Why Do Philosophers Talk so Much and Read so Little About the Stone Age?

False factual claims in appropriation-based property theory

Karl Widerquist
Visiting Associate Professor, Georgetown University-Qatar
Karl@Widerquist.com
Word Count: 9,523

NOTE: Self-citations in this article refer to: Karl Widerquist A Dilemma for Libertarianism,
Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 8, No. 1, February 2009, pp. 43-72.

Introduction
Political philosophers often talk about the Stone Age. They tell stories about the state of
nature, the origin of government, and the appropriation of property, all of which occurred in
prehistory, but they seldom refer to evidence of what actually happened in the Stone or Bronze
Ages. Political philosophy (or political theory)1 is not an empirical discipline, but it cannot be
unconcerned with the truth of factual claims. On many issues, philosophers are very good about
treating truth claims appropriately. For example, the philosophical debate on the ethics of global
warming is well informed by primary research. But when it comes to the Stone Age, many
philosophers make (and seem willing to accept) broad pronouncements with little or no
supporting evidence.
Perhaps they believe their claims are obviously true. If so, they must be prepared to back
them up if they turn out to be controversial. Perhaps they only intend to examine the
ramifications of controversial factual claims without researching them. If so, they must admit
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that their conclusions are tentative. Perhaps they believe fact checking is the job of another
discipline. Unfortunately, there are no empirical researchers trolling through philosophical
journals looking for claims to investigate. If we neglect to do so much as read the relevant
empirical literature, we are in danger of passing on false claims year-after-year or century-aftercentury.
Perhaps philosophers believe their claims are metaphors illustrating a deeper, underlying,
purely normative argument. If so, they should state it explicitly. Readers should not have the
burden of constructing argument out of metaphor. At the very least, philosophers should be clear
about whether a factual statements is unsupported because it is a metaphor, or because they
believe it is an obvious truth. Yet, when the claim involves prehistory, philosophers have a
surprising willingness to accept this kind of ambiguity, even though relying on a claim as an
obvious truth is nearly the opposite of relying on it as a metaphor.
The subject of this article has nothing to do with the fact-value distinction. Pure ethical
theory does not require factual claims, but applied ethical theory always does. This article is
directed at applied ethical theories and theories that are ambiguous about whether or not they are
applied.
This essay presents a through investigation of truth claims in the natural rights
justification for private property based on unilateral appropriation (some version of which is
involved in most arguments for strong private property rights). This theory is a good example of
the undisciplined use of factual assertions about the Stone Age. Property rights advocates
typically tell an appropriation story as if it were true, present little or no evidence that it is true,
make no explicit claim that it is a metaphor, and seldom state an underlying a priori argument
capable of replacing the metaphor. Philosophers have extensively explored the normative
difference between natural property rights theory and competing theories, but they have paid
little attention to the factual claims embedded in the appropriation story. Are they necessary to
support property rights advocates conclusions? If so, are they true?
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Part One demonstrates that appropriation-based property rights theory is an applied

theory. This demonstration is necessary because many property rights advocates have been
unclear about the extent to which they rely on empirical claims, even though many of them
explicitly draw on factual premises at important points. Part Two examines these claims
against evidence from anthropology and archeology. It finds that they are certainly
unsubstantiated and possibly refuted. Part Three discusses the implications of the argument.

Part One
Property rights advocates are well aware that their theories rely on empirical facts.
Nozick writes, Justice in holdings is historical; it depends on what actually has happened.2
Loren Lomasky writes, What is in fact the case carries moral weight.3 Rothbard writes, We
can only find the answer [to who owns property] through investigating the concrete data of the
particular case, i.e. through historical inquiry.4 Yet, the works of these authors contain little
historical inquiry. They seem to believe that, although historical investigation might be necessary
to show that any particular persons claim to any particular piece of property is justified, no such
investigation is necessary to prove their general conclusion. That is, private property rights
extend over all or most resources; those rights imply strong (possibly overriding) moral limits on
governments powers of taxation, regulation, and redistribution.5
In Nozicks version of the natural rights argument, justice in holdings is determined
entirely by the repeated application of three principles: original acquisition (appropriation),
voluntary transfer, and rectification. The second and third principles are fairly straightforward.
Most of the attention in the debate of natural rights theory focuses on appropriation.
Although there are many different versions of appropriation theory, basic elements of it
are common to all and well known. The first person to do X with a resource appropriates it
unilaterally.6 That is, she establishes ownership without the need for the consent of anyone else.
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This X can be discovery, first use, first occupancy, first claim, first labor, and so on. Israel
Kirzner endorses discovery. Lomasky and Jan Narveson both endorse something like first use or
first occupancy.7 Probably the greater number property rights advocates, including Rothbard,
Boaz, and (tentatively) Nozick, follow John Locke in endorsing first labor: particularly the
transformation of the resource through labor.
If labor is the criteria, a hunter appropriates her kill but not the land on which she hunted
because she transforms only the kill. A farmer, on the other hand, appropriates both the crops she
planted and the land that she cleared, because she transforms both. Discovery, use, occupancy,
and claim would seem to bestow ownership on hunter-gatherers, although most property rights
advocates seem unwilling embrace that possibility.
The lack of connection between current titleholders and original appropriators is the only
empirical issue that is received significant attention in the debate over property rights theory, but
critics and supporters alike agree that the vast majority of modern property rights cannot be
traced by a series of just steps to original appropriation. This problem is not necessarily fatal.
Again, most property rights advocates are open to the idea that many current property titles
might be unjust. Their main concern is to justify the general pattern in which someones private
property rights place extensive moral limits on government. Still in a world in which the true
heirs of the original appropriators cannot be found, we need some basis on which to say X owns
this and Y does not. I have elsewhere argued that property rights advocates solve this problem
(tacitly or explicitly) by invoking a fourth principle I call the statute of limitations, which can
take the form of a time limit on rectification of past wrongs, adverse possession, abandonment
and re-appropriation, or relative title.8
The statute of limitations cannot free property rights advocates from the need for
empirical investigation of prehistoric appropriation, because it frees current holderswhoever
they arefrom the need to make a connection to original appropriation. Governments have held
sovereignty for a long time, and most property rights advocates admit that sovereignty is
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essentially the assertion of landownership. Nozick imagines a small utopian community that
exists on jointly held land. The community will be entitled then, as a body, to determine what
regulations are to be obeyed on its land; whereas the citizens of a nation do not jointly own its
land and so cannot in this way regulate its use. Lomasky writes, [S]uppose that title to all
property was conferred to one person, the king, and no one else owned anything. It would follow
that should anyone make use of any item except with the sufferance of the king that person
would be guilty of interference. Rothbard writes, If the State may be said to properly own its
territory, then it is proper for it to make rules for anyone who presumes to live in that area.
Thus, all three recognize the conceptual possibility of what I will call a property-owning
government (a state that owns full or partial interest in its territory). They need to show that the
state cannot or does not have just ownership of its territory. Property rights advocates cannot
simply rule out a property-owning government on the grounds of its inability to show an
unbroken chain of just transfers to original appropriation, because private property holders have
the same inability. Unless property rights advocates can come up with a reason to apply the
statute of limitations selectively, it protects a property-owning government as well as any other
property owner.9
I have argued elsewhere that natural rights theory cannot rule out a property-owning
government on a priori grounds. Arguments based on negative freedom, self-ownership, the
Lockean proviso, the need for consent, the supposed inherent criminality of government, and
so forth fail to drive a wedge between the ownership of resources by government and the
ownership of resources by any other corporate entity.10 Therefore, property rights advocates have
to rely on empirical claims how appropriation and subsequent trade actually occurred.
Nozick uses what he calls, hypothetical history. He argues that if the hypothetical just
history is close to the actual history, the structure it produces will be as just as one can expect
to get. But if hypothetical history involved in producing the structure that now exists necessarily
involves either rights violations or implausible assumptions about what people have consented
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to, that structure must be ruled unjust. He tells one hypothetical history in which private property
arises justly, one in which a minimal state arises justly out of a protective association, and two in
which a more-than-minimal state arises unjustly or with implausible assumption.
The three hypothetical histories involving government all begin with individual private
property rights in place. Unsurprisingly, powerful governments violate those property rights. The
other hypothetical history is the standard Lockean appropriation story in which individuals in a
state of nature go into an unclaimed wilderness, clear the land, and establish private property
rights. The operative premise in these hypothetical histories is that individual private property
precedes collective property: resources are unowned when private individuals come along but
they are individually owned when collectives come along. That is an empirical assertion about
events that took place in prehistory.
Nozick challenges people who believe in any other form of property to provide a theory
of how such property rights arise. Once of frees oneself from Nozicks Stone Age presumption,
this challenge is not difficult:
(1) A hunter-gatherer band discovers, uses, occupies, and claims land. Later, they jointly
begin to farm that land and hold it jointly. Anyone who does not want to participate in that
project under those rules may go off into the wilderness alone or with whomever they choose.
Therefore, everyone who remains agrees to these terms as much as anyone agrees to a market
transaction. Eventually this group parcels out land to individuals with the understanding that it is
subject to taxation, regulation, and redistribution by the collective. (2) An individual, Lockean
appropriator chooses not to join any protective association. She protects her estate herself. She
enlarges it through strategic marriage alliance, primogeniture, and rectification in defensive wars
until one day her estate is the size of England and he calls herself the Queen. In both (1) and
(2), a more-than-minimal government comes into existence without violating the principles of
appropriation, voluntary transfer, or rectification.11

