Ancient Maya Political Dynamics

3. Archaeological Studies of Ancient Politics

3 Archaeological Studies of Ancient Politics Archaeologists have been interested in political power for many generations (see Trigger 1974). In this chapter, I present archaeological studies from outside the Maya world that focus on ancient politics. The discussion is not meant to be an exhaustive review of the literature, which is extensive, but rather is a review of major trends in archaeological studies of political power, highlighted by case studies. My concern in this chapter is with political power in complex societies that we call “states.” These will serve as comparisons with Classic Maya polities, such as the one centered at Motul de San José, where I have worked for the last decade. My goal is to understand how archaeologists approach the issues and problems involved in reconstructing power in archaeological societies for which few or no written historical records have survived. The archaeology of political power has been heavily influenced by the paradigms of political anthropology. Until the 1980s, the paradigms of neoevolutionism and political economy were dominant. Archaeologists were most concerned with macro-scale political processes and institutions, and more often than not, they viewed political power as state power through the lens of economics. Beginning in the 1990s, the focus shifted and archaeologists began to inquire about political processes rather than about origins and causes of political complexity. Instead of viewing political power as resting exclusively within the hands of state governments, archaeologists began to consider the middle and micro scales of ongoing political processes , focusing on individuals, households, and communities and the actions that create, change, or reproduce norms, customs, and structures of the larger society. Archaeologists have now begun to incorporate the roles of ideology, religion, and rituals in their assessments of political processes, institutions, and power instead of viewing political power as an economically driven machine. Archaeological Studies of Ancient Politics · 47 The Sociocultural Evolution and Political Economy Paradigms: 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 48 · Ancient Maya Political Dynamics center and in subsidiary administrative nodes (or centers), where they had the...