The soldiers were thus a concomitant of numerically strong aggregations, hence functioned intermittently rather than continuously.’ But the soldiers’ sovereignty, he stressed, was no less real for its temporary nature. As a result, Lowie insisted that Plains Indians did in fact know something of state power, even though they never actually developed a state.
You can’t speak of an evolution from band to tribe to chiefdom to state if your starting points are groups that move fluidly between them as a matter of habit.