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Nozicks only available response to these examples is that his hypothetical just history is
close[r] to the actual history. Yet, Nozick presents no evidence about how original
appropriation actually happened. His justification for such strong, individual private property
rights, therefore, rests entirely on uninvestigated assumptions about events that occurred in the
Stone Age. Nozick distracts attention from this assumption and focuses it on his moral theory,
but his moral theory says only that people should respect each others ownership rights. It says
nothing about whether rent-collecting landlords or tax-collecting governments have a better
empirical claim to ownership. Without empirical evidence, Nozick has given us no reason at all
to accept his conclusions about limited government.
Nozick is not they only property rights advocate who distracts attention from the extent to
which his conclusions rely on empirical assumptions. David Boaz endorses Nozicks entitlement
theory without discussing its empirical base.12 Tibor Machan phrases like the natural right to
private property, but in four works on the issue, he does not spell out how a natural resource
becomes private property, and thus, his theory does not indicate whether private title holders or
governments have a better claim to hold that natural right.
Jan Narveson is somewhat more explicit about his empirical claims. His original
appropriators are pioneers. Such a person appropriated private property rights, because that
was what the agent saw herself to be in the way of enabling herself to do. He claims, When
the first Asian crossed the land bridge to Alaska did she then get title to the whole of North
America? Certainly not. it cannot plausibly be argued that her activity, what she saw herself
to be doing, was using a whole continent or anything like it.13 Yet he refers to no evidence to
show that the original appropriators actually saw themselves to be establishing individual rather
than collective land rights. We are to take it on faith that the ancient Olmecs saw themselves as
right-libertarian pioneers? Certainly this claim needs investigation.
Israel Kirzner stresses present rather than past discovery as the justification for
ownership. This would seem to take his theory out of the Stone Age, but he admits that the issue
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of how the original inputs became property is of primordial importance. This forces him to
make factual assertions about the origin of property: When I find an unowned natural object
and, considering its annexation worthwhile, proceed to take physical possession of it, I have
discovered it.14 Like Nozick, Kirzner establishes only that someone can take possession of
natural resources.
At least one property rights advocate, Loren Lomasky, recognizes that the standard
appropriation-based justification of property relies on unsubstantiated empirical claims. He
writes, A classically liberal theory of property rights holds that natural relations obtain between
persons and objects in the world. These relations precede civil society and thereby establish
claims to property that are prior to social determination.15 He discusses empirical (as well as
moral) weakness of that theory.16 He attempts to reconstruct a rights-based theory of property
without reference to prehistory. But he ends up falling back on similar empirical premises. He
writes:

If A comes to possess I, to use I in the service of his projects, and thereby values the
having of I, then A has appropriated I. A has reason to acknowledge and respect Bs
having I* conditional upon B recognizing and respecting As special interest in I. A
has reason to reject the imposition of a system of collective control over all goods that
will determine whether A is entitled to have I.17

This conclusion works if A has appropriated I as an individual, but not if he has

appropriated I as part of a collective. Suppose A is a citizen, and I, which A comes to possess is
the benefit he receives from government taxation, regulation, and redistribution within its
territory. Suppose I* is the holding of a title to resources within the governments territory.
Therefore, consider how Lomasky would have to revise the above statement:

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If A comes to possess I (shared ownership of government-held territory), to use I in the

service of his projects, and thereby values the having of it, then A has appropriated I. A
only has a reason to acknowledge and respect Bs having I* (a property title) conditional
upon B recognizing and respecting As special interest in the taxation, regulation, and
redistribution of property titles. Therefore, A has reason to reject the imposition of a
system of privatized control over all goods that will determine whether A is entitled to
have shared ownership of government-held territory (I).

If I can be a share in the land held by a marriage, a partnership, or a corporation, why not
a share in the land held by a corporate entity called a government? As far as I can tell,
Lomaskys answer to that question is:

[P]ersons come to civil society with things that are theirs. A socially defined system of
property rights must be responsive to what persons have. In no respect does a civil order
entail the collectivization of property.18

On an a priori basis, natural rights theory can say people come to civil society with only one
thingself-ownership. Whether they come with other anything else is an empirical claim, and
all property rights advocates agree that at least many people come into civil society without
private property rights in land. Consider how Lomasky would have to revise this statement to
free it from this empirical content:

