Case Studies from the Near East
In the mid-twentieth century, archaeologists were concerned with political organization as a long-term process of social change within the perspective of sociocultural evolution (Trigger 1998; Steward 1955; White 1959; Sahlins and Service 1960; Service 1962; Fried 1967, 1978; Johnson and Earle 1987; Haas 2001b). Following the classifications of human societies promulgated by Service (bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states) and Fried (egalitarian, ranked, and stratified societies), archaeologists hoped to identify the complexity of political systems on a general level so they could categorize the societies they studied in one of Service’s or Fried’s ideal types of society.
Archaeological studies for most of the rest of the century engaged with the evolutionary model that focused on chronicling the transformation from small-scale, egalitarian societies to large-scale, urban polities with significant social, economic, and political inequality and a centralized government (Flannery 1972; Johnson and Earle 1987; Upham 1990; Price and Feinman 1995; Manzanilla 1997; Trigger 1998; Marcus and Feinman 1998; Haas 2001a). These studies have tended to be highly materialistic (see a critique in Conrad and Demarest 1986) and too focused on classification (see critiques in Upham 1990; Earle 1991; Feinman and Neitzel 1984; A. Smith 2003; Yoffee 2005). Often the concept of political centralization is at the core of investigations of how highly complex societies or states have evolved politically (Haas 2001b). However, recent work questions the existence of a single type called “the State” (A. Smith 2003; Yoffee 2005) and the usefulness of a single definition of “political centralization” that applies to all ancient states (Blanton et al. 1996; Feinman 2001; Stein 1998). In other words, states are variable, and so are their political institutions.
Nevertheless, the evolutionary paradigm has made significant contributions to our understanding of ancient politics by identifying large-scale patterns of political organization. Stein’s (1994) research in Northern Mesopotamia is an excellent example. Like many Maya archaeologists of the 1980s and early 1990s, Stein is primarily interested in characterizing Mesopotamian states as either unitary or segmentary (or as either highly or weakly centralized, concepts that were originally proposed by Southall [1956]). Stein argues that ancient states should be viewed along the three main axes of scale, complexity and integration. Unitary states are at the high end of these axes and segmentary states are at the low end. Stein identifies segmentary states by the presence of administrative staff in both the capital center and in subsidiary administrative nodes (or centers), where they had the same political powers as in the capital. This feature of segmentary states is called replication. Furthermore, the central authority of a segmentary state has only limited control over its periphery, so its influence declines with distance from the center, as does its ability to extract tribute from peripheries farther away from the capital (Southall 1956, 260-61). Stein (1994) argues that rural settlements in segmentary states would have “few positive or negative incentives impelling them toward economic specialization in the sense of surplus production and exchange. Instead, villages would maintain a generalized, flexible subsistence system aimed at preserving a high degree of local political and economic autonomy” (12; see also Stein 1998). In contrast, the greater territorial scale, complexity, and integration of centralized or unitary states would push the rural economies of such states “toward the specialized production of large-scale food surpluses” that could then be extracted as tribute and used by the state government (Stein 1994).
Stein’s study is also concerned with the intersection of political power with economics. For example, he provides estimates of the minimum agricultural area needed to sustain each settlement in the Tell Leilan zone of the Khabur Plains of northern Mesopotamia using reconstructed population densities for rural and urban sites and data about agricultural productivity in this zone (14). The overlap of the sustaining agricultural area required by Tell Leilan with those of neighboring communities suggests that this newly urbanized center was not self-sufficient and needed to extract agricultural surplus from the surrounding villages and secondary centers (ibid.). Furthermore, Stein uses site rank-size distributions to assess regional political and economic integration following geographical approaches (see Johnson 1980, 1987; Christaller and Baskin 1966; Haggett 1966). The regional rank-size distribution of settlements exhibits a straight-line pattern (in log-linear or log-normal space) if there is a great deal of political and economic integration, but the distribution will deviate from the log-linear straight-line pattern when there is less regional integration (Stein 1994, 15). Based on this macro-scale approach, Stein was able to reconstruct the change in the regional settlement around Tell Leilan from one with little integration to one with high integration. Although agricultural tribute extraction is indicated by the settlement study, the state did not control all economic systems: ceramic production and exchange were localized and took place at all levels of the settlement hierarchy, as shown by the broad distribution of kiln wasters across the region.
