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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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chapotraphouse
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The one I know about off-hand are the Chumash people of California. They had complex social hierarchies throughout the possibly thousands of years they spent as hunter-gatherers, and most of it had to do with control over labor specialization by their elites. They would regularly move around their territory, sometimes going more inland, sometimes more on the coast, and sometimes on the nearby North Channel islands, all of that depending on tides. And so their hereditary elites were usually the ones who knew the land and when the tides were due to change, so they're the ones who'd direct productive labor.
Most of their social hierarchy was hereditary, although they at times had legit cult-like secret societies that would influence whoever the hereditary chiefs were. I'm an amateur at anthropology, but it seems to me like the Chumash had such a stratified social hierarchy due to their relatively complicated production. They had much more advanced boats than most other indigenous Americans, so advanced they'd navigate dozens of miles out into the Pacific ocean. Their boats were so good they'd even regularly go whale hunting (image of a modern version of a Chumash boat) . They had rock quarries and complex basket weaving as well. They had a rudimentary currency based around carved beads or bones, and even contingencies against counterfeiting because their beads were made using a specific kind of drill bit.
A vulgar way of describing it is they somehow had some kind of vague feudal mercantilism while still existing as a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer society. The Chumash are really interesting and I'd suggest reading about them.
That is definitely interesting. I'll have to give them a look. That does sound significantly more nomadic than hunter gatherer though.