Ppl often assume that stone-age cultures must have maintained very simple social organisation, living only in small, nomadic family-tribes. This idea is based in part on actual archaeology, and in part on comparison with modern hunter-gatherers, who largely share this lifestyle. 
(2) The logic here seems straight-forward enough - social complexity is a function of resource availability & economic complexity. Hunter-gatherers can only gather small amounts of food, and so can only support small populations. Furthermore, they have to keep moving restock game
(3) The main issue with this conception is that it is wrong.
Most modern-day hunter-gatherers inhabit extremely marginal land - their inability to form and feed complex social structures is just as much a consequence of the land they inhabit as it is of their lifestyle.
Most modern-day hunter-gatherers inhabit extremely marginal land - their inability to form and feed complex social structures is just as much a consequence of the land they inhabit as it is of their lifestyle.
(4) This, in turn, is a consequence of the systematic expulsion of hunter-gatherers from more fertile, desirable land by farming peoples, which has been ongoing for millennia.
Most hunter-gatherers for most of history have inhabited substantially better land.
Most hunter-gatherers for most of history have inhabited substantially better land.
(5) Enter the Calusa. Pre-Columbian inhabitants of what is now southern Florida, the Calusa were a powerful, comparatively centralised kingdom, ruled from their capital of Mound Key near what is now the town of Estero. They were also entirely non-agricultural.
(6) The Calusa defy nearly all our stereotypes about hunter-gatherer peoples. They were socially organised, highly hierarchal, builders of monumental structures and with a unified monarchy and institutional priesthood. All of this maintained almost entirely by fishing.
(7) Well, you may say, surely we would expect substantial archaeological evidence if comparable societies existed in the Palaeolithic?
The answer here, again, is to look at the Calusa. Their kingdom collapsed a scant 300 years ago, yet nearly all material evidence has vanished.
The answer here, again, is to look at the Calusa. Their kingdom collapsed a scant 300 years ago, yet nearly all material evidence has vanished.
(8) Were we not to know of Mound Key, nor the historical reports by early Spanish travelers, what little came down to us of material artifacts - stone spearheads, fishing-instruments, moss skirts - would paint an incredibly simple material culture. Yet they built megastructures.
(9) What, then, if anything, does this tell us about the Stone Age? Should we envision ice-age kingdoms, organised around artificial islands and mounds by estuaries and lakesides? Maybe. Probably most tribes really were socially simple, but all? It cannot be taken for granted.
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