Stein’s work is a sophisticated analysis of Mesopotamian political systems using the paradigms of political evolution and political economy that focus on political structures at the large-scale or societal level. His study exemplifies archaeology’s concern with political economy as the lens through which political power can be queried. Even recent reviews of the political organization of ancient states and empires use this framework: Smith and Schreiber (2005, 2006), Feinman and Nicholas (2004), M. Smith (2004), and Stein (1998) find economic organization a useful way to reconstruct the nature of state politics because they see economic control as the most important foundation of political power.
Postprocessual Case Studies from the Near East and North America
In the 1990s, archaeological studies of ancient politics shifted to a conflict-based model that examines organizational dynamics of complex societies instead of exploring state origins (Stein 1998; Stein, 2001, 214; Stein and Rothman 1994; Brumfiel 1992, 1994; Ehrenreich, Crumley, and Levy 1995; Mann 1986; Eisenstadt 1993). Moving away from generalized typological discussions of political organization, archaeologists have been drawn to micro-scale analyses of political dynamics. These studies have been deeply influenced by post-processual approaches in archaeology and in the social sciences in general (Hodder 1986; Giddens 1979, 1984; Bourdieu 1977, 1990; Foucault 1991) and have therefore emphasized the role of individuals, gender, households, and factions in manipulating, reacting to, and resisting political power within specific ecological, cultural, and historical contexts (Arnold 1995; Brumfiel 1992; Brumfiel and Fox 1994; Chapman 2003; Cowgill 1993; Dobres and Robb 2000; Haas 2001b, 13-16; Preucel 1991; Stein 1998, 2001; Stein and Rothman 1994).1 Rothman (2004) describes the theoretical shift in the paradigms of political archaeology: “With a concentration on the administrative, centralizing core largely rejected, these researchers propose that administrative organizations are one of a number of sometimes competing, and sometimes cooperating, institutions” (88; see also Smith 2003; Pollock 1999).
The Political Landscapes of the Urartian Empire
Adam Smith (2003) has made a case for a new approach to understanding political authority in early complex societies that focuses on the political landscape, or the spatial dimension of political life where relationships are
Created and reproduced. Instead of emphasizing on the “polarized concepts of coercion and consent” to account for integration in ancient states, he proposes authority as the crucial concept: “The central pillar of any political community is authority, the asymmetric, reciprocal public relationships where one actively practices a power to command that is confirmed by another as legitimate” (26). For Smith, “politics is not directly about territory, or urbanism, or architecture. It is about the production and reproduction of authority” (280).
He envisions a framework for understanding ancient politics that is predicated on four sets of relationships: 1) between polities; 2) between subjects and regimes within each polity; 3) between “power elites and grassroots organizations that produce regimes”; and 4) between “institutions within a governing apparatus” (26, 104).2 However, at all four levels, the landscape is critical in creating legitimacy: “Political authority is constituted through the making and transformation of landscapes by the governing bodies” (5). Thus, Smith argues that political power is materialized in the landscape and that the landscape in turn generates and legitimates political power. For Smith, landscape and therefore space are defined in a recursive manner through the interaction between space and individuals: “space, defined as the relationships between [human] bodies, forms and elements, is a product of negotiations between an array of competing actors with varying practical capacities to transform these relationships” (72). By placing relationships, authority, and landscape at the core of political systems, Smith incorporates the dynamic nature of political institutions in his analysis.