Persons might come to civil society with things that are theirs. A socially defined system
of property rights must be responsive to what persons might or might not have. In no
respect does a civil order entail either the collectivization of private property or the
privatization of public property.
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In other words, devoid of its empirical content, Lomaskys argument says nothing about whether
governments should have the power of taxation, regulation, and redistribution.
Lomaskys empirical claim, [P]ersons come to civil society with things that are theirs,
is very much the same as that classically liberal premise he was trying to distance himself
from, property rights precede civil society. He makes no attempt to verify it; hes voiced a
great deal of skepticism about it. Yet, he explicitly employs it as a necessary premise in his
argument for limiting government.
Murray Rothbard unambiguously rests his conclusions on the empirical content of his
appropriation story. His original appropriator is a homesteader or pioneer, who clears and
uses previously unused virgin land and brings it into this private ownership.19 Recognizing the
conceptual possibility of government ownership of its territory, he writes, our homesteading
theory suffices to demolish any such pretensions by the State apparatus.20 He doesnt explain
precisely how a hypothetical story can demolish anyones ownership claims, but he later on
writes, There is really only one reason for libertarians to oppose the formation of governmental
property or to call for its divestment: the realization that the rulers of government are unjust and
criminal owners of such property.21 That is, if they came to ownership unjustly.
Rothbard clearly believes the only way a collective could obtain ownership of land is by
usurping that right from individual owners. We can tell he recognizes the importance of this
empirical premise because his examples of abusive governments begin with a story of
government aggressively seizing land from private individual property holders.22
He seems to think this claim is obviously true. He refers to empirical support for other
claims, such as that property law can exist in the absence of state sovereignty,23 but he seems to
think his claim to know what the original appropriators were thinking is so obvious that it needs
no empirical support. However, one source that Rothbard cites for something else does contain

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support this claim. The source is not empirical work, but a right-libertarian treatise by F. A.
Hayek. He writes:

[T]he erroneous idea that property had at some late stage been 'invented' and that before
that there had existed an early state of primitive communism has been completely
refuted by anthropological research. There can be no question now that the recognition of
property preceded the rise of even the most primitive cultures . [I]t is as well
demonstrated a scientific truth as any we have attained in this field.24

Hayek cites three sources to support this claim. I have been able to find two of them. The first of
these, although written by an anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, is not a piece of empirical
research but yet another right-libertarian treatise. The passage Hayek quotes uses a priori
reasoning to argue that people must have property but it does not refer specifically to any
empirical evidence to confirm. Hayeks second source, A. I. Hallowell, writes that property
rights of some kind are universal, but not that individual private property rights are universal.
He refers some of Malinowskis empirical research, writing Malinowskis conclusion was that,
ownership, therefore, can be defined neither by such words as communism, nor
individualism, nor by reference to joint-stock company systems or personal enterprise.
This conclusion is not nearly as strong as Hayek implies.
In all of the property rights literature cited here, these three citations are the only
empirical support offered for the claim that individual private property rights precede civil
society. It cannot bear the weight that has been place on it. If there is a property rights advocate
who has conducted a more thorough investigation, he or she isnt cited by any of the authors
mentioned here. We need a more thorough investigation to find out whether this claim is in fact a
well demonstrated a scientific truth.

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Part Two surveys anthropological and archeological literature to find evidence for this
classically liberal hypothesis that these relations precede civil society. Who were the first
private property holders? Who were the first collective property holders? Do private land claims
tend to precede collective claims? Do individuals, acting as individuals, perform the first
appropriative acts or is there evidence of collective or government appropriation?

Part Two
If we want to know how property developed, we have to look at the best available
evidence. Most of the events were interested inthe first use of resources, the development of
state powers, and the development of something recognizable as private propertyoccurred in
prehistoric societies. That is, societies that do not keep written records. They are also called
preliterate or non-literate societies. Anthropologists find evidence about prehistoric societies
from the distant past by comparing three sources: direct archeological investigation of long
passed societies, historical accounts of early contact between non-literate and literate people, and
ethnographic investigation of contemporary non-literate societies.25
To the extent that we are interested in people who lived thousands of years ago, the use of
people living in non-literate societies today is inherently problematic. Economically simple
modern societies are separated from our distant ancestors by as many generations as we are, and
those who managed to maintain an economically simple lifestyle into modern times might only
have done so because they occupied marginal land.26 They might have been affected by years (or
centuries) of contact with more complex societies.27 Anthropologists try to get a picture of life in
the distant past by triangulating these different kinds of data. If ethnographic investigation find
that people with similar technology in many different parts of the world today share certain
elements of social organization, and if archeological and historical investigations indicates that

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people in the distant pasted shared some of those elements, we can begin to get some idea how
people lived in the distant past. At least, that is the best method available at this time.
This article traces the development of property through four different forms of social
organization: bands, autonomous villages, chiefdoms, and states (each of which is defined in its
own section below). These four forms of organization were first defined by Elman Service as
stages in social evolution.28 Few anthropologists today view them as part of a uni-linear
progression. They are not intended as homogenous, discrete, non-overlapping categories but as
reference points on a rough continuum from economically simple to more economically complex
societies.29 Anthropologists use these categories to further our understanding of history and
prehistory by developing a picture of the regularity and variability within and between each
form. These categories are not the only legitimate way to classify societies, but they do capture
important differences in social organization that ethnologists have observed in diverse
communities around the word and that archeologists and historians have found evidence of in the
past.
We cannot say that every complex modern society passed through all four of these forms
of social organization, but we can be fairly confident that the earliest states developed out of
chiefdoms; the earliest chiefdoms developed out of autonomous villages; and the earliest
autonomous villages developed out of hunter-gatherer bands.30 Therefore, understanding these
reference points will give us some idea of how property and government developed.

A. Hunter-gatherer bands
Early humans, like other primates, lived in small foraging groups. Aside from intellectual
ability, cooperation is the most significant difference between human foragers and other primate
foragers.31 Other primates forage almost entirely for themselves and for their infants,32 while
humans usually forage in groups and share what they have.33 Morton Fried argues that the

