PhilPaine.com

Cur­rent inter­ests led me a sec­ond read­ing of this excel­lent his­tory (it’s approach is his­tor­i­cal, not eth­no­log­i­cal) of the Man­dans, Hidat­sa and Arikaras of North and South Dakota.

Schol­ars try­ing to recon­struct the Neolith­ic soci­eties of Europe, espe­cially regard­ing trade, ear­ly agri­cul­tural set­tle­ment, and the move­ment of peo­ple, would prof­it by study­ing the val­ley of the Mis­souri Riv­er. Here we have a mix­ture of first-per­son eye-wit­ness sources and archae­o­log­i­cal data that shows us much about the inter­ac­tion of nomadic and agri­cul­tural peo­ples, which Old-World his­to­ri­ans could learn a lot from, if they both­ered to look. The rel­e­vance to under­stand­ing the Euro­pean Neolith­ic seems to me obvi­ous, but the par­al­lels and exam­ples have not been explored or exploit­ed. Exact­ly why this is, so, I’m not sure. But of par­tic­u­lar rel­e­vance is the detailed knowl­edge we have of Man­dan and Hidat­sa trade: the prod­ucts involved, how they moved, how far, how many peo­ple where involved, and with what eco­nomic con­cepts and process­es. They do not at all resem­ble the pic­ture con­jured up by his­to­ri­ans in the Old World of How Things Must Have Been Done. One can­not prove, of course, that the Euro­pean Neolith­ic farm­ers, hunter-gath­er­ers, and nomads had the same kind of econ­omy as exist­ed in the cen­ter of North Amer­ica in a lat­er peri­od, but the data cer­tainly is rel­e­vant to guess­ing what was like­ly or probable.

The Man­dan and Hidat­sa presided over a net­work of trade that extend­ed over a large por­tion of the con­ti­nent. It was real and explic­it trade, not cer­e­mo­nial gift exchange or the acci­den­tal drift­ing of objects from loca­tion to loca­tion. It was based on mov­ing large quan­ti­ties of food prod­ucts and oth­er util­i­tar­ian goods, aimed at a broad mar­ket, not mere­ly at elites. Pres­tige objects and trin­kets rode on top of this more mun­dane eco­nomic activ­ity. They were not its raison‑d’être. Trad­ing took place through trade fairs draw­ing vis­i­tors and cus­tomers over hun­dreds of kilo­me­ters, and prod­ucts trav­eled over thou­sands of kilo­me­ters by small num­bers of large-scale exchange jumps, not by large num­bers of small ones. Man­dan and Hidat­sa traders man­u­fac­tured and sold goods specif­i­cally for this type of trade, and were well-informed in geog­ra­phy, trade routes, and eco­nomic con­di­tions over a huge area. Entre­pre­neur­ial activ­ity, indi­vid­ual pri­vate prop­erty, invest­ment, import replace­ment, con­tract law, and many oth­er con­cepts that are sup­posed to be “mod­ern” or (even more ridicu­lously) “West­ern”, were all con­cepts well under­stood and prac­ticed in Native Amer­ica, long before any con­tact with Euro­peans. None of these activ­i­ties required the pres­ence of kings or nobil­ity, or of a rigid, hier­ar­chi­cal soci­ety. The Man­dan and Hidat­sa had none of these, though their Upper Mis­souri farm lands was dot­ted with large, well-built towns.

Sure­ly, these facts should give us some­thing to think about when we spec­u­late on how trade and the intro­duc­tion of farm­ing took place in ancient Europe.