Authority as the central pivot of ancient politics is recursively constituted of power (the ability to direct the action of others) and legitimacy, which Smith defines as “the ability. . . to synchronize practices that perpetuate the existing political order within a discursive framework that generates the allegiance of subjects” (2003, 105-8). Smith argues that the “central spatial problems for constituting authority within polities” are “the delineation of a bounded territory within which a sovereign regime rules a community of subjects integrated by a shared sense of identity that binds them together in place” (151). He maintains that the “practical relationships between regimes and subjects. . . were constituted within the experience, perception, and imagination of political landscapes” (153). Regimes make up the political structure involving varied power blocs or factions: “Regimes are located in the intersection of a power elite that controls critical institutions of governance (the political apparatus) and grassroots coalitions of ‘like-minded’ subjects committed to sociopolitical reproduction” (155). The political apparatus is recognized archaeologically in the built environment of political centers, fortresses, palaces and administrative structures, monuments, the living space of the power elite, and so forth. The connections between these built features are mapped out across the landscape, especially in urban settlements, and are produced and reproduced through the imaginations, perceptions, and experiences of the grassroots subjects and political elites who live within these political landscapes (202-31).
Smith is also interested in the dialectical relationships between the multiple political institutions (which existed in all ancient states), which he sees “as both privileged sites of political action (or inaction) and arenas for contending social forces” (235). Rather than envisioning the “state” as one unitary institution, Smith constructs it as a number of institutions that at times work together and at other times work against each other. Echoing some of the processual-action theorists, Smith defines a political institution as “less a formal structure than a set of enduring procedures, routines, and values that establish the frameworks within which social and political relationships proceed” (ibid.). Institutions in a political regime are also manifested in the landscapes, primarily but not exclusively in the constructed locales of these institutions: “Political institutions are profoundly sited in place within an architectural landscape that draws together not only discourses on appropriate action but also physical demands on inter-institutional ties and imaginings of the governmental apparatus as a whole” (ibid., 235).
Smith uncovers the political institutions of the Urartian landscape of the Ararat plain during the eighth and seventh centuries BC by following the regularities in the siting, design, and architecture of Urartian political centers or fortresses. He analyzes how humans experienced the Urartian fortresses through the architectural organization, symmetry and distribution of access of these sites. He also examines how these fortresses are depicted clothed in religious symbolism in Urartian art. His analysis highlights that by the seventh century BC, the institutions of king and temple within the Urartian imperial administration had differentiated and were probably competing against each other, weakening the whole empire (254-63).
Archaeology of Power at Cahokia
Another important postprocessual (or historical-processual) approach to the archaeology of power is Pauketat’s analysis of Cahokia (2000, 2001, 2003, 2007). Pauketat, who is critical of debates that centered on whether
Cahokia was a chiefdom or a state, pursues the historical process of changing political relations by analyzing the practices of individuals rather than analyzing reified (or objectified, abstracted) institutions. For Pauketat, state formation is the process of creating one unitary identity through place and community: “It’s all about building collective memories and group identities into landscapes” (2007, 199). Rather than focusing on causes, he delves into the process: “Urbanization, landscape, and polity were inextricably wrapped up in the historical process whereby people were ‘gathered’ and their cultural practices and embodied identities and labor appropriated for the greater good” (177; see also Pauketat 2001, 2003). In other words, the pyramids and palaces that are at the apex of state political power “were not simply reflections of political institutions. Mounds and mound building were the [political] institutions coming into being’ (Pauketat 2007, 42, Pauketat’s italics). Rather than debating whether coercion or persuasion was more dominant in the rise of chiefs, rulers, or kings, Pauketat asserts that both the non-elite and the elite had agency in the process: “The strategies of ‘the few’ matter little, after all, if ‘the many’ refuse to heed them or accommodate them; power and hegemony are clearly ‘relational’ if not ‘consensual’” (Pauketat 2003, 56). But when the proto-elite and proto-commoner groups came together to build mounds, temples, pyramids, or palaces, they may not have predicted that the consequence of these construction projects would be social, political, or economic inequality. This is what Pauketat calls the “tragedy of the commoners” (2000).