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institution of sharing accounts for the human success that has dominated Earths history over the
last 2 million years.34
Human-style, cooperative, hunter-gatherer bands probably developed sometime in the
long interval between the branching off of humans from other apes (about 2 million years ago)
and the appearance of biologically modern humans (at least the last 60,000 years ago and
arguably more than 125,000 years ago). The hunter-gatherer band was probably the only form of
social organization until about 15,000 or 20,000 years ago, and the most common form until only
a few thousand years ago. The last remaining fulltime hunter-gathers are probably giving up the
lifestyle in this generation, although some groups might continue to survive on more-than-halftime foraging into the future.35
Most known hunter-gatherer bands had about 15 to 50 people including children and
elderly.36 They had fluid membership; larger bands could split into smaller bands, and
individuals could leave one band to join a related band nearby.37 Bands are usually nomadic
within a fairly defined range.38 Many farmers spend some of their time foraging, but the common
definition of a hunter-gatherer band is a nomadic group, whose only productive activities are
forms of foraging: hunting, gathering, and fishing.39
The proposed criteria for appropriation (discovery, use, labor, etc.) all literally imply that
property is far older than humanity. Most primates live in foraging groups with well-defined
territories. In fact, they tend to define and defend their territories tend much more rigidly than
human hunter-gatherers.40 Beavers, bees, and ants transform the land with their labor. If we
didnt make some qualification to appropriation theory, we would have a duty to respect a great
deal of animal property rights. Yet, I know of no property rights advocates who are willing to do
so. Perhaps it goes without saying that appropriation requires sentience. But if so, property does
not begin with a person performing an appropriative act on a previously unused resource. The
first truly sentient human must have lived in a foraging group that already had a delineated
foraging territory. It is very unlikely that this person would also have claimed new territory for
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her band. Perhaps then, property begins with an act of inheritance rather than an act of
appropriation.
If first claim, first use, or first occupancy by a sentient being establishes ownership, our
hunter-gatherer ancestors appropriated most of world except for Antarctica, some remote islands,
mountain tops, deserts, and so on. What sort of property rights did they establish?
Many diverse anthropological studies show that the economically simplest human
societiesthose with lifestyles most similar to the lifestyles of original appropriatorsdid not
choose to establish anything like individual private property in land. Lee and Daly write, one
characteristic common to almost all band societies (and hundreds of village-based societies as
well) is a land tenure system based on a common property regime. These regimes were, until
recently, far more common world-wide than regimes based on private property.41 Martin Baily
examined anthropological observations of more than fifty hunter-gatherer bands and autonomous
villages, and found that they all had collective claims to territory.42 Some hunter-gatherers, such
as the Mbuti Pygmies of central Africa and the Nayaka of southern India, view land not an
object that can be owned but something that people can be closely associated with and related
to.43 The Inuit of arctic North American and the Hadza of east Africa have no exclusive
territoriality at all. Woodburn writes The Eastern Hadza assert no rights over land and its
ungarnered resources. they do not even seek to restrict the use of the land they occupy to
members of their own tribe.44 Among both human and non-human foraging primates, no
individual can claim exclusive use of any piece land, and no individual can be excluded from
resources she needs to maintain her existence.45
Human foragers have something more like private property rights in food and tools, but
those rights are seldom exclusive and not usually appropriated by individualistic labor mixing.46
Hunter-gatherers have a strong obligation to share what they have (including things that they
have made and big game they have killed) and little reciprocal obligation to produce.47

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According to Hill and Hurtado, Property was never really private, and sharing was the most
important aspect of the behavioral code.48 According to Kristen Hawkes,

Among modern tropical foragers, hunters generally do not control the distribution of
meat from big animals. Large carcasses are treated more as a communal resource, like a
public good from which many claim shares. A hunter cannot exclude other claimants,
nor can he exchange portions of meat with other hunters (or anyone else) for obligations
to return meat (or anything else).49

Fried writes, in a simple egalitarian society the taking of something before it is offered is more
akin to rudeness than stealing.50
A property rights advocate might be tempted to argue that this evidence, rather than
disproving the individual appropriation hypothesis, merely shows how quickly collectives
violated individual property rights. Perhaps the collectives treatment of big game as common
property is an example of early collectivist aggression against individual private property rights.
This argument is not merely wishful thinking unsupported by evidence; it is substantially
contradicted by evidence. Most hunter-gatherers prefer to hunt for big game, even though big
game is treated as common property of the band regardless of who kills it.51 Social approval,
prestige, and competition for wives seem to be adequate incentives to get males to hunt for the
whole band.52 More importantly, individual hunter-gatherers could have created the institution of
private property if they wanted to. All hunter-gatherers are free to leave the band and to start
their own band with whoever wants to join. If 6 to 10 adult hunter-gatherers wanted to start a
band that recognized the hunters natural right to exclusive ownership over the kill, no one would
have interfered with them. Yet, although we know that hunter-gatherer bands split for many
other reasons, we dont know of any who split for that reason. All known hunter-gatherers (in all

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climates and geographies from the arctic to the tropics) exercised their free will to establish a
collective property regime.53 As the original appropriators, it was their right to do so.
This evidence raises doubt about whether individual appropriation is a natural right. A
natural right must be something that all humans want or need, something that all humans must
respect in others to respect their humanity. But yet this natural right of individual appropriation
was not see as natural at all until long after most land was already discovered, used, occupied,
and claimed by groups of individuals who chose to hold that land and most of what it produced
collectively. Individual private property was apparently not practiced by anyone for the first
100,000 years of our existence as humans; it is not practiced by our closest primate relatives;54
and there is no evidence that it was practiced by our hominid ancestors during the 2 million years
separating humans from other primates. People in some parts of the world have never have
practiced this institution in their history. This supposed natural right contravenes what some
anthropologists have found to be a far more ancient principle: the belief that wild places could
not be appropriated by any individual.55 To say that individual appropriation is a natural rights is
to say that all humans chose to live unnaturally for most of our existence as a species.
Many property rights advocates deal with hunter-gatherer bands either by ignoring them
entirely or by employing an appropriation criteria, such as first labor, that supposedly excludes
bands territorial claims. This strategy has two difficulties.
First, to say that hunter-gatherers do not transform their land through labor is another
factual assertion that requires empirical investigation. Just because hunter-gatherers dont farm
does not mean that they leave the land just as they found it. Earth was very different in 10,000
BCE, after hunter-gatherers covered it, than it was in 500,000 BCE, when hominid foragers were
confined to a small part of Africa. For example, some researches believe that hunter-gatherers
hunted many large animal species to extinction.56 This may have been unwise, but it must count
as a serious transformation of the land, more so than clearing the land of trees, which can easily
grow back.
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Second, excluding hunter-gatherers from land appropriation implies that whatever they
do with land is not enough to obtain the right to keep doing it. Even though they obtain the right
to the meat or fruit they collect, no matter how long they have been foraging, they do not obtain
the right to go on foraging without interference.57 The appeal of individual private property
rights supposedly relies on the appeal of freedom from interference. If you are the first one to use
a resource, no one can stop you from what youre doing; no one can judge you or impose their
way of life on you. The endorsement of the farmer and the miners right to aggressively interfere
with hunter-gatherers runs completely contrary to that appeal. If that endorsement were an
aberration, the appeal of the theory can be restored by disavowing it. But it appears that counting
hunter-gatherers as owners of land implies that the original property rights to most of the land on
Earth were collective property rights. To maintain the belief that property is necessarily
individual and private, property rights advocates either have to come up with some story why
land, initially appropriated by collectives, must necessarily get into the hands of individuals, or
they have to accept that the endorsement of the aggressive dispossession of hunter-gatherers is a
fundamental part of their theory.
Whichever argumentative strategy property rights advocates might take, we have look to
the development of economically more complex societies to see whether the theory actually
leads to an individual property rights regime.

B. Autonomous villages
The simplest known settled communities are villages with populations of 100 to 600
people.58 Most anthropologists call these kinds of communities tribal societies, but some prefer
the term autonomous villages. I use the latter term both because it is more descriptive and
because, the word tribe is commonly used many different ways.

