Review Feature

Review Feature
Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations, by Norman Yoffee
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-81837-0 hardback 45 & US$75; ISBN 0-521-52156-4 paperback 19.99 & US$34.99; 291 pp.

For more than a century, archaeologists have frequently been drawn to understand the human past in broadly evolutionary terms, applying Darwinian thinking to the development of human societies. The unilinear models of human development that often result typically regard the state as the culmination of human progress, the end-point of a journey through intervening stages of bands, tribes and chiefdoms. Neo-evolutionary thinking was especially prevalent from the 1940s onwards, in the work of Julian Steward and others writing on the origins of the state. In the volume reviewed, Norman Yoffee challenges the former dominance of the neo-evolutionary approach, arguing that over the past half century it has stied rather than stimulated our understanding of early state development. Yoffee contests the idea that states develop through a series of programmatic stages from less complex kinds of society. Instead, he stresses the diversity of the archaic state, drawing heavily on his specialist knowledge (drawn from texts as well as archaeology) of early Mesopotamia. Here we see city-state societies in which heterarchies play a role alongside hierarchies, and in which the varieties of lived experience varied considerably from place to place, even though all may at some level be considered to have been part of a shared Mesopotamian civilization. Yoffees book is not, however, concerned solely with Mesopotamia; far from it, he draws comparative evidence from Egypt, South and East Asia and Central and South America to demonstrate the diversity and uidity of the entities he is describing. Few of them conform to models that might be drawn from ethnography, and each state may in many ways be considered unique. Yet in a broader perspective, all states arise through a widespread pattern of change that has taken place in human society since the end of the Pleistocene in which individuals and groups have competed for control of resources. Yoffee concludes that The central myth about the study of the earliest states ... is that there was something that could be called the archaic state, and that all of the earliest states were simply variations on this model. The methodological alternative is to consider each society (of whatever type) as individual and unique, and constantly in a state of ux. In this review feature we invite a series of archaeologists specializing in the study of early states to address this and other issues raised by this important book. We begin, however, with an opening statement from the author himself.
Cambridge Archaeological Journal 15:2, 25168
doi:10.1017/S0959774305000120 2005 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Printed in the United Kingdom.

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Overview Norman Yoffee

This book is about the earliest states, particularly the constellations of power in them, and also about their evolution, that is, where varieties of power came from. Economically-stratied and socially-differentiated societies developed all over the world from societies that were little stratied and relatively undifferentiated; large and densely-populated cities developed from small habitation sites and villages; social classes developed from societies that were structured by kinrelations which functioned as frameworks for production, and so forth. Although archaeologists have produced spectacular new data in the last decades, our understanding of the evolution of the earliest cities, states, and civilization has not kept pace with the new ndings. This book reviews theories that are now seen as inadequate to do the job and discusses new ways towards explaining major trends in human societies that created the world we now live in. I write this abstract having returned from a dramatic conference held in Vancouver, British Columbia, on early states in China. The eld of Chinese archaeology is in zestful ferment, as the incredible amount of superb archaeological work on late prehistory and early cities and states in China, especially in the second millennium BC, is changing just about everything we thought we knew about the evolution of early states in China. New interpretations challenge the former conceptions about the monolithic control of Shang states over large amounts of territory and now stress interactions among many cities and their leaders. Young Chinese archaeologists have rejected older dogma within China about slave or feudal societies and eagerly are embarking on comparative studies with other ancient cities and states in order to investigate what is similar to evolutionary trajectories in China and what is quite distinctive. It is an exciting time to be an archaeologist in China and, indeed, it is exhilarating to be able to draw such comparisons in evolutionary sequences with major new data and ideas emerging from every region on the planet where the rst states arose. In my own area of Mesopotamia, we now know that the earliest cities did not emerge only in the south, and arguments based on adaptations to environmental qualities of the region must be completely reassessed. New and old social evolutionary theory Attempts to build new social evolutionary theory, of course, must begin with the rejection of older usages of 252

the term evolution, namely those holding that world history was a continuation of biological evolution, in which societies advance from lower to higher forms. I join the critics of those who created categories of human progress and who sought to t prehistoric and modern traditional societies into them. I contest these myths of social evolution: the earliest states were basically all the same kind of thing (whereas bands, tribes, and chiefdoms all varied considerably within their types); ancient states were totalitarian and stable regimes, ruled by despots who monopolized the ow of goods, services, and information and imposed true law and order on their powerless citizens; the earliest states enclosed large regions and were territorially integrated; typologies should and can be devised in order to measure societies in a ladder of progressiveness; prehistoric representatives of these social types can be correlated, by analogy, with modern societies reported by ethnographers; and structural changes in political and economic systems were the engines for, and are hence the necessary and sufcient conditions that explain, the evolution of the earliest states. In this book I question the image of the earliest states as totalities (as in such phrases as Teotihuacan did this or that) within which political competition and social conict were rare, and I critique types of societies as essentially content-free, abstract models that say little about how people lived or understood their lives. I want to contribute to the rehabilitation of social evolutionary theory as a means for investigating how the emergence of new and differentiated social roles and new relations of power in early agricultural societies occurred and how differentiated groups were recombined by means of the development of new ideologies of order and hierarchy. These ideologies, I argue, are at the core of what we call ancient states. It has taken archaeologists many decades to reject the neo-evolutionist proposition that modern ethnographic examples represent prehistoric stages in the development of ancient states. Dening types of societies (e.g. bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states), establishing putative commonalities within a type, and postulating simple lines (or even a single line) of evolutionary development had led archaeologists to strip away most of what is interesting (such as belief systems) and important (such as the multifaceted struggle for power) in ancient societies and consigned those modern societies that are not states and in some cases do not wish to become them to the scrap-heap of history. Who invented types of societies and why This book begins by considering why such theories