Emerson (1997) also pursues a practice-oriented approach in his study of Cahokia’s political structure from the perspective of its rural settlements in the Midwest United States. Like Adam Smith, Emerson stresses that coercive power (what he calls political power) is always intertwined with persuasive-emotional power (what he calls religious power) because of the importance of authority and legitimacy. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s practice theory and Giddens’s structuration theory, Emerson argues that material culture should be seen as an active “medium of discourse” that recursively forms and reshapes social practices of the individual (26-30; see also Shanks and Tilley 1987).
To identify political structures and power dynamics at the rural tier of Cahokia’s settlement, Emerson pursues a dual approach by differentiating between the material culture associated with political (or coercive) power and the material culture associated with religious (or ideological) power (Emerson 1997, 37-67). Political power is manifested in the construction of an architecture of power, control over prestige/wealth items, and control over differential mortuary treatment (37-38). The architecture of political power is represented by “elaborate [elite] domestic structures, storage facilities associated with the elite accumulation of comestibles and goods, [other specialized architectural facilities such as meeting houses,] or ritual facilities that indicate [elite] access to supernatural power” (36-37). Religious power is manifested in the construction of religious architecture and a sacred landscape and through control over religiously charged artifacts, symbols, and cults (39-40). The architecture of ideological power is identified as “temples, [sweat houses], priest houses, and specialized elite mortuary facilities” (39).
Through this dual approach that considers the distribution of material markers of political and religious power across the landscape, Emerson is able to show that the Stirling phase (AD 1100-1200) was the apogee of political centralization at Cahokia and of its control over the periphery (167). At this time, ceremonial nodes (centers of religious power) were separate from civic nodes (centers of political power), showing a degree of functional differentiation or specialization in the rural tier of Cahokia’s settlement hierarchy that had not been seen before (ibid.). Elite roles also show specialization into separate political, religious, and mortuary functions (178). Emerson is also able to chart transformations in political leadership as storage shifted over time from the civic to the ceremonial nodes and as sweat houses were introduced into civic nodes. These changes may suggest a transition from civic-dominant authority to religious-dominant authority.
Power, Discipline, and Dynamics on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala
Our final case study comes from a region closer to the Maya lowlands: the early center of Ujuxte on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala. Michael Love (2002) explores the dimensions of power at Ujuxte during the Middle to Late Formative Period (600 BC to AD 100), when it was the seat of a complex chiefdom or early state (219-22).
Love is interested in “aspects of disciplinary power that are not institutional but concern daily social practice, particularly the organization of space” (216). Like Foucault, Love sees this disciplinary power as lacking a locus because it appears “through collections of practices shaped by the material world and [because it] pervaded all social relationships” (ibid.). According to Love, two aspects of this type of disciplinary power are important: first, it is hard to resist because it lacks a specific locus; second, it affects everyone but not equally because the dominant groups are not controlled to the same degree as the dominated groups (216-17). Love argues that “discipline of the body was a vital part of governance and. . . one of its principal forms was the control of people’s movements through space and time” (217). He asserts that the central feature of early states is that they involve a tug-of-war between dominance and resistance: this feature makes them such fragile societies that they cycle between periods of integration and disintegration (or “political dynamics”). Resistance is only rarely successful because the “networks of power and institutions controlled by elites are simply too much a part of the structure of society for resistance to succeed” (219). But although resistance may not succeed, it does affect and shape the state and its political institutions. For example, Love suggests that elites learned from episodes of resistance or from episodes of political disintegration and that they sought “new and enhanced means of grasping power” (ibid.).
Love explores how more institutional forms of power (economic and ideological) are integrated with the more diffuse form of disciplinary power (222-33). He begins with economic power: elites at Ujuxte had more control over subsistence production and in particular over food processing and storage technology, as is evidenced by the greater numbers of ground stone tools and large storage vessels found in elite architecture (223). Members of elite households also had more control over exchange; they consumed more imported obsidian and foreign pottery than members of lower-status households. But non-elites resisted this economic control. Elites and nonelites used two distinct ways to obtain obsidian needed to create all sorts of tools: while elites used mostly percussion blades (which were probably imported in finished form from the highland quarries), the non-elite obtained small nodules and spalls separately from the highland quarries and created their own small flake tools (224-25).