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Many autonomous villages survived into the Twentieth Century, and ethnographers have
extensively studied them. A few people continue this lifestyle today.59 Autonomous villages tend
to have a nominal headman with no real power, little economic inequality, and no explicit fixed
rules.60 In all known autonomous villages, there is virtually no trade or specialization.61 All
individuals, (including headmen & religious leaders) produce their immediate familys
consumption.62 There are usually no fixed property rights in land; all members of the village are
entitled to access to land, but not necessarily a particular plot.63 Like bands, autonomous villages
have fluid membership. Although they have the technological capacity to support a population in
the thousands, they are prone to split when their populations increase to more than a few
hundred, and autonomous villages with populations of more than 600 are rarely if ever
observed.64
Autonomous villages were first societies to assert land rights stronger than simply
territoriality and to engage in farming. However, they did not do it in that order.65 The oldest
known autonomous villages appeared about 15,000 years ago, in areas where foraging was
sufficiently abundant to support settled people. The oldest known agricultural villages appeared
only 8,000 or 10,000 years ago.66 Many of the oldest know agricultural sites were built on sites
that had already been occupied by settled hunter-gatherers. It is easy to imagine why: settled
hunter-gatherers have much greater ability to experiment with agriculture than nomadic huntergatherers do.
Therefore, agriculture follows rather than coincides with a major change in the
institutions of property ownership. This sequence has important implications. Remember that
this natural rights theory is supposed to be based on a sober and realistic understanding of human
nature, of who we are, of what we actually do, and of the rights we actually need. Property rights
advocates assume that when people transform the land with their labor by becoming farmers,
they naturally require a greater right to that land than they required when they merely huntergatherers. Agriculture must, therefore, coincide with a great change in the kind of rights people
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want hold in land. But apparently this change in property rights was not something that the first
agriculturalists thought they needed. They continued the same property rights regime as their
settled hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Also, the property rights regime that these original appropriators chose to establish was
not the individualist system that property rights advocates suppose. Individuals in known
autonomous villagers are interested in use-rights in land, not individual land ownership.67 The
most important of these rights is that each member of the community maintains direct and
independent access to land and other resources with which they can secure their needs, but an
individual claim to be the owner of any particular plot of land does not seem to have been
important.68 Autonomous village land rights have been described as ambiguous and flexible69
or overlapping and complex.70 Fried observes, in most rank societies, the concept of title, of
legally specific ownership, is absent. A population, with its ranked head, is associated with area,
but they have little power to keep out newcomers.71 There is, however, usually individual
excludability in crops; each family would keep what they produced.72
The ambiguity and complexity of property rights in simple agrarian societies is probably
the source of Hayeks overstatement about the existence of property right. In most cases, we can
say that kinships groups owned the village because they hold rights to that land against other
kinship groups. But the kinship groups held the land collectively. Individuals could not alienate
their share of ownership in the village and they clan couldnt deny them direct access to land.
Hayeks source, Malinowski, studied tribes with clan-based ownership, not the kind of
individualistic private property postulated in the appropriation story.73
A headman was sometimes spoken of as the owner of his groups real estate, but he
acted more like the administrator of his groups possessions.74 Either way, the headman present a
difficulty for property rights advocates. If he was the owner, the original appropriator was also
the government of the village. If he was not the owner, the original appropriator was the village

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collective. Neither one implies that the original appropriator was an individual private property
holder.
Once again, a property rights advocates might be tempted to interpret this situation as an
example of original individual appropriators being victims of group interference. But once again,
such an interpretation is contradicted by evidence. Autonomous villages habitually under-used
resources and were therefore able to settle disputes by splitting.75 As in band societies,
individuals were free to leave and set up a society with a private property regime. Although
thousands of village societies are known to anthropology, there does not seem to be any
ethnographic, archeological, or historic study showing evidence that any village created the
institution of individual private land ownership or that villagers desired to do so. The reasonable
conclusion is that the first farmers voluntarily chose to hold land collectively. As the full owners
under appropriation theory, they were, of course, within their moral authority to do so.
Once again, this observation has great importance for property rights theory. Supposedly,
what we really care about are the normative principles underlying appropriation theory. These
principles lead us to respected individual private property only becausesupposedlythe first
people to mix their labor with the land created individual private property. Instead, we find even
using this criteria, the original appropriators established something very different than individual
private property. Why did the earliest agriculturalists tend to be collectivists? Baily argues that
land simply isnt very valuable to the earliest farmers with the simplest techniques; they would
clear it, farm it for a few years and move on. What they needed at any given moment was access
to some land, not permanent exclusive control over any piece particular piece of land. Individual
ownership of land comes when it makes sense economically, often with fertilization or
irrigation.76
This observation provides a possible way out for property rights advocates. They might
argue that fixed property comes later than Locke supposed; not with first transformative labormixing, but with more sophisticated techniques, when land is transformed so much that
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exclusivity becomes more appealing. Another possible way out for property rights advocates
would be to suppose that even though the original appropriators held lands as clans, their
property rights were eventually transferred into the hands of private individuals. To examine
these possibilities we have to look further ahead in prehistory.

C. Chiefdoms
A chiefdom is something like proto-state, consisting of at least several villages brought
under a single rule. They tend to have populations in the low thousands to tens of thousands.77
The first chiefdoms probably came into existence within the last 10,000 years. Many chiefdoms
survived into the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, and a few are still not fully incorporated
into nation-states today. Chiefdoms can support some economic specialization. Archaeological
evidence shows that the oldest known chiefdoms had the earliest signs of socio-economic
differentiation.78 They were the earliest and simplest know forms of social organization in which
some individuals were excluded from direct access to the resources to sustain life. They were the
first to have a permanent specialist rulers who did not produce their own food.79 Chiefdoms
sometimes maintained large joint projects such as irrigation, flood control, temple or monument
building.80
The chief and the elite group can have varying levels of authority depending on the size
and complexity of the chiefdom. Some chiefdoms, usually smallest ones, were only slightly less
egalitarian than tribal societies.81 Others were extremely inegalitarian with powerful rulers, rigid
class distinction, and sometimes slavery.82 In larger Polynesian island groups, chiefs commanded
powers of life and death over their subjects.83
Chiefdoms are the simplest and presumably earliest form of social organization with
excludability in property and persons who can be clearly identified as individual owners. Yet,
these original private property holders do not fit the model supposed by property rights

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advocates. The property owners were the chiefs, who both owners and governors.84 Why were
these powers combined? Probably because the economies were so simple: the separation of
different areas of power (economic, religious, political, etc.) only seems to have become possible
in more complex economies.85 Timothy Earle writes, In all cases, economic power was in some
sense basic to the political strategies to amass [political] power.86 And, [T]he evolution of
property rights by which chiefs control primary production can be seen as basic to the evolution
of many complex stratified societies the significance of economic control through varying
systems of land tenure is a constant theme.87
Hawaii provides an excellent case study, because chiefdoms existed there without contact
with more economically complex societies until the late 1700s, and good historical records were
taken in the early years of contact. In an in-depth study of Hawaiian chiefdoms, Timothy Earle
finds that chiefs were the only people in pre-contact Hawaii who could be spoken of as owners:
of colonizing canoes, of landholding descent groups, of irrigation projects, of the irrigated land,
of particularly productive land.88 They did the things a Lockean appropriator is supposed to do.
[T]he environment was transformed into a cultural world owned by a class of ruling chiefs.89
Chiefs financed the construction of irrigation canals, and thereby appropriated the most
productive lands. They acted as managers of irrigation projects. And they apparently financed
and led the expeditions that originally brought people to the islands in about 600CE.90 Earle also
finds evidence of various forms of ownership-based chiefly power in other times and places such
as pre-Columbian South America, Iron-Age Denmark, Olmec Mexico, the pre-Columbian
Mississippi basin, Bronze-Age Britain, and pre-Roman Spain.91
Once established as owner-governors, Hawaiian paramount chiefs treated their chiefdoms
as for-profit businesses. They hired and fired community chiefs, who hired and fired konohiki
(local managers), who allocated lands to commoners in exchange for labor.92 The konohiki also
had the power rescind land for nonpayment of labor.93 Earle writes:

