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that they obtained, the people in these positions of political influence may have had
greater access to more trade partners, making them part of an incipient ranked social
formation in Gabrielino society.

The evidence appears, perhaps, stronger for a more socially egalitarian society based on
extensive kinship networks among a wide-ranging set of communities that traded their
micro-environmentally-based resources. Gabrielino communities perhaps are best
described as having had a social system that was organized as a political heterarchy. In
heterarchical political system, power is distributed along a continuum of actors. Political
decisions cannot be enforced by elders, leaders, religious edicts, or codified legal
systems. Instead of such hierarchical systems of social order, people have to learn to be
good orators, using the power of persuasion in order to influence each other. As such,
various clans of Gabrielinos would have formed their own decisions and their clan
leaders would represent their political selves to other clans.

Despite some assertions of Gabrielino social organization as being a hierarchically-
organized society (Bean and Smith 1978), the contemporary evidence favors the portrait
of pre-colonial Gabrielino society as a fundamentally egalitarian society, one not based
upon hereditary distinctions between elites and commoners. Such a perspective is based
upon linguistic, archaeological, and cultural materials. First, the Gabrielino grammar and
lexicon are structured in such a way that only egalitarian social relationships are
expressed. There are no levels of address or politenss in which the speakers used
honorifics. Second, archaeological sites reveal no long-term storage facilities in which
elites would be able to use delayed-return systems of storage to save wealth for personal
savings or politically-motivated distribution. Further, there are no complex technologies
indicative of stratified societies. Gabrielino material items include feather headdresses,
shell money, awls, baskets, water bottles, flutes and games, multiple types of bows and
arrows, a deer hunting disguise, mats, shelters, dishes, ceremonial bundles, metates and
manos, shoes, dancing sticks, knives, whistles, clothing, beads, rattles, infant cradles and
diapers, canoes, pipes, hair brushes and ornaments, hunting and fishing nets and traps,
string and cordage, and yucca ovens. Even pottery was a storage form not used or made
by Gabrielinos. Perhaps one of the most complex tools was the plank canoe (tii’aat).
Made out of carefully shaped wood, glued together, and finally stitched with vegetal
cordage, canoes enabled Gabrielinos to move into deep waters. Yet these tools and
materials are all manufactured using learned techniques which can be described as
complex. They are difficult to make unless one possesses the knowledge of how to make
them, indicating that Gabrielinos carried their technologies “in the mind” rather than “in
the hand,” as materially complex objects. Easier to transport than granaries, ceremonial
buildings, or heavy non-portable objects which represent “congealed knowledge,”
complex indigenous knowledge remains a defining feature of foraging-based societies.

Finally, looking at evidence from cultural anthropology, as incipient stratification
evolved in the early ethnographic period, circa 1770-1850, different spheres of
stratification emerged. Gabrielino households were drawn into spheres of exchange with
colonial immigrants. Gender stratification, economic stratification, political stratification,
religious stratification, and social stratification all emerged, though at different rates. On
the eve of the ethnographic period, communities increasingly adopted forms of religious
and political stratification, as evidenced by a range of named political offices. There

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