Elites at Ujuxte also had more control over the ideological realms than earlier elites. First, they “appropriated ritual functions” from the non-elite, and second, they “asserted an ideology that reinvented the basis of chiefly power” (226). While earlier commoners had numerous figurines and ceramic feasting equipment, Ujuxte non-elite households are devoid of figurines and large feasting vessels. To highlight the tremendous change in the frequency of household rituals involving figurines, we can compare the frequencies of figurines uncovered at Ujuxte and at the earlier site of La Blanca in the same region. Excavations at the earlier site of La Blanca produced approximately one figurine for every five ceramic vessels, but at Ujuxte, excavations produced only one figurine for every 2,500 ceramic vessels. At the same time that we see this decline in household rituals, there was “a dramatic new emphasis on public ritual [at Ujuxte], which was manifested in the construction of planned ceremonial groups” including a temple-pyramid over 20 meters tall, a ball court, and several plazas with formally arranged structures around them (227). Even more significantly, the new architectural ritual construction was replicated at Ujuxte’s subsidiary centers. Based on these multiple lines of evidence, Love concludes that “it is likely that rites and ‘official’ religious practices were usurped by the elite during the Caramelo phase [when Ujuxte flourished] and that household ritual waned in importance” (228).
Love uses the iconography of stone monuments and other art media to suggest that the elites of Ujuxte made new ideological claims that were very different from the claims of earlier chiefs. Previous coastal leaders “derived their identity and power by linking themselves to. . . powerful and dangerous [natural forces like lightning and earthquakes, and] animals, such as serpents” (228). In contrast, Ujuxte’s leaders made much stronger claims that they controlled the order of the whole universe by planning the entire city in alignment with astronomical directions of importance and placing symbols of cosmic order in numerous caches buried in the Central Plaza along the east-west axis of the site (228-29). One example of such symbols is the cross representing the World Tree that connected the different levels of the multilayered universe that Central American civilizations envisioned. At Ujuxte, the site itself represented a World Tree and the elite controlled this axis mundi. Love argues that we see at Ujuxte the beginning of the same claims to divinity that are characteristic of the Maya lowlands in the Classic period: “It was the ruler who maintained cosmological order through shamanic prowess and blood sacrifice” (228). This new ideological claim that the Ujuxte lords made “goes far beyond the ideology of earlier chiefs and their claims to control natural forces and spirits. The new ideology posited that without the ruler the world would fall into chaos” (229). Thus, all of a sudden, Ujuxte’s rulers claimed to be the center of the universe rather than just shamans who were able to control part of the universe. According to Love, this new claim to ideological power transformed Ujuxte’s lords into divine or semi-divine beings who were different from the commoner populace (ibid.).
In spite of this all-encompassing new ideology and even though the elite at Ujuxte appear to have usurped household rituals involving figurines and feasting, the commoners at the site resisted by elaborating other rituals, in particular those surrounding the dead. So in the ideological realm, again, we see that the commoners had sufficient power to resist in some way the attempts of the elite to control all ritual life.
Finally, Love asserts that the elite at Ujuxte developed a new type of power, disciplinary power, through the extensively planned orientation of the site in which structures, open space, and lines of access were oriented along the same approximately east-west and north-south axes (230-31). Daily social practices became highly spatialized, limiting contact between elites and non-elites to the moments the elites chose. More important, this spatial control regularized “people’s daily paths to a high degree, thereby promoting disciplined social actors more likely to comply with the desires of centralized institutions” (231). Ujuxte is indeed a special site because it is built on a grid, a feature found at few other sites in Mesoamerica. Teoti-huacan is the only other planned site that is organized along a grid system, which is usually interpreted as evidence that a powerful political elite could impose its ideas about urban planning. Love goes beyond this explanation to show how Ujuxte’s urban planning could change daily practice for the whole population, creating more obedient “subjects”: “Such regulation of movement, I suggest, disciplines actors in the same way that the regimes of schools, prisons, and clinics discussed by Foucault do,” but to a lesser degree (232). Although elites may have not intended to instill such new disciplinary practices, the effects on people’s movements and social practices were exactly that. Love affirms that a second consequence was “to create actors unsuited to active resistance. . . [although] they may have utilized the ‘weapons of the weak’” including hidden resistance such as poaching, pilfering, and delayed payment of taxes (ibid.; Scott 1990).
