Hawks, Serpents, And Bird-Men:

Abstract

The late prehistoric Oneota society of the midwestern United States is analyzed for its politicoeconomic structure. Oneota cultural organization is compared with Mississippian chiefdoms to the south for evidence of complexity. This approach does not extend the critique to a deep enough level, and the methods of dialectical materialism are introduced to analyze how value was created from social labor in the Oneota system. Oneota society is modeled as a tribal organization in which specific forms of social structures existed to justify production and differential distribution of a social-surplus. The organization of the Oneota production system engendered it to expand; therefore, the model is expanded to explain how symbolic motifs (hawks) developed as a standard of cultural hegemony for the Oneota. The transformation from Woodland to Oneota systems is analyzed as an historical process involving the reorganization of productive relations and the development of pan-ethnic symbols of dominance.

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