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were invented and in which academic environments. In the 50s and 60s in the US, archaeologists, who were normally minority members of anthropology departments, sought to become genuine anthropologists by nding ethnographic types of societies in the archaeological record. As they shamelessly decontextualized the history of these societies, however, they failed to note that social anthropologists had systematically abandoned any attempt to type and rank societies. It is not surprising that archaeologists in the UK and other parts of the world, where archaeology was not considered a sub-section of anthropology, beginning in the late 70s, utterly rejected this form of neo-evolutionism. However, it is less clear why they also abandoned research into large-scale social change and even comparative studies. The neo-evolutionist rhetoric had done its work all too well as archaeologists shrank even from using the term social evolution in favour of discussing social development or social change. Neo-evolutionists were obsessed with identifying types, such as chiefdoms or states, and in developing methods that would allow them to nd them in the archaeological record. In the 1990s, archaeologists, having rejected the neo-evolutionist project and inuenced by things like practice theory, began to ask not what states were but what they did. In the new millennium, archaeologists, like many other social scientists and humanists alike, have tended to study the limits of power in early states, what states did not do. In this book I provide some case-studies of how people constructed their lives in early states quite apart from the demands of rulers, no matter how repressive they were. Cities, states, and civilizations Certain central trends in the evolution of early states occurred in cities. First, I show that many of the earliest cities in the world emerged from a context of modest village life, and that cities evolved extremely rapidly. I assert that the process of urbanization was also one of ruralization: the countryside was created as the population of villages owed into the earliest cities. Differentiated and stratied groups were recombined in cities under new kinds of centralized leadership. New ideologies were created that insisted that such leadership was not only possible, it was the only possibility. The earliest states the state being dened as the governmental (political) centre of a society as well as the territory controlled by the governmental centre were in effect created in cities. Most of the early states were territorially small, indeed, can be called city-states or micro-states and a number of such 253

city-states interacted (as peer-polities) and shared an ideology of statecraft. I refer to the larger social order and set of shared values in which several early states were culturally embedded as a civilization. Ideologies of statecraft and agency in states The earliest states were made natural, that is, legitimized, through central symbols, expensively supported and maintained by inner elites who constituted the cultural and administrative core of the state. Ideologies of statecraft also set the rules for how leaders and would-be leaders must guard these symbols and perpetuate the knowledge of how to maintain, display, and reproduce them. Although neo-evolutionist archaeologists tended to ignore the meaning of cities, cities rerouted the practical experiences of everyday life, in cities and beyond them, and incubated the new ideologies in which economic and social differences and bases of power could be expressed and contested. This book presents examples from Mesopotamia and other regions of how early states attempted (unsuccessfully) to simplify social complexity, how law and order were conceived and administered in early states, how ideology was instituted in everyday life, and how local leaders negotiated with rulers and/or contested their dominion. In Mesopotamia I show how law codes were not the foundations of order in society but were instruments used to subvert local authority. I discuss how individuals with my case-studies focusing on women made play with venerable symbols in order to create new economic and social realities in changing historical conditions. In discussing the collapse of Mesopotamian civilization, I note that Mesopotamians nally made choices about which aspects of their identity to emphasize and which to forget. Eventually, the memory of Mesopotamia was kept alive only by those whom Mesopotamians had conquered or who had conquered Mesopotamia, not by those in Mesopotamia itself until modern residents of Mesopotamia revived and gave new life to the ancient memory. The comparative method in social evolutionary theory In the concluding chapters of the book, I consider how societies that were arguably not states, such as ancestral puebloans at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico and Mississippians at Cahokia, must be understood on their own terms, not as pre-states. I further argue that by weighting the various domains of power in ancient states, one can begin to understand the signi-

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cant differences among ancient states. As I have indicated, the search for appropriate comparisons among the earliest cities, states, and civilizations is a relatively new enterprise in social evolution research, now freed from its typological shackles. It is important that the projects goals include not only explanations of why things happened as they did, but also why they didnt happen some other way. For those who rightly wish to study the particular qualities of a civilization, the comparative method offers the only opportunity to posit uniqueness. Understanding and comparing developmental sequences is well within the capabilities of modern archaeologists, and I hope to have made some progress in this endeavour. It is surprising but salutary to note that, in spite of the myths that have dominated theories about the evolution of the earliest states, many archaeologists never stopped nding counter-indications to the myths: complex veins of stratication and differentiation, many kinds of hierarchies, the large sizes and political independence of many of the worlds earliest cities, the limits on the absolute power of rulers, and the endemic struggle for power in the earliest states. Although I have traced broad evolutionary schemes in this book, produced social-science-like generalizations and even one law and have asserted that calculating the numbers of people and the size of settlements are indispensable goals in social research (even if the numbers are little more than educated guesses), and have sometimes written (I fear) in socialscientese, I have tried to resist the reductionist and dehumanizing tendencies inherent in much social evolutionary research. There are many speculations in this book and considerable uncertainty about how societies and their developmental histories can be compared and contrasted, and my new rules of social evolutionary theory are not meant as substitutes for creative thinking about how people in the past understood their lives. I do not apologize for all this open-endedness. Indeed, unburdening archaeological research from some of its central myths (which have been masquerading as systematically organized knowledge) can lead to what archaeologists do best: tenaciously discovering, precisely dissecting, and pleasurably confronting the living, surprising past. Norman Yoffee Department of Near Eastern Studies Frieze Bldg University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 USA Email: nyoffee@umich.edu 254