Conclusions: Toward an Archaeology of Power
This chapter presented four archaeological case studies that explored ancient politics: at Tell Leilan in northern Mesopotamia in the Near East; in the Urartian Empire of the first millennium BC, also in the Near East; at Cahokia in the southeastern United States, and at Ujuxte on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala in Central America. These studies are representative of the major theoretical shift in political models that occurred in archaeology in the late 1980s and 1990s.
The four studies also illustrate the types of evidence and methodologies used by archaeologists interested in power and the epistemological issues these scholars encountered in their attempts to reconstruct political dynamics in premodern societies. In the absence of ancient texts, archaeologists rely heavily on settlement patterns to understand many aspects of ancient states, including their extent and boundaries, population density and the scale of monumental construction, the number and distribution of first - , second - , or third-order centers. Archaeologists have also used the distribution of artifactual evidence (be it administrative records, political insignias, or evidence of economic or religious activities) to reconstruct the locales of political activities, the foundations of political power, and the identity of political actors. The decisions ancient states made about what to depict in their monumental or public art provides another window into how political actors constructed power in these societies.
An important point to be drawn from these studies is that we need to continue to pursue the study of political power and its dynamics by considering in detail the manifestations of political power in the material world of archaeology at all the levels of each polity, from the commoner individual and household to the village or local community, the district or larger communal hinterland, and the polity and suprapolity levels. Because all “politics is local politics” (O’Neill and Hymel 1995), we need to reconstruct political power along these multiple levels of human societies, from the local to the suprapolity.
Although the micro-scale studies presented in this chapter may appear to be the most promising new arena for providing insights into political dynamics, we cannot lose sight of the political macro-scale because it is the one that provides the structure, institutions, or rules and possibilities for social encounters (Bourdieu 1990; Stein 1998; DeMarrais 2005; Barrett 2000). Rather than placing the macro scale (or “power over” arena) in opposition to the micro scale (or “power to” arena), these two social realms should be seen as complementary. Therefore, I will pursue the threads of political dynamics at three scalar levels: the macro level of the polity and its supra-polity interactions, the middle level of the internal complexities of the polity, and the micro level of individuals, households, and small communities that interacted with each other and with political elites in the capital in a tug-of-war of dominance and resistance.
In the following discussion, Chapter 4 presents the macro-scale analysis of Classic Maya polities and Chapter 5 addresses the middle scale of the internal political structure of these kingdoms. Finally, Chapter 6 endeavors a micro-scale exploration of the discourses of political power from different political factions including commoners. All three scales of the political arena contribute important threads to our understanding of ancient Maya societies because the flow of power from the individual upward to the Maya ruler was shaped, enabled, and/or restricted by the structure of the interactions among individuals, administrators, leaders, and factions. Such an approach to Classic Maya political structure envisions a plurality of political forms and political dynamics. At any one time, there were probably different kinds of Maya polities, some that could be easily envisioned as states and others that probably could not (Scarborough, Valdez, and Dunning 2003), some large and complex, others smaller and simpler, some more theocratic, others less so.3 In the following chapters, I will explore the critical aspects of these complexities and dynamics of Classic Maya polities.
Stein (1998) calls for a new “archaeology of power” that can be pursued by integrating textual, iconographic, and archaeological evidence of claims to power with regional analyses of political economies that examine “variation in ‘nodes of power’ across the landscape” by recording “the behavioral correlates of the exercise of power. . . [or the] variation in patterns of production, exchange, and consumption of different goods or forms of value (such as labor)” (26-27). I would add to this definition the importance of political rituals as the embodiment of political power, authority, and legitimation (as I explore in Chapter 6).
World History
