ABSTRACT
This chapter describes several examples of emerging social complexity in the ancient world that did not result in literate civilizations. The chiefdoms surveyed, from the Pacific Islands and the American Southwest and Southeast, represent a wide range of complexity, which resulted from diverse environmental and cultural circumstances. Inevitably, multilinear cultural evolution has acquired a somewhat step-like association. Factionalism and vicious infighting riddled Tahitian society, as in the chiefdoms that developed far to the north, in the Hawaiian Islands, at about the same time. Polynesian chiefdoms were highly volatile and politically unstable. The chiefdoms of Polynesia were fully as elaborate and hierarchical as those elsewhere in the ancient world. They were based on kin ties and on communal ownership of land. Their chieftains were not despotic monarchs, exercising supreme political, religious, and economic authority, but people who ruled because of their inborn abilities and because of their close ties to their people.