Factoids for the Mythoclast Roger Matthews

Professor Yoffee has produced a highly-stimulating book that will rapidly nd its way onto university course reading lists across a broad spectrum of archaeological and anthropological courses. It is rare to encounter an academic book that expounds a clear line of argument while maintaining an entertaining style of discourse. That Yoffee has succeeded in this end is due to the clarity of his expression, the impressive breadth of his learning, and his admirable determination not to take himself, or anyone else, too seriously. The scope of Yoffees book is global but the major emphasis is on early states of Mesopotamia, principally modern Iraq. The myths of Yoffees title centre on neoevolutionary conceptions of the earliest states as closely similar socio-political entities dominated by totalitarian control over society and economy. While seeking to challenge this rigid characterization of archaic states, Yoffee accepts that the nature of rule in these states was always repressive and exploitative (p. 2). Yoffees aim, then, is not so much to question the characterization of archaic states as totalitarian but rather to explore how attempts at totalitarian control were variously challenged and negotiated. He does so through consideration of the limitations of power imposed on rulers and elite groups and through study of bottom-up aspects of social power relations in those states. In many respects Yoffee succeeds in this aim through meticulous, sometimes microhistorical, approaches to specic case-studies principally from the Mesopotamian past. Occasionally the explanatory statements come over as slightly slick: In the rst millennium BC in Mesopotamia, the Neo-Assyrian kings took advantage of the lack of competitors in Western Asia to build a genuine empire (p. 58) suggests that Assyrian kings had a master-plan for control of the universe and had only to wait till no-one was looking in order to realize their evil schemes. Was it really as simple and purposive as that? And was not the lack of competitors achieved and maintained through the Assyrians own actions against their neighbours rather than a precondition of those actions? What is somewhat lacking as backdrop to these case-studies, and to the overall discussion throughout, is a full consideration of the selectivity and biases of the available evidence when we are looking at the early state in Mesopotamia (and doubtless elsewhere too). It would have been useful to have had, early on in the volume, an analytical review of what the nature

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of the evidence is, how it has been assembled over the decades since Mesopotamian archaeology and history began, what is likely to be missing from the available assemblage of evidence, and nally how theories and interpretations of the Mesopotamian past have been shaped how myths have been generated by the contours of those biases and choices inherent in the available evidence. Mesopotamian archaeologists predilection for excavating large cities, for excavating central high points of cities, for ignoring small villages and hinterlands of cities, for failing to realize the full potential of integration of textual-archaeological approaches (against which tide Yoffee swims strongly), for failing to record in sufcient detail or scope the nature of the evidence destroyed by them in course of excavation and, perhaps above all, for so abysmally failing to publish the results of their endeavours in full fashion are all factors that fundamentally affect how we look at, or are permitted to look at, the states of the Mesopotamian past. We cannot fully appreciate the problem of how to demythologize the study of that past without rst apprehending the rents and tears in the fabric of the evidence. One example of bias in the available evidence is the effect of the modern political scene on the distribution of current and recent archaeological activity in Western Asia. When Yoffee talks about an urban environment in the north that was at least as old as the cities in the south (p. 55) we need to keep in mind that our archaeological understanding of southern Mesopotamia in the earlier part of the fourth millennium is extremely weak. The large buildings now attested in the north at sites such as Arslantepe and Tell Brak argue for a considerable degree of socio-political development in this region by 3500 BC, at the latest, although I am not convinced that we are yet dealing with an urban society rather than large-scale cultic centres for essentially rural communities. For the south, the available information is extremely patchy, almost negligible in terms of excavated materials. We simply do not know what lies under the massive late fourth-millennium ruins of Uruk-Warka, nor does our understanding of the pottery assemblages of the period encourage condence in interpretations based on selective survey of the region so far (Nissen 2002). The lack of modern eldwork in southern Iraq, and a corresponding boom in eldwork in adjacent regions of Turkey and Syria, has swung the emphasis of interpretation strongly against the south Mesopotamian side, a swing likely to be reversed at some unknown time in the future when fresh eldwork can address this, and a hundred other, germane issues. In the context of Mesopotamia, Yoffee lays em255

phasis on the city-state as the key socio-political entity. He sees city-states as uncomfortably embedded in state and imperial structures (p. 59), a statement that echoes earlier suggestions by Yoffee (1995, 300) and others (Liverani 1979, 297) that imperialism was not natural in ancient Mesopotamia. Empires have a long and highly colourful history in the Mesopotamian past, the lands of Iraq being subject to imperial control, from within or without, on a score of occasions through time. Rather than characterize this tendency to imperialism as unnatural and causing discomfort to the city-state mode of socio-political life, I wonder if there is not a productive exploration to be made of how city-states contained within themselves the seeds of imperial ambition, the codes of imperial structure, and the preconditions for imperial collapse. The citystate/empire discourse is one that can be addressed over very long timescales in the Mesopotamian arena, but has yet to be adequately explored and will not be until it is accepted that empires were as natural a part of the Mesopotamian past as city-states. To believers myths explain facts, to the mythoclast they deliver factoids at best. But do the myths delineated by Yoffee enjoy genuine subscribers, and are they therefore worth the struggle? Yoffee writes that
Neo-evolutionary theory depicted the rise of states as a series of punctuated (that is, extremely rapid) and holistic changes from one stage (or type of society) to another. In each stage, all social institutions politics, economy, social organization, belief system were linked so that change had to occur in all institutions at the same time, at the same pace, and in the same direction (p. 22).

While this sentence may describe a logical outcome of an initial belief in a neo-evolutionary model for state development, it is hard to think of a single statement in recent or current literature that demonstrates such a rigid attitude to the study of this topic. Does anyone still really believe this? It is notable that at several places in the text, as here, where Yoffee rather sharply characterizes the putative extremes of neo-evolutionary thinking, he fails to cite specic authors or texts to support his assertions. Perhaps he is being polite, a rare and commendable attribute, but I wonder if the myths are not at least partly in the form of Straw Men set up to receive the sallies of Yoffees capable wit. Since neo-evolutionism never purported to be a theory of social change rather than a theory of classication (p. 31), is it fair or productive to critique it for something it never professed to be? This brings me lastly to the title of Yoffees book. The book deserves a more positive title, one that does

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not situate the study in opposition to a series of ideas that had their origins in Second World War USA and whose sell-by date expired a long time ago. Yoffees ideas are healthy and vigorous owers that can stand by themselves, as is unremittingly demonstrated throughout this book, and a more tting title would have been one that pointed forward and stressed the originality of Yoffees approach rather than one that harks back to an already defunct and never hugely inuential mode of thought. In any case, Yoffee has written a superb and exciting book that will provoke thought and discussion wherever it is read. Roger Matthews Institute of Archaeology University College London 3134 Gordon Square London WC1H 0PY UK Email: roger.matthews@ucl.ac.uk References
Liverani, M., 1979. The ideology of the Assyrian empire, in Power and Propaganda: a Symposium on Ancient Empires, ed. M.T. Larsen. (Mesopotamia Copenhagen Studies in Assyriology 7.) Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 297317. Nissen, H.J., 2002. Uruk: key site of the period and key site of the problem, in Artefacts of Complexity: Tracking the Uruk in the Near East, ed. J.N. Postgate. (Iraq Archaeological Reports 5.) Warminster: British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 116. Yoffee, N., 1995. Political economy in early Mesopotamian states. Annual Review of Anthropology 24, 281311.

