Territories without states: mobility, collective labour and inequality in hunting-and-gathering societies

1. Mobility is a portfolio of strategies, not a stage of development

“Nomadic” conceals several different movements. Residential mobility relocates a household or camp. Logistical mobility sends small parties to fish, hunt, collect plants, quarry stone or visit allied communities while others remain behind. Seasonal aggregation assembles a wider network for ceremonies, marriage arrangements, resource harvests or exchange; subsequent dispersal redistributes people over larger territories. A society may combine all three, including periods of relatively stable residence. Neither its population size nor its institutions can be inferred from the label “mobile.” [1][3]

Movement balances costs. Leaving a camp means carrying children, tools and possessions; it can abandon stored food and investments in shelter. Remaining means traveling increasing distances to depleted nearby resources and bearing the risk of a local failure. A mobile household may sacrifice the capacity to accumulate heavy objects while retaining the economically valuable option to access distant land. A sedentary household can invest in durable facilities and concentrated processing, but may become dependent on particular harvests, storage technology and rights enforceable at fixed locations.

Mobility is also political. When people can realistically leave with relatives or join other camps, would-be leaders face a limit on demands. But exit is not free: access elsewhere may require kinship, language, trust, permission and adequate resources. Social networks, therefore, are not optional “cultural decoration”; they influence whether migration can function as protection against scarcity or coercion. A law of automatic freedom through movement would be as unwarranted as a law of automatic domination through settlement.

2. Territory is a bundle of rights, not simply a closed border

Territoriality can mean recognition of ancestral connection, particular harvesting grounds, paths and water sources, recurrent camping places, obligations of stewardship, permission to invite visitors and powers to exclude certain outsiders. These rights need not belong to the same person or group; they may change by season, ritual context and relationships. Ethnographic synthesis records extensive variation in how land boundaries are acknowledged and how relatives and affines secure reciprocal access. Zedeño and Anderson accordingly treat territory formation as a political process of using and maintaining places, not only fencing off land. [1][7]

Foraging territories can overlap. One group may return to a favored dry-season water point while another has access through marriage and hosting arrangements. A ritual site can carry obligations distinct from nearby fishing grounds. A landscape containing multiple meanings cannot be modeled accurately by coloring contiguous polygons on a map and attributing exclusive sovereignty to each. What looks like an “unowned” corridor in a colonial cadastral survey may in fact sustain dense rights of passage, visitation, naming, memory and seasonal use.

The central political-economic mechanism is access under uncertainty. A tightly defended grove or salmon station can protect the return to investments in processing and storage; it can also prevent hungry outsiders from obtaining food. Reciprocal passage rules can reduce risk among groups whose harvests fail at different times, but depend on enforceable expectations. Territorial rights thus regulate production, distribution and mobility simultaneously. Neither exclusive private ownership nor wholly unrestricted commons is an acceptable universal default.

3. Residential groups are not equivalent to entire societies

An influential study of 32 contemporary foraging societies, covering 5,067 individuals, found an average experienced residential group of 28.2 adults in its sample. Many co-residents were not close genetic relatives; both sexes could remain or disperse. These are measured properties of the sampled societies, not a prehistoric demographic series or a fixed natural size for all groups. Later research stresses that the camp is a residential unit within wider social networks, and that even the apparent “society” can be an inappropriate boundary for understanding interactions. [4][5]

Small-scale residence and large-scale social organization coexist. People can know spouses, exchange partners, ceremonial collaborators and reliable hosts beyond any single camp. The network may be periodically activated when a household experiences illness or a food shortfall. Marriages connect groups, but the relationship is not reducible to genetic kinship; friendship, reputation, obligations and remembered gifts can also cross residential divisions. [5][6]

The distinction changes how archaeologists interpret a group of hearths. A few simultaneously occupied shelters cannot by themselves establish the total population served by a quarry, ceremony or trading system. Conversely, a large ceremonial site could attract temporary visitors rather than constituting a year-round capital. The social scale of coordination is not identical to the number of beds visible in one excavation trench.

