Larger boats, longer voyages, and powerful leaders : comparing Maritime Modes of Production in Scandinavia and California

Island and coastal societies around the world followed several unique developmental pathways that allowed for the formation of economically and politically complex systems. In this paper we argue that marine resources allow levels of intensification comparable to that of terrestrially focused societies, while seaworthy boats amplified the ability of emergent leaders to trade and raid over long distances. Many of these factors are summarized in the Maritime Mode of Production (MMP), a model which explains the development of decentralized chiefdoms in Scandinavia through the nexus of mobile wealth, advanced boat technology, and maritime trading and raiding. These characteristics are shared by other early maritime societies such as those in British Columbia and North-east Asia, suggesting that the MMP may have wide cross-cultural applicability as a pathway towards social complexity. By using the MMP to help explain the development of social complexity in another well-documented maritime society, the Chumash of southern California, we argue that innovation in watercraft technology combined with the ownership of boats by emergent elites led to a powerful positive feedback system which propelled the formation of maritime chiefdoms along similar trajectories to those hypothesised for Bronze Age Scandinavia. We use this comparison as a springboard to evaluate the applicability of the MMP as a comparative model for the development of social complexity in maritime societies around the world and suggest promising areas for future research.