Going Still Further? Bruce G. Trigger

The study of early civilizations often reminds me of the proverbial blind men trying to understand an elephant. It is a challenged enterprise to say the least, but with cooperation and patience investigators can hope to learn something. For this reason, it is reassuring that, while our respective approaches to the study of early civilizations are very different, I nd myself agreeing with most of what Norman Yoffee has to say in this profoundly interesting volume. In general, Yoffee uses the term archaic state to refer to the same societies that I have designated as early 256

civilizations (Trigger 2003), and, for reasons I will explain later, I will continue to employ this term. We are in accord that early civilizations/archaic states were not disciplined, conict-free totalities; that they were characterized by an unprecedented degree of vertical and horizontal differentiation that encouraged the development of many new forms of public identities; that, while rulers strove to appear all-powerful, their polities were fragile, often unruly, and not infrequently fell apart in times of crisis; that within these societies economic, social, and political power reinforced each other and produced material correlates that archaeologists can study; and that in these societies, urban centres were central arenas of state activity where elites sought to justify and reinforce their power by making it appear to be in accord with the cosmic order. On a more general level, I have long argued that valid social evolutionary theory cannot be operationally distinguished from the study of world history; a position long taken for granted by palaeontologists when dealing with the development of all species of plants and animals. Yoffee traces how the study of early civilizations has moved away from the now discredited unilinear approaches that American neo-evolutionary anthropologists propounded in the 1950s and 1960s. Much of the damage was done early on by Julian Steward (1949) who, although he described himself as a multilinear evolutionist, created a unilinear scheme that had all early civilizations passing through the same stages of development and decline and formulated an ecological explanation of why they were supposed to have done so. Yoffee examines the diverse reasons why so many young American archaeologists embraced the concepts of neo-evolutionary anthropology in the 1960s. Having been solidly grounded in possibilist geography and comparative ethnography while I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto in the late 1950s, I was never able to subscribe to the tenets of neo-evolutionism. I was also deeply impressed by the alternative, and genuinely multilinear, models of the development of early civilizations created by Childe (1928) and Frankfort (1956), who demonstrated the very different ways in which early civilizations had developed in ancient Egypt and Iraq. I can conrm Yoffees observation that archaeologists who opposed processual archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s risked disciplinary marginalization. But why did prominent non-neo-evolutionary sociocultural anthropologists who knew better not actively engage processual archaeologists in a potentially therapeutic debate at this time? Did they not regard theorizing by archaeologists as worthy of their attention? If so,

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the situation in American anthropology has changed for the better. In retrospect, it appears that in the 1960s there was not yet enough archaeological data available concerning the origins and development of early civilizations to support a critical dialogue among archaeologists themselves. It is also noteworthy that there were no ethnographic examples of societies at a stage of development that appeared fully equivalent to early civilizations; the last independent examples of this sort of society having been incorporated into the modern world system during the colonial division of Africa in the late nineteenth century. Most preindustrial societies studied by professional anthropologists were characterized by international religions and other features not associated with early civilizations. The fact that early civilizations had to be studied by a combination of archaeological and historical rather than archaeological and ethnographic data further isolated the examination of such societies from anthropological research that might have called into question the neo-evolutionary assumptions concerning them. New techniques utilizing archaeological and various sorts of textual sources had to be produced to encourage the development of a productive anthropological approach to the study of early civilizations. Yoffee maintains that the earliest states varied enormously. My own research supports the humanist belief that every early civilization represented a unique design for living, in the sense that those who were associated with it shared a distinctive understanding of what it meant to be human and to live in the world. Such patterns of beliefs exhibited the same idiosyncratic cross-cultural variation as did art styles, except that, unlike art styles, they had selective signicance (Trigger 1993, 62637). Yet some remnants of the unilinear evolutionary thinking that Yoffee rightly rejects may continue to inuence his treatment of archaic states, especially with respect to their institutional arrangements. Assuming that societies must evolve progressively from smaller to larger, Yoffee, like Mann (1986), concludes that citystates constituted the normal political units of early civilizations. Ancient Egypt is too well documented as having evolved as a territorial state for this interpretation to be rejected, but Yoffee tends to regard Egypt as a puzzling exception. The Inca state is not discussed in detail but Yoffee welcomes important recent studies that interpret Shang and early Zhou China as a series of city-states and I can easily understand why an Assyriologist would adopt this interpretation. While too little is known about ancient Chinese civilization to resolve this issue, the itinerant behaviour of late Shang 257

kings as described in oracle-bone texts, the existence of multiple capitals of the same state at considerable distances from one another, and a preoccupation with distant frontiers suggests that ancient China may have been politically organized as a series of adjacent and competing territorial states. At least one attempt by the reformist May Fourth Movement early in the twentieth century to deny the historicity of traditional views of ancient China foundered when texts excavated at Anyang in the 1920s strikingly conrmed the knowledge that traditional scholarship had preserved of late Shang history. In my study of a small number of exceptionally well documented early civilizations, territorial states and city-states are differentiated not simply by their size but also by the differing nature of their urban centres, rural-urban relations, agricultural systems, craft production, marketing, and long-distance trading patterns. These differences appear to be functionally correlated with variations in political organization (Trigger 2003). The existence of these two contrasting types suggests that, while there are very many causes and pathways leading to the development of more complex societies, Childe (1958), Flannery (1972), and Hallpike (1986) may be correct that only a limited number of functional patterns are sufciently coherent to stabilize themselves and hence endure for signicant periods of time. Murdock (1949) suggested the same with respect to kinship systems. Understanding these institutional arrangements seems at least as important as understanding agency and identity, if we are to achieve a rounded insight into early civilizations, or any other form of society. I do not suggest that my differentiation of city-states and territorial states necessarily exhausts the range of general types of early civilizations. Yet other interpretations which were based on limited evidence, such as the notion that Maya societies were theocratic polities dominated by priests living in otherwise empty ceremonial centres, have had to be abandoned as more data have accumulated. Hallpike (1986, 1412) has suggested that, as societies become more complex, the range of viable alternative sociopolitical structures decreases. Yet, even if all early civilizations can be assigned to only two general types, the situation would be signicantly different from the unilinear models of Steward and other neo-evolutionary anthropologists. It might also have helped to further transcend unilinear views if Yoffee had differentiated more radically between the development of states and of civilizations. As a student of Murdock, I have viewed the state as a form of political organization in which leaders are recognized as having the right to make

