ABSTRACT
Anthropologists seeking to understand the development of civilizations have focused on the earliest complex societies. These arose in arid river valleys and basins in both the Old World and the New with the emergence of progressively larger and more nucleated regional systems. The hierarchical societies which developed outside — and often in interaction with — these established centres have been attributed to entrepreneurs, missionaries, conquerors or undefined influences from the centres. Some researchers have proposed explanations of such developments using the same variables called upon to explain the primary examples: changes in population, subsistence, exchange, warfare or ideology. Such secondary or tertiary developments are deserving of more careful consideration, for any general explanation of the development of complex cultural systems should subsume cases arising under many different conditions. Perhaps the most striking contrasts with the nucleated primary civilizations are the dispersed archipelagic civilizations whose elements — scattered on islands in the world's seas or on oases in its deserts — are some of the smallest known hierarchical polities. The early polities of the southwestern Indian Ocean are an interesting nexus to consider, not simply because they are increasingly well understood, but because they are often explained solely in terms of the stimulus of outside entrepreneurs or missionaries. Let us consider, within the limits of presently available data, a wide range of both local and external factors which could have affected the development of these Indian Ocean polities.
