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This article examines the evolution of quirípa, a primitive valuable from the Orinoco Basin, from a world-systems perspective. This process must be understood as a result of the economic and symbolic uses given to beads by different social actors based on their ethnic and sociopolitical backgrounds through time. The history of this primitive valuable illustrates how some aboriginal economic institutions evolved as a result of exchange among Amerindian and European economies and societies, not merely as the product of the imposition of Western economic rationality.

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Complex chiefdoms are subject to oscillating cycles of regional political centralization under the domination of a paramount chief, followed by political dissolution, and frequently, the rise of a rival paramount chiefdom. A macroregional scale of investigation offers the best opportunity to examine the development of centralized, hierarchical leadership and the trajectories of such regional control at successive paramount centers. We present the results of recent archaeological investigations in the tropical savannas of western Venezuela, which document the development of the earliest complex chiefdoms that emerged here around A.D. 500. Regional and community-level investigations in neighboring river valleys of Barinas, Venezuela enable us to examine the development of the regional polities centered at £1 Gavan and El Cedral from a macroregional perspective, and tentatively to propose that they were subject to the cycling pattern of growth and dissolution characteristic of complex paramount chiefdoms. 109

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