4. Food sharing, storage and the economics of risk

Sharing and storing are alternative and complementary responses to unpredictable harvests. Storage shifts resources through time: it requires suitable food, containers, protection from pests and labor, and rules governing future access. Sharing shifts resources across people and places: it requires relationships and some expectation that those in need will be supported. A community can store fish in one season and support visitors through reciprocal obligations in another. Neither mechanism is automatically egalitarian; a store can be collectively governed or appropriated by a powerful household.

The form of resource matters. A rapidly spoiling large catch may encourage immediate distribution or intensive drying. A concentrated run of fish can permit long-term storage, residential permanence and the ability to restrict access to productive sites. Highly dispersed and unstable resources may instead favor flexible travel and reciprocal hospitality. Smith and Codding's comparison of Northwest Coast and Native California societies found particularly strong support for an explanation centered on subgroup control of dense, predictable and concentrated resources, rather than a simple rule that more food inevitably creates class hierarchy. Their conclusion concerns the studied regions and competing hypotheses, not a universal law of the Stone Age. [8]

Storage adds a political question absent from aggregate food-production statistics: who decides whether others can withdraw an inventory? A stored surplus can insure children during bad weather, finance ceremonies, sustain workers constructing public facilities or create leverage over debtors and dependents. Observing storage installations alone cannot establish which of those uses predominated. Institutions mediate the transition from physical stock to social power.

5. The Ju/'hoansi: wealth held in relationships as much as objects

Among Ju/'hoansi communities of southern Africa, the hxaro institution of deferred gift exchange supported relationships through which people could obtain alternate residence, assistance and access to resources. It was not a cash market in which the price of a gift settled an immediate debt. Long-term obligations, remembered exchanges and visiting possibilities mattered because environmental and household shocks did not strike every partner identically. Wiessner's historical analysis shows both the former reach of these networks and their reorganization under cash income, sedentism, fences and other changes in the 20th and 21st centuries. [9]

In the reported 1974 comparison, Ju/'hoansi maintained on average about 15 hxaro partners, while 69% of their possessions had been received as hxaro gifts. By 2018, employment, purchased objects and more permanent settlement were associated with profound changes in the distribution of gifts. In that specific study, the share of gifts from distant or unrelated donors fell from 23% in 1974 to 1% in 2018. These are documented modern ethnographic observations, not measurements of prehistoric behavior. The denominators also refer to observed gifts in distinct samples and dates, not a constant population. [9]

Network contraction did not simply mean “loss of tradition.” Some people gained wages and purchased goods; others lost access to the intergroup insurance provided by long-distance partnership. Property accumulation and protection against resource failure thus became differently distributed. A modern transition in this case is instructive precisely because it cannot be read backwards as a faithful documentary record of Paleolithic institutions.

6. Settlement, cash and the changing geography of reciprocity

The same longitudinal investigation reported that 187 of 538 gifts (35%) came from within the village in 1974, compared with 608 of 1,337 gifts (45%) in 2018. The shares are measured for different collections of gifts, not necessarily identical individuals. Their rise is consistent with exchanges becoming geographically more local even as cash purchases expanded. The fall in distant or unrelated donors and increased local gifting reflect different dimensions of the same reorganization. Neither figure measures absolute generosity, household welfare or the share of money in total economic output. [9]

Settlement can make distant reciprocity less practical if local wild resources are depleted and visitors cannot contribute to a host's subsistence. Regular wages can also allow a family to buy goods without activating faraway obligations. Yet dependence on cash carries distinct risks: lost employment, price inflation, unequal access to shops or transport, and legal constraints on moving across fenced or state-controlled land. It would be wrong to assume that one form of security replaces another without costs.

A political economy of these changes asks who gained mobility and who lost it. Better roads may increase access for wage earners but property boundaries may close paths formerly available to visitors. Increased average possessions might accompany weaker help in a distant emergency. The distribution of options—rather than the simple stock of household objects—is decisive.

7. The Hadza: shifting camps and cooperation beyond relatives

Research on Hadza social networks in Tanzania found structural features including reciprocity, clustering and geographic decay; cooperative behavior was patterned in those networks. This evidence supports the existence of extended relationships relevant to helping, learning and movement. It does not mean Hadza society is a living Paleolithic museum or that cooperation is biologically predetermined by proximity. The specific sampling period and circumstances must remain visible when drawing comparisons. [6]

Flexible residence affects both households and collective action. A dispute may lead individuals to seek another camp; access depends on hospitality and social credibility. When successful foraging produces more food than a household can use or preserve, sharing can reinforce relations. When local food is insufficient, the same relations can facilitate relocation or assistance. These are plausible mechanisms supported by ethnographic evidence, but the direction and strength of effects vary with obligations and resource conditions.