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In chiefdoms, control over production and exchange of subsistence and wealth creates the
basis for political power. In Hawaii, community chiefs allocated to commoners their
subsistence plots in the chiefs irrigated farmlands in return for corve work on chiefly
lands and special projects. By owning the irrigation systems, and thus controlling access
to the preferred means of subsistence, chiefs directed a commoners labor. Where you
lived was determined by whose land manager put you to work.94

Property rights advocates could argue that the first chiefs were probably took power by
violent aggression. This is undoubtedly true for chiefdoms that developed out of autonomous
villages. It might not be true for chiefdoms that were founded by colonizing expeditions to
uninhabited islands. I presume the aggressive possibility is far more common. However,
establishing that the earliest chiefs were usurpers would be far from sufficient to support the
conclusions property rights advocates wish us to draw. The question is not whether chiefs
usurped power, but from whom they usurped it. Property rights advocates ask us to assume that
governments must have usurped power from individual property holders.
But there is no evidence of that such people existed. We know chiefs did not take power
from any ownership class because no ownership class predated chiefdoms. Chiefs are the earliest
known people to hold exclusive individual property rights. They only preexisting entities that
chiefs could have usurped power fromautonomous villages and hunter-gatherer bandsdid
not practice the institution of individual private property in land.
The closest thing to small private holders in Hawaiian chiefdoms were the konohiki, who
were appointed by the chief to serve his interest. Thus the relationship between government and
small holders in these actually existing early governments was the opposite of the relationship
Nozick supposes in his imagined early governments. Instead of small holders with an
appropriation-based claim to property appointing a government to serve the small holders
interests, we see a government (with a possible appropriation-based claim to property)
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appointing small holders to serve its interests. The only connection that the konohiki have to
original appropriation is through the government. The konohikis claim to have the right to
manage the land they control is because the ultimate landlord, the paramount chief, chose them
rather than someone else. Even if the chiefs ancestors illegitimately usurped power from
someone, giving the chiefs ownership rights to his appointees would do nothing to rectify that
wrong.
None of the potential claimants to be the original appropriator gives property rights
advocates what they need. If chiefs are the original appropriators, natural rights theory implies
monarchy. If autonomous villages or hunter-gatherer bands were the original appropriators,
natural rights theory implies that we should return the land to the people as a group. Either way,
instead of a limit on government power over its territory, appropriation theory provides a
justification for it.
If the institution of individual private property developed by strengthening the claims of
people like the konohiki, the belief that government somehow interferes with private property
holders with an appropriation-based claim to property is backwards. To find out where the
institution of individual private property emerged, we need to examine the development of full
states.

D. Early states
By 5,000 years ago some chiefdoms became so large and complex that they could be
called states or empires. Some archeologists use the term early civilizations.95 States differ
from chiefdoms in size, level of economic specialization, and the power and stability of
government. Although all early states were still primarily agricultural, they had complex
economies with specialist warriors, administrators, rulers, and professionals. They were also the
first to leave behind historical records.

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All early states for which there is sufficient available information were extremely
hierarchicalpolitically, economically, and socially.96 They were ruled by kings with the aid of
a small, powerful ruling group. The upper classes were no more than a few percent of the total
population, but they controlled most the surplus wealth, lived luxurious lifestyles, made all
decisions about policy and administration, and justified their position by claiming special
supernatural origin.97 Lower class agricultural laborers, who were generally barred from social
mobility, made up the bulk of the population (probably well over 90 percent), and faced not even
the pretence of equal protection of the laws.
Bruce Trigger studied seven early civilizations across the world: the Aztecs, the Maya,
Yoruba-Benin (of sub-Saharan Africa), the Inca, Egypt, Southern Mesopotamia, and the Shang
(of China). He found that they all had kings who united religious, economic, and political
power.98 Even the highest-ranking commoners were most often state employees, such as scribes,
soldiers, and administrators.99
It appears that private property did not exist in the earliest states. A small upper class in
each state controlled wealth and made policy decisions, but they were usually also government
officials who received land as a revocable reward for government service.100 In the Americas,
institutional land assigned to individuals in return for service constituted a major source of
revenue for the nobility, all of whose active male members were involved in some sort of state
service.101 In all early states for which adequate documentation exists, the legal system
protected government property and upper-class privileges.102 A defining feature of all early
civilizations was the institutionalized appropriation by a small ruling group of most of the wealth
produced by the lower classes. Farmers and artisans did not accumulate large amounts of
wealth, although they created virtually all the wealth that existed in these societies.103 In some
cases local kin groups continued to hold land collectively. This practice is probably a holdover
from earlier forms of social organization.104

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Most experts in the development of early civilizations seem to agree that private
property is a recent innovation, which did not exist in the earliest states.105 Taxation developed
simultaneously with the transfer of land from collective property to private property:106 very
much the opposite of the story property rights advocates tell in which collectives assert control
over land that had previously held by individual private owners rather than collectives.
Trigger argues that although private land cannot always be ruled out, there is no
evidence that such land existed in most early civilizations.107 He does in fact rule out private
ownership in five of the seven early civilizations in his study (the Aztecs, the Maya, the Yoruba,
the Inca, and the Shang): That leaves Mesopotamia and Egypt as early civilizations in which
some land might have been privately owned.108 In Mesopotamia, private land was a late
development. Maisels finds that land in prehistoric and early-historic Mesopotamia was owned
by temples, clans, or collectives.109 Land was held collectively prior to 3000BCE, after which
increasing amounts of land fell under the control of temples or palaces, but some of it appears to
have become the property of individual creditors. It is less certain that private land existed in
the Old Kingdom of Egypt.110 Nevertheless, it goes too far to say that kings owned all the land
in their territory. Kings often claimed ownership of all lands (perhaps a idea carried over from
chiefdoms?), but in practice their actual hold over land was weaker than full ownership.111
Something truly recognizable as an individual private title to land emerges only later and
only in certain places such as Rome and medieval northern Europe. Chinese civilization, for
example, never evolved a strong sense of private property,112 except perhaps under the 21st
Century communist regime. Some property rights advocates who portray private property as an
ancient and ubiquitous institution appear to have been mislead by beginning their analysis in
Greece and Rome.113
Property in the earliest states looks much different, and it appears in a way seems to the
hypothesis that the earliest private property holders were more like the konohiki than original
appropriators who owe nothing to the state.
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Once again, the findings of this investigation have important consequences for property
rights theory. Supposedly government control over property can be established only by
interfering with private landholders, but there is very little evidence to support this supposition.
They certainly interfered with someone, but landholders tended to be the beneficiaries rather than
victims of that interference. Any connection that private landholders have to the original
appropriators seems to have come through the state, and it is, therefore, directly or indirectly
dependent on the legitimacy of the states ownership of its territory.
This problem for natural rights theory becomes more evident when we look at land rights
that owe their origin to colonization. In many cases, governments have invaded taken land from
bands, villages, and chiefdoms who do not practice private property so that privileged members
of the state can hold that land as private property.114 Someone in this story is the victim of
government interference, but it is not the private property holders.

