These individual city-states supported several dialects of the Hokan linguistic family, first identified by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber in 1925 and named, for the most part, for the missions in the areas encompassed by the dialects, namely the Ventureño, Barbareño, Ineseño, Purisimeño, Obispeño, and the additional Emigdiano, Cuyama, and Island dialects. While these dialects have been identified as branches of the Hokan linguistic family tree, they in fact operated much like distinct languages. This, in turn, has given rise to the notion that the various regional entities actually operated as distinct tribes in their own right, but with the necessary economic and sociopolitical system that would unite a region into a relatively cohesive network.
The regional federations consisted of smaller villages, which varied in population from sixty to over a thousand people, each presided over by a chief, or wot. The smaller villages owed their allegiance to a major chief for the region who resided in a capital village, enabling him to control the production and redistribution of the goods within his villages, thereby strengthening the federation's position among the other regions. Perhaps the key feature of this complex of inter-regional trade is the presence of specialized craft guilds, or brotherhoods, both within the villages and extending into a regional alliance of like craft specialists.
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