Descriptions of foragers as invariably living among immediate biological kin obscure such relationships. Their networks can transmit information over distances larger than a residential group could cover in a single day's travel. That capacity can support technological learning and coordination in ways that do not require a permanent ruling class.

8. The Northwest Coast: fishing societies with durable inequality

The North American Northwest Coast provides a sharp contrast to models of universally mobile and egalitarian foragers. Historic Indigenous fishing societies had substantial fixed or seasonally permanent settlements, storage, sophisticated watercraft, resource rights and, in many cases, hereditary rank and slavery. Ecological abundance is not a sufficient explanation on its own. The ability of particular descent groups or households to control highly productive and concentrated harvest locations shaped dependence and bargaining. Warfare, marriage, ritual obligations and intergroup exchange interacted with those economic foundations. [8][10]

It is essential not to describe these societies as timeless “prehistoric tribes.” Ethnographic records were shaped by commercial contact, colonization, disease, land appropriation and state intervention. Specific Coast peoples also differed from one another; their institutions cannot all be reduced to one salmon model. Research on the potlatch and competitive feasting shows how ritual can redistribute goods and publicly negotiate standing and obligations, but celebratory display must be placed alongside the coercive experiences of enslaved people and commoners. [10]

Comparison with more mobile foragers does not produce a moral ranking. Durable housing and storage can protect people against seasonality; the same assets can enable appropriation of labor. The mechanism under review is not “fish causes aristocracy,” but the historically contingent relation between a controllable resource, institutions of exclusion, accumulated stocks and political enforcement.

9. Jōmon Japan: complex settlements without a universal ascent to farming

Japanese Jōmon archaeology documents millennia of foraging, fishing, pottery and varied settlement arrangements. At Sannai Maruyama, broadly dated to 3900–2300 BCE in Habu's study, settlement history shows expansion, changes in tool assemblages and eventual contraction rather than uninterrupted growth toward ever greater complexity. The presence of houses, storage features, pottery and organized ritual spaces does not justify projecting a centralized state onto the village. [11][12]

Regional ecology shaped subsistence: forest nuts, terrestrial animals and coastal resources made different production portfolios possible. Pottery could improve processing, preparation and storage while increasing the cost of movement with heavy possessions. The decision to remain in one location could therefore be economically attractive even without domesticated cereal agriculture as the dominant production base. But occupation intensity is not automatically an index of prosperity. Longer residence can accompany resource pressure, changes in demographic structure or dependence on specific harvests.

The temporal lesson is important. A society can intensify settlement and later disperse; increase investment in buildings while reducing population; expand exchange without creating a state. Habu's reconstruction directly challenges the assumption that complexity must rise monotonically. [11]

10. Natufian communities: reduced mobility before full domestication

The Levantine Natufian tradition, roughly 15,000–11,700 calibrated years before present, provides archaeological evidence of substantial occupation, durable buildings and intensive use of diverse wild resources. Recent microscopic wear analysis of sickle blades from el-Wad Terrace and Salibiya I was interpreted as evidence of organized harvesting of wild cereals, and possibly forms of cultivation well before fully domesticated crops. These are claims grounded in tool wear and experimental comparisons; they do not collapse all Natufian communities into an early farming society. [13][14]

A nearby but later transitional example illustrates the value and the danger of chronological precision. Granaries at Dhra', in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A around 11,500–10,500 calibrated years BP, demonstrate substantial storage before clear fully domesticated plant agriculture in that context. Dhra' is not simply a Natufian village and must not be used as evidence that every mobile Paleolithic group built permanent granaries. Its relevance is to the sequence of evolving relationships among cultivation, storage and settlement. [15]

These developments were reversible and uneven. Research on Natufian mobility argues that deterioration in Younger Dryas conditions coincided with adjustments in residential organization and resource pressure; competing archaeological interpretations address the magnitude and timing of these changes. It is not enough to say climate forced agriculture. Some groups moved more rather than planting more, and the timing of domestication varied among communities. [16]

