Leader's office

Usage examples of chiefdom.

The Hail Wolf got a chiefdom for his trouble, and Iss drew Blackhail into the war.

What there were were a lot of tiny villages, chiefdoms, kingships, and bands of roving tribes.

The deserts of northern Mexico similarly separated the urban centers of southern Mexico from the chiefdoms of the Mississippi Valley.

That is why chiefdoms devote so much collected tribute to constructing temples and other public works, which serve as centers of the official religion and visible signs of the chief's power.

Other population centers of states outside the capital may also qualify as true cities, which are lacking in chiefdoms.

In addition to that coarse correlation between regional population size and type of society (band, tribe, and so on), there is a finer trend, within each of those categories, between population and societal complexity: for instance, that chiefdoms with large populations prove to be the most centralized, stratified, and complex ones.

Among all those chiefdoms, the ubiquitous problem of devising centralized power structures was solved most successfully by a chief called” Dingiswayo, who gained ascendancy of the Mtetwa chiefdom by killing a rival around 1807.

He also developed superior centralized political organization by abstaining from slaughter as he conquered other chiefdoms, leaving the conquered chief’s family intact, and limiting himself to replacing the conquered chief himself with a relative willing to cooperate with Dingiswayo.

Parts of sub-Saharan Africa were divided among small states or chiefdoms with iron tools.

The most populous and highly organized native societies of North America, the Mississippian chiefdoms, disappeared in that way between 1492 and the late 1600s, even before Europeans themselves made their first settlement on the Mississippi River.

Hence moderate-sized agricultural societies are often organized in chiefdoms, and kingdoms are confined to large agricultural societies.

Some hunter-gatherers in especially rich environments, such as the Pacific Northwest coast of North America and the coast of Ecuador, also developed sedentary societies, food storage, and nascent chiefdoms, but they did not go farther on the road to kingdoms.

They also included Tonga's maritime proto-empire, the Hawaiian state emerging in the late 18th century, all of the states and chiefdoms of subequatorial Africa and sub-Saharan West Africa before the arrival of Islam, and the largest native North American societies, those of the Mississippi Valley and its tributaries.

However, some tribes and even chiefdoms consist of herders who move seasonally.

Similar tribal organization in the past is inferred from archaeological evidence of settlements that were substantial but lacked the archaeological hallmarks of chiefdoms that I shall explain below.