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various decisions on behalf of their followers and are provided with some coercive power other than that of public opinion to ensure that their orders are neither ignored nor disobeyed. Murdock (1957) saw such powers as essential to govern the affairs of groupings made up of over 1500 people. It is clear, however, that, at least among swidden cultivators such as the Tupinamba and the Iroquoians, settlements of up to 2000 people and tribes of 5000 or more could be effectively governed by councils backed only by public opinion, while ideally individuals and families retained the right to opt out of communal enterprises of which they disapproved (Trigger 1990). In larger, more sedentary societies state power is essential for effective governance. In Understanding Early Civilizations (2003), I distinguished between early states and civilizations. In early states leadership tended to be charismatic, kinship often remained a key feature of political organization, and elite traditions and art styles remained only weakly distinguished from those of ordinary people. Such polities, often labelled chiefdoms, varied considerably in size from the Zulu kingdom under Shaka down to entities embracing only a few communities. They also tended to be ephemeral entities by comparison with the sorts of states found in early civilizations. The term chiefdom is a useless political category because many non-state societies, such as the Iroquoian ones, as well as early states are said to have had hereditary chiefs. The nature of their power was, however, very different. While, on the basis of available evidence, I cannot determine whether or not Chacoan society was organized at a state level as I have dened states (I am here happy to adopt Yoffees Law), it seems clear that Mississippian polities were states. Some early states developed into civilizations by institutionalizing political power to a greater extent, basing overall state organization on class rather than kinship, and developing among the upper classes increasingly elaborate elite traditions of governance and specialized knowledge, which constitute the most characteristic feature of all civilizations (Trigger 1968, 534). These developments helped to consolidate states as political entities that could survive over longer periods than early states generally did. This was done partly by constructing, often in terms of religious beliefs, understandings of political power and the cosmic order that helped to restrain the rapacity that all too naturally motivated the behaviour of the governing classes (Trigger 2003, 47294). I would argue that some early civilizations succeeded in doing this better than did others and hence achieved greater 258

survivability. By distinguishing states, as a broad form of political organization, from civilizations, or societies possessing elite cultural traditions, it becomes easier to investigate the processes by which some early states or groups of early states transformed themselves into early civilizations. A more systematic understanding than we have at present of the range of variation in early states might also help to explain why different sorts of early civilizations arose in various localities around the world. Bruce G. Trigger Department of Anthropology McGill University 855 Sherbrooke St West Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T7 Canada Email: bruce.trigger@mcgill.ca References
Childe, V.G., 1928. The Most Ancient East. London: Kegan Paul. Childe, V.G., 1958. The Prehistory of European Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Flannery, K.V., 1972. The cultural evolution of civilizations. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3, 399426. Frankfort, H., 1956. The Birth of Civilization in the Near East. New York (NY): Doubleday. Hallpike, C.R., 1986. The Principles of Social Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mann, M., 1986. The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murdock, G.P., 1949. Social Structure. New York (NY): Macmillan. Murdock, G.P., 1957. World ethnographic sample. American Anthropologist 59, 66487. Steward, J.H. 1949. Cultural causality and law: a trial formulation of the development of early civilizations. American Anthropologist 51, 127. Trigger, B.G., 1968. Beyond History: the Methods of Prehistory. New York (NY): Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Trigger, B.G., 1990. Maintaining economic equality in opposition to complexity: an Iroquoian case study, in The Evolution of Political Systems, ed. S. Upham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 11945. Trigger, B.G., 1993. Early Civilization: Ancient Egypt in Context. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Trigger, B.G., 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations: a Comparative Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The Limitations of Early States and Other Such Constructs or the Emergence of Multilinear Evolutionary Theory Philip L. Kohl
Norman Yoffee has written an elegant, witty, and substantive critique of neo-evolutionary theory in archaeological anthropology. This theory is characterized as a classicatory exercise, burying the complexities of development under the single-minded aim of establishing an all-encompassing regularity, a teleology without a god (p. 21). Societies are supposed to progress inexorably along a graduated spectrum of social organizational complexity (bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states), the name of the neo-evolutionary game being simply to determine where to rank any society along that spectrum of social progress. Yoffee, rather, is interested in the varieties of social systems and modes of power that emerged and also periodically, almost predictably collapsed; how social relations were transformed and stratied and differentiated groups came into being under centralized leadership; and how these different groups accepted or resisted the new state ideologies that were meant to structure their lives. Fundamentally, Yoffee is interested in what these states did not or could not do: the limits to their power. Early states were not duplicates of each other, but varied tremendously; they were not the totalitarian regimes assumed by the neo-evolutionists, monopolizing and exercising their power over their hapless and helpless subjects. It is important to note that Yoffee does not reject qualitative evolutionary change: bands differ from states, but they are not arrested states; i.e. there is nothing inevitably compelling them to become states. I believe Yoffees perspective has great merit and with its emphasis on diversity and contingency can truly be dubbed multilinear, unlike the lip service paid to that term by neo-evolutionists from Julian Steward on. Some might object that Yoffee has caricatured neo-evolutionary theory; he has created a straw man or by simply reiterating worn criticisms beaten an already well-ogged animal. I dont think this is the case. Neo-evolutionary concepts are so pervasive in the literature that they are often not even noticed or commented upon, even, admittedly, when they occasionally prove useful. Inuential books, like Timothy Earles recent Bronze Age Economics: the Beginnings of Political Economies (2002), still appear that correspond perfectly to Yoffees characterization, exhibiting a vision of inevitable social evolutionary change as 259

