Escuela Superior Politécnica Del Litoral

Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanísticas

Departamento de Arqueología
Orígenes de los Estados Prehispánicos

La sociedad Manteña, ¿estado o cacicazgo?

Introduction
In Ecuador, there is a debate whether the Manteños-Huancavilcas society was a state or
a confederation of cacicazgos. That is why to analyze the question of the title we will
proceed to compare the findings made of this culture with the theory of birth of a state of
Morton Fried which is based on the transit from early forms of social organization
egalitarian to a hierarchical and state society, which occurs in a gradual process of
thousands of years, but whose changes will be radical in the long term.

In addition, the theory proposed by Latin American social archaeology through two of its
exponents will also be considered: L. Bate and Henry Tantaleán. Both mention that for
the formation of a state it is necessary to form and establish an institutionalsystem
imposed by the ruling classes for the disposal of the productive surplus through extractive
mechanisms.

Theoretical framework
Manteño-Huancavilca culture
The Manteño-Huancavilca culture was a state-society that encompassed the provinces of
Esmeraldas (south), Manabí, Los Ríos, Santa Elena, Guayas and El Oro during the
integration period. The archaeologist Emilio Estrada proposed dividing in two the
populations that inhabited the territory of this society, called Manteños those who
inhabited the northern region between Bahia to Salango; and Huancavilcas to those who
resided south of the territory, from Colonche to the Gulf of Guayaquil (Estrada, 1957).
 Figure: Map of the localized Manteño-Huancavilca sites. Source: (Touchard-Houlbert, 2010)

According to Renfrew (1982),for a society to have the level of intesnification necessary

for the appearance of the state it must create or implement innovations, due to the
innovations developed by the Manteño-Huancavilca Society, this has been regarded as a
pristine state in the northern Andes. The main innovations were in the field of navigation
with the construction ofbalsas managed by guaras which allowed its crews to sail the
waters of the Pacific which resulted in the intensification of trade and cultural itnerchange
with other parts of the continent. Other innovations were the modifications of the coastal
mountain ranges to convert them into surplus production centers,the storage of agricultural
surplus in surface or underground silos, social stratification, the specialization of work and
the standardization of tools such as ceramics (Marcos, 2012).
The Manteños-Huancavilcas developed a water collection system which allowed them to
collect water from the coastal mist, which prompted them to modify the hills by building
in them production centers of cultivation terraces. The surplus production obtained by
intensive agriculture,mainly maize, was stored in silos,these could be underground, and in
1
difficult to excavate the surface silos on stone clavas were used. The accumulation of
commodities allowed the Manteños to offer food security to their population and to the
peoples with which they agreed and annexed (Marcos, 2012).

The Manteño-Huancavilca culture is known for its famous chairs in the form of "u" which
have been found only in main political offices of Manabí, such as Cerros de Hojas, Cerro de
Jaboncillo, Agua Blanca, among others. In the latter place, chairs or fragments of its bases
were still "on site" forming part of the perimeter wall of a platform of what appears to have
been a civic building. The distribution h far proposed, its presence restricted to the hills near
Portoviejo and the old site of Calangome (Agua Blanca), would indicate that the power
center of the Manteña-Huancavilca nation was in Manabí. Although several of the elements
of material culture that Estrada (1957, 1962) marked as typical of the Northern Manteños,
have been found in several places in the territory that attributed to the Southern Manteños or
Huancavilcas.

Figure: Chair in the form of "u" of the Manteño-Huancavilca culture. Source: (Mark, 2012).

In 1934, Carlos Zevallos on the hill of Los Santos, northeast of the town of Juntas found
a ceremonial center with a platform of 44 m. in diameter, on its surface found three stone
sculptures: one with a tiger's head, and two with plic representations, a large grinding
stone, and other smaller ones; three circles of cuneiform flat stones buried in tip (similar
to the remains of silos found at the foot of the chanduy hill). Three carved Guasango

1 Zevallos 1934; Mark 1995.

wooden poles were highlighted in this complex ritual, the largest of which was buried at
the top and it was 8.5 m tall, decorated with men's carvings, women separated by the
figures of two alligators while the other two were incomplete and a lower conservation state to
the está major (Zevallos, 1934;; Mark, 2012) .

Figure 1 : Reference image of heraldic poles. Source: (Mark, 2012).

Theoretical analysis

Morton Fried was an American anthropologist evolutionist who in 1960 proposed a

theory about the formation of "primary states" in his work "On the Evolution of Social
and State Stratification". In the work, Fried creates stages a lsthat assigns the first four
letters of the alphabet with theirs respectivestages of organization 2 : Stage . A (equal
organization)), Stage B (hierarchical society), Stage C (stratification society) and
Stage D (statal society). Fried discusses and goes into detail en the things that must
have happened to make possible theseaforementioned transitions by analyzing specific
institutional developments, normal and predictable events in viable societies which
allowsociety toenter a new organizational level and conditions under which these
institutional developments happened..

