Conny Waters - AncientPages.com - Ancient ruins and artifacts in Borgatta, located in the Argentinean Andes reveal pre-Inca societies lacked hierarchical leadership before the Inca Empire claimed the region.
Borgatta was built in the tenth century. It grew to a community of several hundred residential compounds before being abandoned around 1450 when the Incas arrived. People who lived there established a settlement built on power sharing and decentralized networks.
Credit: University of Cambridge
This is quite fascinating because at a big site like this one, archaeologists expected to find evidence of leaders, of rich and poor – as in our own society, but uncovered artifacts reveal little social differentiation.
“We thought we’d see socio-economic differences reflected in diet through remains of animal bones, or in dwelling locations, or in material accumulation,” Dr Elizabeth DeMarrais from the University of Cambridge says.
Archaeologists found evidence of craft production occurring across the entire settlement. But no specialists could be identified: no equivalent of a blacksmith’s workshop, or a dedicated weaver or a kiln technician. And no wealthy elites with stockpiles of luxury goods. Yet things were being made in most houses in town – things that defied easy classification.
“Think of the feather cloaks of Hawaiian chiefs, or the swords of Bronze Age warriors,” adds DeMarrais. “These were objects of wealth and power, commissioned from specialist technicians for elites who controlled production and often also trade. This commodification is typical in hierarchical societies.
“In Borgatta, however, we found evidence of nonspecialist ‘multicrafting’ right across the community: with each household using expedient bone and stone toolkits to create a range of objects – from baskets to cooking pots, spindle whorls to wooden bowls – in their own idiosyncratic styles.”
It appears that each household produced its own items, creating a society very different from ours; a society based on individual relationships rather than one defined by social hierarchies.
People in Borgatta depended upon “a different kind of social glue” – one based on individual relationships, rather than ordered by social rank.
Urns taken from the Borgatta site on display at the Museo Arqueológico de Cachi in Argentina. Credit: Museo Arqueológico de Cachi
"Objects were gifted on a personal basis to build connections, rather than being funnelled up to a leader who represented the group." DeMarrais describes this was a 'heterarchy' – a society made up of decentralised networks and power sharing.
"Heterarchy was described in the 1940s as a means of understanding the structure of the human brain: ordered, but not hierarchically organised. In a human society, it highlights a structure where different individuals may take precedence in key activities – religion, trade, politics – but there is a fluidity to power relations that resists top-down rule. One can think of it as a form of confederacy."
Scientists also discovered that clay urns with painted motifs showing serpents, frogs and birds, as well as human facial features contained the skeletal remains of young infants.
Infant urn - Credit: University of Cambridge
The urns were buried under the floors of houses. DeMarrais suggests that the funeral rites of babies involved displaying urns in the community as part of an extended process of mourning, before they were returned to the residences.
Some urns had the rim extending above the floor, to allow ongoing access to the contents. “In the Andes, mortuary practices involved extended interaction with remains that sustained a sense of connection between the living and the dead.”
The decorated urns were the most striking pieces of material culture excavated at Borgatta. Adults were simply buried in groups of three or four outside the home, while other children were interred in old cooking pots called ‘ollas’.
Why were the burial vessels of certain infants so distinctive? “The emotions around such premature loss may have been intense. But emotion is also culturally constructed. Would our grief be the same as their grief?” asks DeMarrais.
“These urns may have been intended to evoke emotions. In the absence of centralized authority, we would expect that rituals involving display of objects and the inculcation of shared emotions were an important means of social cohesion.”
When the Incas entered Borgatta, the settlement was abandoned and the situation changed.
Written by Conny Waters - AncientPages.com Staff Writer
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