Part Three
Property rights advocates have been repeating the same appropriation story for more than
300 years: Property begins when individual homesteaders plant the first crops thereby
appropriating individual private property. Collective entities, such as governments, appear only
later and obtain property only be interfering with individual private property holders. If the
normative theory behind it is correct, and if this story is true, the private property rights place
great moral limits on government.
Unfortunately for property rights advocates, there is no reason to believe that this story is
true, and very good reason to believe it is false. There is no evidence that the original
appropriators were homesteaders who established individual private property rights. Huntergatherer bands and autonomous villages held land as groups. The first individuals to hold
exclusive property rights were not private owners but chiefs who were both owners and
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governors. It is very likely the first chiefs and monarchs usurped power, but there is no evidence
that they usurped power from individual private property holders; there is not even evidence that
a class of private property holders preceded chiefs.
Something recognizable as individual private property emerges only later, and the first
holders appear to have received it as a reward for service to the king. If so, the rights that they
have over that land are whatever rights the king chose to bestow on him. If the king chose to
retain the powers to tax, regulate, and redistribute that property, so be it. If the kings claim to
that property was illegitimate, an individuals claim stemming from their service to the king is
also illegitimate.
Property rights advocates have failed to prove their case. That property rights advocates
have pass on false factual claims in the philosophy literature for so long should certainly be
worrying.
The available historical evidence does not give us reason to believe that private
corporations or individuals have a stronger appropriation-based claim to hold the rights they hold
than governments have to hold the rights they hold. I cannot say that it is impossible to make an
argument separating government and private land rights without reference to spurious factual
claims, but I can say that none of the property rights advocates cited in this article succeed in
doing so. The government is just a landlord. If we trace the history of the its land claim we will
not find an unbroken chain of just transfers to the original appropriation, but the same is true for
any landlord.
A property rights advocate could respond to this evidence by accepting that governments
own most of the property in the world. Anarcho-capitalism exists; landownership just happens to
be dominated by about 200 corporations called governments. I expect that few if any property
rights advocates will have this reaction. Why would theorists so committed to accepting any
pattern of distribution refuse to accept this one? Hayek and Nozick both accuse egalitarians of
being motivated by envy,115 but perhaps property rights advocates are motivated by another kind
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of envy: the envy a lord has for his king. The lord forgets that the kings power over the land is
of the same kind and same origin as the lords power. If the king is unjust his power must be
returned to the people, not usurped again by jealous lords.

Notes

I use the terms political philosophy and political theory interchangeably.

Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 152.
3
CITE: 130, emphasis original.
4
Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 51,
5
Property rights advocates disagree about how strong those limits are. Nozick wants a minimal state. Rothbard
wants no state at all, but they share the belief that private property rights imply strong limits on what government
can do.
6
CITE Attas characterizes appropriation in this way.
7
CITE: Lomasky; Narveson.
8
Self-citation; Epstein 1995. Simple Rules for a Complex World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 6467. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 63. Edward Feser, 'There is no Such Thing as an Unjust Initial Acquisition',
Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (2005): 56-80 argues that most past injustices simply arent rectifiable, p. 79.
Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, includes several statements that appear to be tacit endorsements of the statute of
limitations including, p. 158, p. 160 (ignoring acquisition and rectification), and pp. 230-231. CITE: Lomasky
9
Self-citation.
10
Self-citation.
11
Self-citation.
12
Boaz , pp. 65-74.
13
CITE: Narveson, pp. 83-86.
14
Kirzner , pp. 153-155.
15
CITE: Lomaksy, pp. 118-119.
16
CITE: Lomaksy, pp. 113-120.
17
CITE: Lomaksy, pp. 130-131.
18
CITE: Lomaksy, 131.
19
Rothbard The Ethics of Liberty. pp. 49, 56-58, 172, 183.
20
Rothbard The Ethics of Liberty. , pp. 48-49.
21
Rothbard The Ethics of Liberty. , 56.
22
For example, Let us say that Ruritania is ruled by a king who has grievously invaded the rights of persons and
the legitimate property of individuals, p. 54; All that feudalism, in our sense, requires is the seizure by violence
of landed property from its true owners, pp. 66-67.
23
Rothbard The Ethics of Liberty. , 178; 178n3; 178n4
24
CITE: Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, p. 108.
25
Clark 1968. "Studies of Hunter-Gatherers as an Aid to the interpretation of Prehistoric Societies." In Lee and
DeVore (ed.) Man the Hunter. New York: Aldine, 276-280.
26
Renfrew 2007. Prehistory: the making of the human mind. London: Phoenix, p. 141; Fried 1967. The Evolution of
Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology. New York: Random House, p. 53-54; Lee 1968. "What
Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources." In Lee and DeVore (ed.) Man the Hunter.
New York: Aldine, 30-48, p. 43.
27
Lvi-Strauss 1968. "The Concept of the Primitive." In Lee and DeVore (ed.) Man the Hunter. New York: Aldine,
349-352; Colchester 1984. Rethinking stone age economics: Some speculations concerning the pre-Columbian
2

