failure of some food-producing societies with complex political organization to develop or adopt writing before modern times. Those cases, initially so puzzling to us moderns accustomed to viewing writing as indispensable to a complex society, included one of the world’s largest empires as of A.D. 1520, the Inca Empire of South America. They also included Tonga’s maritime proto-empire, the Hawaiian state emerging in the late 18th century, all of the states and chiefdoms of subequatorial Africa and sub-Saharan West Africa before the arrival of Islam, and the largest native North American
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Have there been no societies that developed writing without first developing food production? Food production allows for more intensive, high-density living, which supposedly leads to specialisation of function and the development of bureaucracy. But is it possible for these later steps, including writing, to have emerged without food production as the base? Is food production really necessary for complex societies to emerge?
