Content area
Abstract
Marital alliance theory provides general categories of kinship systems based on shared types of groups and marriage rules that are meaningful to political economy and social processes. Marriage alliance systems not only reproduce social structure but also regulate the exchange of people among groups; structure ceremonial organization, related surplus production, and exchange; and produce different forms of social ranking. The dissertation illustrates how a marital alliance perspective may explain political economies and social transformations in prehistory. The dissertation focuses on Crow-Omaha alliances and, to a lesser degree, on “complex” alliances.
Specific group composition, marital exchanges, ceremonial organization, surplus production, and exchange are structured by the Crow-Omaha marriage system. The Crow-Omaha marital system also is found to have an internal demographic process that leads to crises in group exogamy. Ceremonially prominent clans grow disproportionately large until there are not enough members in other clans with which to intermarry. Disproportionately large exogamous groups may fission or alter their marriage system, which may change social structure and political economy. Empirical data on nineteenth century marriages among the Omaha are used to confirm adherence to the Crow-Omaha marital alliance system and to document the internal social process leading to crises in exogamy.
An ethnographic survey of 62 Native North American societies is used to define archaeological correlates of Crow-Omaha and complex marital alliances. Using multiple lines of evidence, the Hohokam of south-central Arizona, the Archaic period cultures of the Lower Mississippi Valley, and the Taíno of the Greater Antilles are argued to have shared Crow-Omaha alliance systems and political economies. Each of these societies experienced the internal social process leading to disproportionate clan growth. The marital alliance perspective is used to explain dramatic social changes among the Hohokam, the emergence and disappearance of mound-building among early hunter-gatherer cultures in the Lower Mississippi Valley, and the development of chiefdoms among the Caribbean Taíno. All are argued to have experienced crises in exogamy but different responses to crises with different transformational outcomes are demonstrated.