Thus, the formation of the State would be linked to a social stratification that is built
according to the phases or stages seen above as follows:

2Fried clarifies that it has never been observed that a society has gone through all these stages or transitions, More
Ok, several unrelated societies representing each to those stages.
First of all, there would be a primal egalitarian society in which, while some individuals
could stand out from the rest in terms of prestige (dueto their talents individuales) or
social status, access to this "privileged"” status was not restricted, but that there were as
many prestigious positions (nomatter age and sex)) as people who could occupy “ it,
usually based on physical patterns related to the productive activities that underpinned
the group. That is, those with better physical conditions or with greater qualities as far as
the livelihood of the group is concerned. These groups also form an economy of
reciprocity, in which the distribution of production is limited to the family level. In other
words: families produce and families distribute. There's no specialization.

Over time they will start to highlight authority figures that will end up grabbing
prestigious positionsoto which accesswill start to be increasingly limited,it should
benoted destacar that theseprestigious positions do not increase or decrease despite an
increase in the demographics of the people.

At this stage the status is limited according to the birth order. In simpler societies this
results in birthright or ultimategeniture at the level of the family or lineage. In more
complex ways it can be projected in time, so that only the first child of a first child of a
first child enjoys the rights of succession, while all others have been excluded as last
descendants of an ancestor without a position 3.

The transition from an egalitarian to a hierarchical society is represented by a

redistributive economy that replaces one dominated by reciprocity. For Freid, this
redistributive network may have appeared as a kind of fortuitous social mutation as it
emerged from non-specific factors that are difficult to generalize, such as a great personal
dependence on members of the unit of descent4 with respect to those they have left behind.

Fried resembles hierarchical organization as a triangle which allows it to have an

economic significance, which corresponds to a family distribution network The key status
is that of central collector of contributions, which also deals with the redistribution of
these provisions either in the form of meals or provisions of hay and emergency seeds in
case of need;this can not be considered as economic power of exploitation or genuine

3This principle based on birth can be invalidated by action conscious, that is, the people.
4The members of the unit of descent are created from the tendency of societies to produce to the limit of their
resources having an impact on the demographics of the population which in turn causes unity to reach the cultural
maximum.
political power. This is because the role of the person with the highest status is not to
expropriate or consume, rather, it focuses on gathering and distributing.. that is, the
hierarchical society operates on the principle of differential status for members with
similar abilities, but these statuses are devoid of privileged political or economic power

But a step further will be taken with the replacement of this hierarchical society with a
stratified society, in which social differences are becoming clearer and based on restricted
and privileged access to resources or livelihoods, which in turn will lead to significant
social change and will require some control ofthis new order. Thisis basically what
distinguishes these two transitions because, although in stratified society there is already
a status, it only applies between members with equal skills what undermines that position
of privileged political or economic power.

In addition, the first social control systems that depended heavily on inculturation,
internalized sanctions and ridicule now required formal declaration of their legal
principles, an award organization and a formally constituted authoritarian police. The
emergence of these and other control institutions was associated with the final
replacement of the principal authority of forms of kinship by territorial forms and explains
the evolution of complex forms of governments associated with theState.

For Fried, the stratification of a society goes through access to strategic resources and
can be these of two classes: the first is privileged and unhindered access; the other
depends on sets of licenses that often require the payment of rights, rents or benefits in
work or in kind. The existence of such a distinction allows for the increase of exploitation
to be of a relatively simple nature based on the slavery of day laborers, or of a more
complex type associated with complicated divisions of work and complicated class
systems.

The development of stratification also encourages the emergence of communities made

up of relatives and non-relatives who, all together, operate on the basis of non-kinship
mechanisms. As time passed, in this new stage kinship relations would cease to
articulate society and replace it in its function an adscription to a certain territory. That
is why in this stadium the ties of kinship definitively cease to articulate society, and this
function will be assumed by the adhered to a territory.
It is interesting that Fried proposes an alternative for a hierarchical society to move to a
tiered one, which mentions that a society can become stratified if it comes into contact
with a culture that is in that stage and that has a fully developed or at least more advanced
state organization compared to non-stratified society. One of these influences is the
introduction of a currency (money) for use in commercial and labor transactions. Fried
explains that one of the ways this can happen is when a simple society (from the
organizational point of view) is within the trade routes of two or more advanced societies,
which allows to improve the economy of "primitive" cultures which gives rise to
stratification.

The last phase will come when it is necessary to establish or create a solid power that
controls and guarantees this stratification and social differentiation, a role that the State
will assume, which arises, as a result of the need to defend the privileged status of a few
over the rest of the group.

In the whole process, as we can see, access to resources has a great weight, a determining
factor in stratification and social differentiation that will give rise to the emergence of the
State. This increasingly restricted access would lead to a series of internal struggles and
conflicts that only a strong power could resolve; a power that would be none other than
the state. With it, this egalitarian society is broken in which prestigious positions were
occupied by as many people as they were able to do so and where the distribution of
production rested on kinship ties. From then on, those "privileged" few will be thanks to
the State, which guarantees the new social order.

Therefore, from Fried's theory we can extract that the State is the result of internal conflict
originated by the group itself as it stratified and hierarchical according to its access to
resources. His fundamental role would therefore be to "institutionalize" the social
differences that had been forged throughout the whole process and which have reached a
certain point end up consolidating (Fried, 1967).
References
Bate, L. (2001). Propuesta para la arqueología. Mexico D.F.
Fried, M. (1967). The evolution of political society an essay in political anthropology. New
York: Random House.