Palaces and Power in the Americas. From Peru to the Northwest Coast (review)

The book presents a range of newer and known research in regard to the formal aspects, spatial organization, location, and potential function of elite residences, temples, and other structures in the Mesoamerican sphere. It introduces important aspects in regard to "palaces," the large residential structures that also play a role in conveying power or that are meant to transcend the architectural form and size of a structure into dominance, whether political, social, theocratic, or economic. Furthermore, the book points out that U.S. archaeology traditionally does not use the term "palace" for such large North American structures of pre-Columbian times, such as the Cahokia mounds close to modern-day St. Louis, Missouri, since a palace implies the existence of a state. Established anthropology in the U.S. seems to be reluctant to accept the fact that "native states" in North America, materialized in large temples (religious) or residential structures, indeed did exist. This is an important thought that breaks open the commonly held belief that such polities did not exert any rule, did not possess clear organizational might, and were local rather than expansive. Scholars might wonder how such complex structures as Chaco Canyon's Pueblo Bonito, another one of such large "palace" structures on the North American continent, could have come into being without sophisticated organizational constructs of a ruling class and without first-class expertise in environmental (solar exposure, or protection from solar gain, effects of thermal mass), mathematical (lunar positioning, orientation, footprint, geometry of the site), and building construction aspects. Pueblo Bonito is equally an example that such building centers or palaces might have had extensive outreach, far beyond their commonly attributed terrains, as seen in the recently discovered cocoa residues, a plant whose closest availability to New Mexico is some 1,200 miles away. Here, the book truly introduces a new view of pre-Columbian polities and challenges the common belief than on this continent no society ever had any greater authority or jurisdiction.

Many of the book's interpretations in regard to potential use and function of entire urban fabrics of settlements or their individual buildings are assumptions, and therefore mostly hypothetical. We simply do not know whether an area of an architectural floor plan of a temple, or elite residence, was used in the presented fashion. It seems also that in many other fields of research the investigator "discovers" within the framework of his or her personal societal context, time, and culture. What if, for example, the small, linearly repeated chambers of the Inka's Farfán were not "elite residences" but holding and feeding cells for voluntary or involuntary sacrifices? Steve Bourget documented such mass human sacrifices by the Moche of Northern Peru. What we know, or think we know, comes almost exclusively from the stone structures still in existence today. That, of course, excludes non-stone habituations of the presumably large military, manufacturing, and storage of non-treasure items, such as agricultural products and their processing, which provided—besides warfare—the base for dominance, wealth, and the resulting power. The assumed large wealth collected by rulers and the elite in Mesoamerica, as exemplified by the vast, windowless treasure-storage cells in the depth of most palaces (areas of compounds, as the book rightly points out, which could not have possibly been used for human habitation due to their lack of daylighting and ventilation), most likely was a result not only of military dominance but of trade. Such trade would have required an infrastructure of enclosed or semi-enclosed spaces for the processing, storage, and shipping of goods. Unlike the stone of palaces and elite residences, the material of such secondary infrastructural entities or the residences of the commoner rotted away, so we are left with a selection of the most prominent, most artful, and in terms of construction and material selection...