State Formation in Italy and Greece: Questioning the Neoevolutionist Paradigm ed. by Nicola Terrenato and Donald C. Haggis (review)

The chapters in this volume are predominantly by archaeologists; the data set is comprised mostly of the excavated remains of burial sites, settlements, and other traces of human alteration of the landscape. But the central topic to be addressed is state formation, which is a mismatch with the evidence. Mortuary remains, surface scatters of pottery and other human artifacts, and foundations of buildings (or even better-preserved remnants of buildings) cannot inform us about a complex, nonmaterial, and essentially ideational social process like state formation. At best, evidence of certain kinds of large-scale buildings—fortification walls and/ or palace complexes, for example—or of organized patterns of settlements and roads, may be suggestive of something that might legitimately be called a state, depending upon one's definition of "state." But to be certain that a state actually existed, and to say anything useful about its formation, requires the right sort of written source material.

This basic incongruity between, on the one hand, data and methodology and, on the other, goal or purpose overshadows this collection. The book's surviving virtue lies in the fact that some of the chapters present and analyze interesting sets of archaeological data. Among the best in this regard are Chapter 3—"'Society against the State?' Contextualizing Inequality and Power in Bronze Age Crete," by Krysti Damilaki and Giorgos Vavouranaki; Chapter 5—"Monumental Architecture and the Construction of the Mycenaean State," by Rodney D. Fitzsimmons; Chapter 10—"Constructions of Authority through Ritual: Considering Transformations in Ritual Space as Reflecting Society in Iron Age Etruria," by Carrie Murray; Chapter 13—"Seeds and the City: Archaeobotany and State Formation in Early Rome," by Laura Motta; and Chapter 14—"Relocating the Center: A Comparative Study," by Albert J. Ammerman.

Too many of the other chapters, however, seek to cover the mismatch between evidence and analysis through a recourse to methodological and/or compositional follies that are all-too-common in the ivory tower of academic research: One of these is the attempt to compensate for inadequate data by importing a "model" drawn from another field or discipline, thereby covering the gaps in data that would otherwise make useful analysis and far-reaching conclusions impossible.

As a case in point, J. Theodore Peña, purporting to illustrate "State Formation in Southern Coastal Etruria" (Chapter 9), employs as his prime heuristic tool something called the "Kipp-Schortman model."¹ This anthropological model posits that "when traders from state societies develop exchange relations with chiefdoms in the context of a trade diaspora, exchange will at the outset assume the forms of gift exchange between elites" (quoted on 190). Regardless of the model's validity, however, applying it assumes a number of things that Peña cannot prove—for example, the existence of chiefdoms in early Etruria and the practice of gift exchange between Etruscan and foreign elites. Although Peña's chapter contains interesting material evidence of developing exchanges between Etruscans and Greek and Phoenician traders, its relevance to state formation is problematical at best, and the relevance of Kipp-Schortman is purely hypothetical, not to say implausible.

D. I. Redhouse and Simon Stoddart's chapter, "Mapping Etruscan State Formation" (Chapter 8) illustrates another methodological folly—the attempt to compensate for inadequate data by using mathematical symbology and statistical formulae to disguise the arbitrariness of analysis. Redhouse and Stoddart use something called the "XTENT model" to apply "mathematical reasoning" to their topic (165): I = f(C) - k.d (I < 0).²

This formula certainly looks impressive, and—to the mathematically uninitiated—highly sophisticated. But doubts arise when the meaning of the symbols becomes clear. For example, k is a constant representing the fall-off of influence (I), which, the authors assure us, they "investigated empirically." But this constant is inherently immeasurable given the limited data set available and the lack of any definite criteria for determining influence (which is...