unilinear as its nineteenth-century antecedents. Not surprisingly, many of the examples meant to illustrate the limited reach of archaic states are derived from Mesopotamia, the area Yoffee knows best. Indeed, these extended Mesopotamian examples provide an informed, reasonably comprehensive introduction to the millennia-long history of that civilization, adding considerable historical substance to the theoretical contribution of this study. Here, Yoffees training as an Assyriologist is apparent, although many of the subtle and topical issues raised, such as identity and agency in early states as seen in the Mesopotamian institutions of female naditus and kezertus, can only disingenuously be described as archaeologically informed (see p. 113). Rather, Yoffees understanding of the historical cuneiform record makes it possible for him to analyze these institutions, as it does his discussion of the limited role of law and decision-making practices in Mesopotamia. There is nothing wrong, indeed everything right, with making use of whatever relevant historical sources exist. Unfortunately, such a wealth of documentary evidence is not typically available to the archaeologist investigating archaic complex polities. Yoffee raises two other issues to consider: 1) the applicability of the ethnographic record to understand or esh out the archaeological record; and 2) social evolutionary theory as world history (pp. 2, 197). Yoffee describes the Chaco ritual system in the American Southwest as unique (p. 173) immediately commenting that neo-evolutionary archaeologists arent used to nding uniqueness, and it makes them uncomfortable. In other words, the comparativist approach essential to the neo-evolutionary exercise has its limits. Not every prehistoric society nds its direct analogy in the ethnographic or historical record. Elsewhere, Yoffee (p. 188) expresses this restriction more generally:
The danger in the use of prior probabilities in archaeological theory, however, is that the past can be condemned to resemble some form of the historical present, that nothing new about the past can be discovered, and that theory itself cannot be ampliative, that is, allow us to nd novelty and even singularity in ancient society and processes of change.

The point is important. Societies and their trajectories of development vary. Not every prehistoric society has an appropriate parallel to be culled from an ultimately limited ethnographic record that has been compiled only over the last 150 years or so. The mobile cattleherding economy that arose during the Bronze Age on the western Eurasian steppes differed fundamentally/qualitatively from what is known historically

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and ethnographically from Iron Age times onwards as mounted Eurasian pastoral nomadism. All the later pieces to that latter way of life were not in place during the Bronze Age and the comparison with those later societies, therefore, is more misleading than helpful. Similarly, changes in the scale and nature of metallurgical production across the steppes from Early to Late Bronze Age times can be documented archaeologically, but it is difcult to model or understand the societies engaged in this industrial-scale production through comparison with much later ethnographically-documented societies. In this case, one confronts specialization and extensive metallurgical production with little to no other archaeological evidence suggestive of social complexity. Referring to such societies as some form of chiefdom is hardly helpful. At several points in his study, Yoffee attempts to explain a given societys trajectory of development by placing that society in a larger regional context. The rises of secondary states are not separable from regional trends or the broader contexts in which these societies emerged or fell apart. Thus, the collapse of Teotihuacan c. AD 600 must have had effects that reverberated throughout the Mesoamerican world, influencing developments at Monte Alban and throughout the Oaxaca valley (p. 192). The collapse of the Old Assyrian trade network must somehow be linked to the rise of a single political power in Babylonia under Hammurabi (p. 151), or the so-called Uruk expansion northwards from southern Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium whether explicitly linked to world systems theory or not must somehow be associated with the formation of temples and temple estates with their surplus economies that made possible the trading and/or political expeditions to the north (p. 213). Cities, the characteristic political unit of archaic states according to Yoffee, crystallized in larger contexts of cultural interconnections or, to use an earlier now largely forgotten concept, interaction spheres (p. 230). These examples illustrate, I believe, what Yoffee earlier had made explicit: social evolutionary theory is world history (p. 197). I could not agree more. Perhaps in its very vagueness and imprecision the concept of an interaction sphere is preferable to a world system. Use of the former, at least, spares us endless discussions on the nature and existence of cores, peripheries and various anachronistic or inappropriate models. Thats not so important. What matters is to see evolution (or, perhaps, Evolution) take place on a large interconnected scale in which many different peoples differentially participate. The periodic rise and collapse of the Mesopotamian archaic state and 260

the millennia-long development of its civilization so richly described here must be placed within an interacting world that stretched at least from the Eurasian steppes in the north to the Central Asian centres of oasis irrigation agriculture and the cities of the Indus in the east to the Nile valley and Balkan peninsula in the west. Yoffees study makes us realize why such an interconnected world perspective is necessary. Philip L. Kohl Department of Anthropology Wellesley College Wellesley, MA 02481 USA Email: pkohl@wellesley.edu References
Earle, T., 2002. Bronze Age Economics: the Beginnings of Political Economies. Boulder (CO): Westview Press.

States of Mind David Webster

As it happens, I witnessed an early stage of the development of Norman Yoffees new book Myths of the Archaic State. In 1992 we both participated in a weeklong seminar on archaic states held at the School of American Research in Santa Fe. Much of the discourse centred not on what we knew about such societies (my main interest), but instead on Yoffees vigorous critique of the evolutionary models commonly used by archeologists. I remember being bemused that he was then on the eve of taking up a position at the University of Michigan, a hot-bed of the very neoevolutionism that he derided. A dozen years there have not diminished his ardour. One can read Myths of the Archaic State in two basic ways. Much of the book consists of examples drawn from Yoffees own impressive studies of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, along with selected others from elsewhere in the world. I greatly enjoyed his discussions of Mesopotamian law codes, temple prostitution and sex, womens dowries, and a host of other informative lore, much of it culled from his earlier publications. Also useful were comparative tabulations of settlement data from various ancient societies and a set of maps showing settlement components to the same scale. His discussion of how the concept of civilization relates to its specic political entities was very perceptive, and I

