seem to constitute a major
challenge to the Polanyian substantivist
approach to the evolution of economic institutions in which markets did not
emerge until the state-based political economies of the Iron Age. But
as with the Kultepe tablets discussed below, Polanyi
might have been wrong about the timing and location of the emergence of market
relations, but still right about the general notion that an
important class of human societies do not have markets and that markets
are institutional inventions that emerged under certain conditions. The Kultepe tablets pushed this invention back from the Iron Age
to the Bronze Age. The Chumash may push
it back to complex sedentary foragers of the Stone Age.
If we are right that semiperipheral polities in both Northern and Southern
California were the main specialists in the production of proto-money, what
might have been the forces that brought this to be? Recall that Sahlins’s
(1974:227-30) discussion of primitive money mentions that a standardize medium
of exchange may be useful when ecological differences encourage a lot of
exchange between distant kin or non-kin.
He also mentions the functionality of a durable symbol of value when the
exchange “between coastal in inland people where an exchangeable catch of fish
cannot always be met by complementary inland products “(230). Fish were involved in both
the Pomo/Patwin and the Chumash island/coastal
trades. Islanders specialized in fishing
and the Patwin harvested the huge migratory flows of anadromous fish (salmon and steelhead) in the Sacramento
River. Both cultures dried fish, to make
it more long-lasting as a source of protein, but fresh fish must have also been
an important trade item. Semiperipherality, as
indicated by relatively less population density and less social hierarchy, is
also related to ecological marginality. Hill people are usually poorer than
valley people, and island people are usually poorer than coastal people because
the territories that they inhabit have fewer natural resources that can be used
by humans as food. In order to have something to exchange for needed food items
(vegetable foods in the case of the island Chumash) the semiperipheral
peoples have a greater incentive to spend their labor time producing
proto-money.
But did these semiperipheral
peoples innovate the use of proto-money or did they actively encourage its
wide-spread use in intervillage exchange? The shift
from thin to thick callus bead production may indicate that there was an
element of agential innovation, or at least early implementation, in the case
of the island Chumash. And was there a
similar phenomenon in the earlier shell bead networks that Bennyhoff
and Hughes (1982) found linking Northern California with the western Great
Basin? Archaeological evidence could be
useful for shedding further light on these questions.
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