Chiefdoms, the polities most often referred to by sixteenth-century Spaniards when they spoke of señoríos, curacazgos (from the Quechua, kurakd), and cacicazgos (from the hispanicized Arawak, cacique), were autonomous societies in which there were permanent, centralized political hierarchies headed by chiefs. The chieftainship was institutionalized and hereditary, with the rule of succession usually specified and restricted to élites. Chiefdoms constituted a persistent sociopolitical form in South American prehistory, occupying a great range of environments including highland and lowland basins, marshlands, desert, coast, islands, lagoons, floodplains, and piedmont. At the time of European contact, chiefdoms were widespread throughout the continent.

In this chapter we discuss chiefdoms/señoríos in four sections. The first considers what Europeans saw and reported at contact, and how their views and categorizations of societies correspond to models of sociopolitical organization that anthropologists and others use today – models that have been developed in the context of a very long-term set of inquiries regarding the development of complex societies. In the second section we discuss structure and process in Chibcha chiefdoms of the Colombian altiplano. The analysis, which is based on a variety of primary sources, aims to delineate how a particular set of political hierarchies were organized and integrated, how they functioned, and how centralization operated with respect to them. The third section is a general overview of chiefdoms in regions that remained independent of Inka rule – the areas encompassed by Colombia, Venezuela, the Ecuadorian coast, and Greater Amazonia. Emphasis is on political centralization. Primary focus is on societies that had paramount chiefs and multiple levels of political hierarchy in contrast to the broad array of independent regional chiefs with fewer political levels. Political centralization in sections two and three is looked at with respect to internal processes – patterns of interaction by which a given people resolve a number of social, political, and environmental stresses, and in so doing optimize hierarchical links, as well as external factors – activities such as exchange of goods and ideas, and participation in alliances and warfare with other groups, all of which affect individual polities and give rise to large interactive geographical regions. The fourth section deals with chiefdoms that lost autonomy as they were overrun by the Inka in the fifteenth century and integrated into the empire.