This book is basically about power-how people came to acquire it and the implications that contrasting paths to power had for the development of societies. Earl

Offers a new framework for understanding the transformation of the Native American South during the first centuries of the colonial era.

These eleven case studies of different chiefdoms examine how ruling elites retain and legitimize their power.

Hispaniola examines the early years of the contact period in the Caribbean and in narrative form reconstructs the social and political organization of the Ta&ia

In recent decades anthropology, especially ethnography, has supplied the prevailing models of how human beings have constructed, and been constructed by, their