11. Poverty Point: monumental collective labor without a farming state

At Poverty Point in what is now Louisiana, the North American Late Archaic archaeological complex dates to approximately 3,700–3,100 BP, or roughly 1700–1100 BCE. Its mounds, concentric ridges and plaza were built by a hunter-fisher-gatherer society. UNESCO documents an outer earthwork diameter of about 1.14 kilometres and the use of raw materials obtained across extensive networks. The setting combined access to the Mississippi valley's resources with a need to import suitable stone. [17]

The engineering achievement establishes coordination of substantial labor, landscape design and access to extra-local materials. It does not, by itself, identify a monarch, a hereditary bureaucracy, the exact number of workers, a compulsory tax system or a universal class structure. Archaeologists continue to distinguish continuous residence from episodic ceremonial aggregation; a monumental center might combine functions over time. The absence of agriculture as the principal subsistence mode cannot be taken to mean absence of complex politics.

Poverty Point is therefore a test case for collective-action theories. Large projects can be motivated by ritual, identity, reciprocal obligations, competition, exchange gatherings or political pressure in changing proportions. Comparative research on large-scale forager cooperation documents shared investments and institutions beyond residential camps, without resolving which of those incentives operated at Poverty Point. Excavation, construction sequences, residential traces and material provenance can constrain these hypotheses. [22] Monumentality alone does not settle which institution authorized the labor.

12. Northern maritime societies: technology, seasonality and cooperation

Arctic and subarctic maritime societies make the scarcity-abundance dichotomy too crude. Hunting large marine mammals can be dangerous, seasonally concentrated and technologically demanding. Collective boats, specialized knowledge, preservation and allocation rights can help manage a harvest whose timing and size are uncertain. Research on Late Western Thule and precontact Iñupiat northern Alaska discusses semi-subterranean houses, whale-hunting maritime adaptations, inland settlements, trade, status and the distinct effects of later contact. [18]

One settlement can exploit several ecological zones through different seasonal parties. Food sharing can reduce individual risk while rights to boats, hunting positions or processing facilities may generate hierarchy. High-value resources need not be “easy” resources: technological requirements and the organization of labor influence who can participate and who can claim a share. Without evidence for particular eras and locations, these arrangements cannot be treated as identical to those of all Arctic peoples.

The case reinforces a comparison already visible on the Northwest Coast. Concentrated harvests, preservation and collective procurement may support dense social systems without a cereal-farming base. Political outcomes nevertheless depend on law, kinship, custom, bargaining and historical disruption as much as ecology.

13. Territory as stewardship: Indigenous Australian Country and fire

In many Indigenous Australian contexts, Country denotes relations to land, ancestors, water, plants, animals and obligations of care. These relationships cannot be translated without remainder into the modern distinction between privately owned acreage and state-owned public land. They are socially and legally specific and continue to exist within contemporary struggles over sovereignty, recognition and environmental governance.

Ethnographic work in Cape York shows that traditional owners, pastoral leaseholders and park managers may employ different fire practices and understand their effects differently. Comparative reviews of pre-European fire regimes likewise caution against attributing every ecological change to a single human-burning process rather than considering climate, vegetation and regional histories. Present-day cultural burning is valuable evidence of continuing knowledge and governance, not a license to attribute one uniform practice to all peoples of ancient Sahul. [19][20]

Here territory is maintained partly through action: knowledge about when to burn, routes, ceremonial responsibilities, access protocols and ecological monitoring. Power can reside in recognized authority to interpret and fulfill obligations rather than only in excluding outsiders. The political and productive consequences are measurable in specific contexts, but an exhaustive claim about 50,000 years of unchanging management would exceed the evidence.