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Yanoama economy. Human Ecology 12: 3, 291-314; Lee and Daly 1999. "Foragers and Others." In Lee and Daly
(ed.) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-19, p. 6.
28
CITE: Service
29
CITE:
30
I will not be dealing with nomadic herding societies, which are often classed as chiefdoms, although they dont fit
neatly into any of these categories.
31
Washburn and Lancaster In (ed.), , pp. 301-303; Fried , pp. 106-107; Hawkes, O'Connell and Blurton Jones 2001.
Hunting and Nuclear Families: Some Lessons from the Hadza about Men's Work. Current Anthropology 42: 5, 681709.
32
Fried , p. 44.
33
Lee "Primitive Communism and the Origin of Social Inequality." In (ed.), p. 231; Lee The !Kung San: Men
Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. 458-461; Bird-David 1990. The Giving Environment: Another Perspective
on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters. Current Anthropology 31: 2, 189-196.
34
Fried , pp. 106-107.
35
Burch 1998. "The Future of Hunter-Gatherer Research." In Gowdy (ed.) Limited wants, unlimited means: A
reader on hunter-gatherer economics and the environment. Washington, DC: Island Press, 201-17; Murdock 1968.
"The Current Status of the World's Hunting and Gathering Peoples." In Lee and DeVore (ed.) Man the Hunter. New
York: Aldine, 13-20; Roscoe 2002. The Hunters and Gatherers of New Guinea. Current Anthropology 43: 1, 153162.
36
Fried , p. 113; Lee and Daly "Foragers and Others." In (ed.), , especially p. 3.
37
Turnbull 1968. "The Importance of Flux in Two Hunting Societies." In Lee and DeVore (ed.) Man the Hunter.
New York: Adline, 132-137; Bird-David 1994. Sociality and Immediacy: or, past and present conversations on
bands. Man 29: 3, 583-603; Boehm , pp. 72-73, 86-87; : Woodburn 1968. "Stability and Flexibility in Hadza
Residential Groupings." In Lee and DeVore (ed.) Man the Hunter. New York: Aline, 103-110; Bird-David Sociality
and Immediacy: or, past and present conversations on bands. ; Leacock 1998. "Women's Status in Egalitarian
Society: Implications for Social Evolution." In Gowdy (ed.) Limited wants, unlimited means: A reader on huntergatherer economics and the environment. Washington, DC: Island Press, 139-164, pp. 142-143.
38
Bird-David Sociality and Immediacy: or, past and present conversations on bands. ; Turnbull In (ed.), , p. 135.
39
There are more liberal definitions, and as with anything, there is always difficulty drawing the line. Roscoe, .
40
Boehm . , p. 29.
41
Lee and Daly "Foragers and Others." In (ed.), , p. 4.
42
Baily, , p. 185.
43
Bird-David The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters. , pp.
190-192.
44
Woodburn "An Introduction to Hadza Ecology." In (ed.), , p. 50; CITE: Hoebel, E. A. 1954. The Law of Primitive
Man. Cambridge, MA, p. 59,
45
Lee "Primitive Communism and the Origin of Social Inequality." In (ed.), pp. 231-232; Lee The !Kung San: Men
Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. , p. 456; Bird-David The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the
Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters. ; Fried , p. 58. See also Section 1.
46
Bird-David The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters. .
47
Some anthropologists find almost no evidence for reciprocity: Bird-David The Giving Environment: Another
Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters. ; Bird-David Beyond the 'Original Affluent Society": A
Culturalist Reformulation. ; Hawkes, O'Connell and Blurton Jones Hunting and Nuclear Families: Some Lessons
from the Hadza about Men's Work. . Others find some such evidence: Gurven 2006. The Evolution of Contingent
Cooperation. Current Anthropology 47: 1, . Fried , p. 62 f3.
48
Hill and Hurtado Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People. , p. xii.
49
Hawkes 2001. "Is Meat the Hunter's Property? Big Game, Ownership, and Explanations of Hunting and Sharing."
In Stanford and Bunn (ed.) Meat-Eating and Human Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 219-236.
50
Fried . , p. 75.
51
Hawkes "Is Meat the Hunter's Property? Big Game, Ownership, and Explanations of Hunting and Sharing." In
(ed.), ; Leacock In (ed.), , p. 145; Hawkes, O'Connell and Blurton Jones Hunting and Nuclear Families: Some
Lessons from the Hadza about Men's Work. .
52
Hawkes, O'Connell and Blurton Jones Hunting and Nuclear Families: Some Lessons from the Hadza about Men's
Work. , p. 695.
53
Boehm , pp. 72-73.

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54

Hawkes "Is Meat the Hunter's Property? Big Game, Ownership, and Explanations of Hunting and Sharing." In
(ed.),
55
Katz 1997. Private Property versus Markets: Democratic and Communitarian Critiques o Capitalism. American
Political Science Review 91: 2, 277-289, p. 284.
56
CITE: Blitzkreig.
57
See, Narveson 1998. Libertarianism vs. Marxism: Reflections on G. A. Cohen's Self-Ownership, Freedom and
Equality. The Journal of Ethics 2: 1, , p. 14n.
58
Renfrew , p. 142; Boehm , pp. 3-4; Lee "Primitive Communism and the Origin of Social Inequality." In (ed.), , p.
236; Wilson 1988. The Domestication of the Human Species. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 3.
59
Roscoe, .
60
Fried; Boehm .
61
Fried , pp. 129-130.
62
Fried , pp. 129-132, 177.
63
Sahlins 1974. Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock, pp. 93-94; Baily 1992. Approximate Optimality of
Aboriginal Property Rights. Journal of Law and Economics 35, 183, p. 92.
64
Fried , p. 113.
65
Renfrew argues that the propensity to assign value to goods seems to have developed with sedentism, which
preceded agriculture by thousands of years.
66
Renfrew , pp. 142-145, 161.
67
Herskovits 1965. Economic Anthropology: The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples. New York: W. W. Norton.
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Sahlins Stone Age Economics. , p. 93.
69
Earle Bronze Age Economics: The First Political Economies. , p. 326-327.
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Sahlins Stone Age Economics. , pp. 92-93.
71
Fried , p. 177.
72
Baily, , pp. 191-192.
73
Hoebel, E. A. 1954. The Law of Primitive Man. Cambridge, MA.
74
Fried , p. 117.
75
Bandy, .
76
Baily, , pp. 191-195.
77
Earle 2002. Bronze Age Economics: The First Political Economies. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 15-16.
78
Thomas 1999. Understanding the Neolithic. London: Routledge, p. 229; Renfrew , pp. 152, 164, 173-176.
79
Fried , p. 186-190.
80
Earle 1997. How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. Stanford: University Press; Earle
2000. Archaeology, Property, and Prehistory. Annual Review of Anthropology 29, 39-60; Earle Bronze Age
Economics: The First Political Economies. .
81
Boehm , p. 98; Trigger 1990. "Maintaining Economic Equality in Opposition to Complexity: An Iroquoian Case
Study." In Upham (ed.) The Evolution of Political Systems: Sociopolitics in Small-Scale Sedentary Societies.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 119-145.
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Lee "Primitive Communism and the Origin of Social Inequality." In (ed.), , p. 239; Boehm , p. 255.
83
Bellwood 1987. The Polynesians. London: Thames and Hudson, pp. 31-33.
84
Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. ; Earle Bronze Age Economics: The First
Political Economies. .
85
Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , pp. 210-211.
86
Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , pp. 74-75.
87
Earle Bronze Age Economics: The First Political Economies. , pp. 327-328.
88
Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , pp. 43, 44, 72, 73; Earle Bronze Age
Economics: The First Political Economies. , pp. 61-62.
89
Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , p. 45.
90
Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , pp. 43, 68-72, 82.
91
Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , pp. 94-95, 102; Earle Bronze Age
Economics: The First Political Economies. , pp. 61-62, 345; Earle Archaeology, Property, and Prehistory. .
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Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , p. 79.
93
Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , pp. 82-83.
94
Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , p. 7.
95
Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. .

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96

Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 44-45. The Harappa of the Indus Valley
may have been an exception, but there simple is not enough evidence to make a firm conclusion. Possehl, Raval and
Chitalwala 1989. Harappan Civilization and Rojdi. Boston: Brill Archive.
97
Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 145-153.
98
Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 71, 79, 91.
99
Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 154-155.
100
Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 147, 153.
101
Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 323.
102
Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 265.
103
Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 375.
104
Earle Archaeology, Property, and Prehistory. , p. 48.
105
See Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 332; Fried , p. 201.
106
Earle Archaeology, Property, and Prehistory. , p. 48.
107
Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 332.
108
Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 332.
109
Maisels , p. 219.
110
Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 332-334.
111
Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 314-315; Earle Archaeology, Property,
and Prehistory. , p. 47.
112
Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 239.
113
CITE.
114
CITE.
115
CITE: Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p. 93; CITE: Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 240.

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