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agree with his assertion that processes of collapse and recovery deserve more scrutiny. I also appreciated his insistence that, although we commonly speak of the emergence of complex societies, the leaders of ancient states and the institutions they devised resulted in signicant kinds of simplication. All of this information was in service of his larger theme how a pernicious set of evolutionary models misled two generations of archaeologists (mainly in the United States) in their reconstructions and explanations of social change, especially with regard to the emergence of ancient states. As was the case in our 1992 discussions, this preoccupation comes across as a bte noire of Yoffees, and it is this dimension of his book that I emphasize below. Yoffees principal villains are those social anthropologists, Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan and more recently Leslie White, Julian Steward, Marshall Sahlins, Morton Fried, and (especially) Elman Service who devised general models of cultural evolution (savagery, barbarism, civilization; bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states, etc.).1 According to Yoffee, American archaeologists, lacking adequate theories of their own and wishing to be more than the poor stepsisters of social anthropology, eagerly adopted neo-evolutionary schemes (i.e. those associated with the latter set of scholars) and became preoccupied with nding data that would t ancient culture sequences to these (in his opinion) restrictive categories and trajectories. The result was distorted and simplied conceptions of culture change and the nature of ancient societies that dominated anthropological anthropology from roughly the 1940s through the 1970s. Signicant myths in particular clouded our understanding of archaic states. The principal myths he identies concern the nature of early states: that they must have emerged from chiefdoms, that they encompassed large regions and were highly territorial, that they were strongly centralized, and that their leaders were despots who controlled laws, coercive force, and the ows of goods and information to their own advantage. A second set of myths (which he states both explicitly and implicitly) has to do with the neo-evolutionist conception of evolutionary change itself. Archaeologists purportedly regarded such change as progressive and teleological in the sense that the emergence of statehood and civilization are inevitable outcomes. The tempo of change was gradual, not punctuated. Ancient societies that did not achieve statehood were devalued as noninnovative, and modern non-state societies studied by ethnographers were survivals that could be used as direct analogies for ancient social types or stages of development. Ancient states and other societies were 261

functionally well-integrated, adaptive systems. All of these myths are in part the legacy of the law-seeking enterprise of the processual or new archaeology that emerged in American universities in the 1960s. To his credit, Yoffee believes that ancient states did develop from earlier kinds of societies and that regularities occur in world history, a general process for which he thinks evolution is an acceptable label. His central concern is the evolution of power relations. He does not succumb to the sterile relativism espoused by some post-modern or post-processual archaeologists, and champions instead careful analogies and comparisons, of which he provides many examples. His main points, predictably, are that there is no lockstep trajectory of evolutionary cultural stages, and that considerable continuities cut across the purportedly rigid categories espoused by neo-evolutionists. More fundamentally, archaeologists have ignored the great variety incorporated in the concept archaic state, the heterarchical conditions of social power characteristic of such societies, the messy effects of agency in their formation and collapse, and the bottom-up perspective on power relations. Only recently have archaeologists broken free from these misconceptions to develop a richer appreciation of the human past and the ways in which societies and civilizations change. The problem I have with all of this is that I remember things differently and my academic career, I am chagrined to say, now encompasses a very large chunk of the interval of perdy that Yoffee identies. First (and leaving aside their nineteenth-century forebears), it seems to me a bit churlish to identify anthropologists such as White, Sahlins, Service, and Fried as great oversimpliers. In fact, one could hardly conceive of a generation of social anthropologists more steeped in effective knowledge of ethnographic variation. What they tried to do is to impose some kind of order on a tradition of cultural particularism and relativism by dening sociocultural types or categories or more properly models. They knew perfectly well that modern non-western peoples were not primitive survivals, but did understand that the ethnographic record suggests a limited number of ways in which humans generally organize themselves, or otherwise behave. Some of these ways do offer insights, and perhaps testable propositions, about what we might (or might not) nd in the archaeological record, and what that record might mean in evolutionary terms. Yoffee himself admits that early states, for example, must emerge from some kind of pre-stratied societies. Certainly many evolutionary assertions were made that now seem to us wrong-headed, misguided, or overgeneralized (e.g. propositions about the uni-

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versality of patrilineal bands, the redistributive roles of chiefs, or the insistence that states all have welldeveloped legal systems and a monopoly of force). That all these (and many other things we thought we knew about the past) are now discredited seem to me to point to the usefulness of the neo-evolutionist models rather than their deciencies. What most of us did, it seems to me, was to use or reject those aspects of the models that seemed productive. Many years ago Robert Braidwood assigned me the task of writing an overview of everything we knew about Halaan culture. I remember struggling with the difculty of seeing anything chiefdom-like in the Halaan archaeological record (and later in the Ubaidian one), and in many years of teaching Near Eastern archaeology I have avoided application of any standard chiefdom model to that part of the world. One virtue of models, after all, is not that they capture some truth about the world, but rather that they make us think. In one sense Yoffees whole book is a product of this kind of challenge. Another problem is that Yoffee falls into the same mode of categorization and overgeneralization that he criticizes in others. Theoretical and interpretive sins are assigned to neo-evolutionist archaeologists, or leading archaeological theoreticians but these are seldom named, and anyone who lived through the last several decades as a professional will wonder why we all disagreed with each other so much if we were all intellectually enslaved to one paradigm. With very few exceptions I think it is unprotable to characterize any individual archaeologist (or group of them) with any label ending in -ist, unless individuals self-identify themselves as such. My colleague William T. Sanders provides a convenient case in point (having practised archaeology throughout the entire period of concern). On the one hand he could be considered an arch-neo-evolutionist (e.g. Sanders & Price 1968). On the other hand, Yoffee generously acknowledges Sanderss departure from the prescribed chiefdom-state trajectory (Sanders & Webster 1978). My own 40 years of association with him make it clear that he has a sensitive appreciation of agency (Webster 1996), and given his long-time concern with the Basin of Mexico he clearly appreciates that sociopolitical evolution can often be extremely punctuated. And like many of his contemporaries, he has changed his mind about lots of things during his long career. Kent Flannery (1972) certainly developed abstract models of systems behaviour consistent with a neo-evolutionist paradigm, but as I recall in the same article provided an interesting example of agency. Nor would either of these archaeologists ever have 262