14. Children, care, gender and social reproduction

Foraging societies reproduce themselves through more than the acquisition of calories. Children learn routes, handling of tools, animals, plants and social obligations; adults provide care during periods in which dependents cannot provision themselves. Archaeological review finds evidence of children's involvement in tool use, play, art and learning, with substantial regional variability. This undermines a reconstruction in which a supposedly universal adult male hunting role represents the whole economy. [21]

Gendered task distributions exist in studied societies but are not identical across periods and ecologies. Fishing gear, plant processing, tool preparation, childcare, hunting and social diplomacy can be organized differently. The archaeological visibility of a weapon or storage structure does not identify its maker's sex, legal authority or household control. Political economy requires attention to who bore the costs of mobility: carrying children, maintaining intergroup relations and providing care can decisively influence when a community moves.

A household's apparent wealth cannot be assessed only through stored objects. Its practical security also depends on the availability of caregivers, trustworthy neighbors, refuge and knowledge. Treating unpaid work or reciprocal obligations as economically irrelevant simply because no wage was recorded would erase much of the organization that made mobility possible.

15. Conflict, exit, and coercion without a centralized state

There is no basis for describing all foragers as either permanently peaceful or perpetually violent. Territory can be defended, rights contested and obligations enforced. Cooperation in large-group hunting or ceremonies can coexist with raids, exclusion and interpersonal coercion. The existence of collective action tells us little about the legitimacy or equality of all decisions made by its participants. [2][3]

The capacity to exit may discipline local leaders, but coercion can persist through control of family ties, access to water, debts, reputation or protection. Conversely, customary rights can limit domination without formal courts. Conflict and reconciliation may involve different coalitions at different scales. For archaeological interpretation, trauma, settlement relocation, defensive works and disrupted exchange should be dated and contextualized before being attributed to a war between named “tribes.”

A state is one institutional solution to coordinating coercion and public works, not the definition of politics itself. Groups may impose norms, adjudicate disputes and organize expensive communal activities while lacking permanent taxation or a specialized administrative class. The evidence for such activities is uneven, and analogies from the ethnographic present cannot fill all gaps in deep prehistory.

16. Comparative evidence and discriminating predictions

This comparative model is falsifiable. If concentrated, storable resources are a principal driver of inherited rank, comparable communities with weaker control over harvest locations should often have less institutionalized hierarchy after accounting for history, demography and violence. Where they do not, the model must incorporate alternatives such as warfare, ideology, external trade or prior inequality. If seasonal mobility fosters exit-based constraints, restricted access to neighboring camps should weaken that mechanism. These expectations should be tested within historically connected regions rather than across arbitrary, non-comparable cases.

17. Distinguishing archaeology, ethnography and historical change

A comparison spanning the Paleolithic, terminal Pleistocene, Holocene and historical ethnography must not suggest that all cases were contemporaneous. The Ju/'hoansi chart depicts change between 1974 and 2018; it is not a chart of prehistoric gift shares. Poverty Point's chronology is in BP, measured relative to the conventional 1950 reference, while some Natufian dates are calibrated BP. Sannai Maruyama dates are expressed in BCE. Conversion without tracking calibration and uncertainty would create false precision.

Archaeology is strongest where objects, buildings, dated deposits and material provenance persist. Ethnography can document conversations, rules and exchanges unavailable through excavation, but its present is a product of history, contact, coercion and policy. Historical accounts can name institutions but may overrepresent elites and colonial observers. No source class should silently replace the other.

18. Beyond the false choice between wandering and civilization

The contrast among flexible Ju/'hoansi visiting networks, ranked Northwest Coast fishing communities, Jōmon settlements and Poverty Point's monumental works makes a binary distinction between “nomadic simplicity” and “sedentary civilization” untenable. Mobility is an economic strategy, not an absence of organization. Territories are political relations as well as places. Storage can insure people or make them dependent. Collective labor can create public goods without demonstrating a state. Trade and gifting can bridge very large social distances without requiring coinage or bureaucratic borders.

The most defensible historical explanation is conditional. A society's political possibilities depend on how resources are distributed across time and space; whether technology makes them harvestable and storable; whether households can leave or secure alternative access; and whether social norms permit particular groups to control surplus and labor. Geography constrains these choices but does not dictate them. The same river valley can support exchanges, conflict, or collective construction at different times.

The following stage of the historical series—multiple Neolithic transformations—must therefore examine not the supposed creation of organized society, but the reconfiguration of existing institutions as cultivation, animal domestication and larger fixed stores changed work, disease exposure, reproduction, control of land and the costs of leaving.

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