Introduction

Between 1600 and 1800, in eastern Africa's Great Lakes region, the states of Bunyoro-Kitara and Buganda formed and began to export their bureaucratic, militaristic, and religious hegemony to neighboring societies. They did so with little or no connection to intercontinental or maritime trading systems. They did so in wet, dry, highland, and lakeshore environments. They did so using metals, cattle, bananas, grains, fishing, and hunting, in varying combinations, as their technological and agricultural bases. But they also did so with less visible resources, with funds of meaning and concepts of power and with sometimes abstract units of social organization. This essay will argue that the history of these visible and invisible roots of these two states between the Great Lakes reveals that any sort of evolutionist model for state formation must take these factors into account.

Exploring these issues begins with the evidence from Great Lakes societies which diagnoses their own analytical categories for social life. If scholars choose to settle on chiefdoms as important units of study they must understand their importance to those who lived in them. Such a condition highlights the necessity of interdisciplinary scholarship. Archaeologists, comparative linguists, and comparative ethnographers generate information on the varieties of chiefdoms and, more importantly, these scholars may suggest what other sorts of social and material relations – family structure and gender – may be implicated in the development of chiefdoms. For historical linguists, such data emerge from the comparative study of retention and innovation in the vocabulary (material and lexical) of power, settlements, social relationships, and gendered identities (see Appendix). But only careful survey and excavation by archaeologists will confirm these sequences of innovation and reproduced continuity.