The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Politics (review)

This is a wide-ranging and ambitious volume. Smith's primary archaeological field of research is the early first millennium B.C.E. realm of Urartu of southern Transcaucasia, but the book makes comparisons with ancient Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica. The central idea appears to locate politics and political authority in the concrete control of territory. Smith deprecates what he believes is the conventional tradition that emphasizes the history of the state. This tradition concentrates on the evolution in time of the growth (and decline) of kingdoms. Ultimately, the tradition implies a teleological reverence for temporality that, if not "idealistic," at least does not attend to how the command of space grounds politics.

Smith shows how this command operated in his three ancient polities. Part of his work demonstrates how regimes dominate land in standard military ways. But, of greater significance, Smith talks about the symbolic dimensions of politics located in geography—depictions of violence or authority in buildings and statuary and walls that literally cast a shadow over the earth. He also notes how alterations in land use not only reflect but also embody changes in the organization of a state. The title of the book, with its accent on landscape, best captures the author's view of the synergy between power and terrain.

In addition to this creative examination of governance in the ancient world, Smith uses this guiding idea to explore contemporary affairs of state. He makes an arresting juxtaposition between the Sumerian King List—a clay tablet dating at c. 2125 B.C.—and Paul M. Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1987). Each has a limited vision of politics, removing from rulership the element of it rooted in the way that the imperial mind envelopes terra firma. Similarly, from time to time the book comments on how in today's world political matters are embedded in something material, for example, the Vietnam War Memorial or Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (New York, 1985). Smith has a wide-ranging concern not just for the interpretation of the distant past but the relevance of such interpretation for the present.

Unfortunately, The Political Landscape is virtually unreadable. This fact almost fatally undermines its creative and intelligent scholarship. Smith is inordinately fond of contemporary jargon—repeating ugly catch phrases like "contemporary theorizations" ad nauseum—and he does not write clearly or grammatically. Smith has not met a bit of theory that he does not inflict on his text. As a result of these flaws, much of the book's meaning is barely intelligible.