insisted that ancient states were uniform in their characteristics, that any modern people were primitive survivals, that cultural evolution represents progress in some nineteenth-century sense, or that there were no continuities in the evolution of successive social forms. Such examples could be endlessly multiplied. My point is that if one scrutinizes what archaeologists actually did and wrote, it is very difcult to match any of them with the caricature, hidebound neo-evolutionist that Yoffee identies. (He does periodically acknowledge variety in what people thought, but in a muted way.) I would go further Yoffee has invented an evolutionary stage of American archaeology that did not exist (in my experience) in the manner he describes. Archaeologists of a certain academic age were hardly as obsessed with discovering ancient states as Yoffee claims, and some of the architects of processual archaeology, such as Lewis Binford, almost never strayed into this intellectual territory. Some archaeologists (including members of a young cohort supposedly more sophisticated than we old folks) do seem to be aficted with what I might call evolutionary stage envy. That is, if ancient cities or states are demonstrably present in other sequences of change, then their own must have them too. Although I prefer to name no names here, I notice this tendency in the literature on three of the societies that gure in Yoffees analysis Chaco, Cahokia, and the Maya. Such attitudes reveal the perplexing anxiety that if their own societies do not clearly reach statehood or urbanism on our evolutionary analytical bar, these societies are somehow devalued. Here, to be sure, is a pernicious effect (conscious or unconscious) of the inappropriate perception of cultural evolution as progressive and teleological. To the extent that archaeologists were preoccupied with investigating ancient states, they were so for a very good reason. If there are major evolutionary changes in regional cultural sequences (and this is a very big if), these appear to tend toward patterns that are generally state-like, especially with regard to power relations. Yoffee seems to agree with this proposition, although he points out some possible exceptions, such as Harappan civilization. But remember that the Classic Maya were also long believed to be strange exceptions until a series of archaeological and epigraphic breakthroughs showed them to be quite comprehensible in terms of our traditional evolutionary models. If archaeologists do enough research in the Indus valley (another big if), Id bet that Harappan civilization in the long run also starts to look more state-like. No

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one would disagree that ... the histories of societies that do not become states require as much explanation as do the various kinds of the earliest states that did evolve (p. 231). Archaeological preoccupation with complex societies might well have diverted attention from other evolutionary pathways, such as that associated with the proliferation of folk agriculturalists, but there is no doubt that the origin of state-like societies is a big and intellectually-challenging evolutionary problem Yoffees own career is built on it. Yoffees position in part derives from his training, which was not in anthropological archaeology, but rather in ancient history and civilizations. To a remarkable degree he has mastered the archaeological literature, and as I already said he has not slipped into a facile humanist vs scientist stance. On the other hand, he as not spent his life standing in trenches. His primary experience derives from ancient societies that (eventually) produced rich historical records. One appreciates from his deft handling of the Mesopotamian texts why he so strongly espouses the heterarchical nature of states, the importance of individuals or groups as agents, the often-ramshackle and messy forms of social integration, and the necessity that social roles and identities be negotiated in complex ways. Exactly how archaeologists who deal with prehistoric societies are supposed to design their research or interpret their data to include all this in any but the simplest ways goes unspecied. During my own career (which some would certainly label neo-evolutionist) I have tried to examine agency (although I did not call it this: e.g. Webster 1975), but even for the literate (sort of) Maya this is a daunting task. Similarly, I have spent much of my professional life mapping and excavating the remains of humble Maya households, and I recognize the importance of bottom-up processes for the structure and change of Maya polities. Nevertheless, I still dont know how to integrate these perspectives very successfully into my own research or interpretations, at least on the levels of specicity that Yoffee seems to advocate. And Yoffee himself is prone to the facile assumption. For example, he approvingly cites (p. 210) assertions that prehistoric Ubaid villagers not only had social identities derived from their kin-groups and local communities, but also a larger identity as Mesopotamians. I cant see how we can possibly know this. In fact I dont know whether Classic Maya people, who shared many more obvious cultural continuities over a large region than the Ubaidians and who are much better known in archaeological terms, ever developed such a collective identity. A final dimension of Yoffees evolutionary perspective is that it is very city-centric another 263

product of his Mesopotamian experience. The archaic phases of Sumerian civilization were dominated by cities in two important ways. There were lots of true urban centres (because there were lots of city-states), and more importantly, an unusually large proportion of the population of any polity lived in the city-state capital. I agree with him that under these circumstances urban inuences were unusually strong and transformative. That said, I dont think he handles urbanization and its implications effectively outside the connes of that part of the world. In Old Kingdom Egypt, where perhaps 5 per cent of the whole population resided in settlements comparable (maybe) to Mesopotamian cities, the developmental roles of urban places must have been very different. Much of his discussion of urbanism does not relate very well to Mesoamerica (see Sanders & Webster 1988; Sanders et al. 2003). There were many kinds of central places in various early states, and they played many different developmental roles. If Yoffee accepts the reality of something we can broadly call social evolution, how does his own stance contrast with the neo-evolutionist models he criticizes? The answer isnt clear to me. Much is made of interaction spheres, the emergent properties of culture change (shades of systems theory), and a rather vague growth model adopted from Bennet Bronson, but he doesnt get down to the nitty-gritty aspects of evolutionary change, punctuated or otherwise. Consider this conclusion:
In the evolutionary trajectories toward the earliest states, new socioeconomic and governmental roles were invented in cities as powerful leaders competed to control not only resources and labor, but also the symbolic capital that had to be marshaled in order to recombine differentiated social units into new and viable political systems (p. 197).

Not much here that anyone would have disagreed with 30 or 40 years ago. Yoffee (p. 200) distinguishes between necessary and sufcient conditions for cultural evolution, with the latter being the most problematical. Exactly what sufcient conditions triggered evolutionary trajectories in specic historical/environmental circumstances is the central problem, but the mechanism of selection scarcely ever appears in Yoffees book (and then mainly in the context of the emergence of agriculture). He seems to have a real aversion to the concept of adaptation, although aspects of his discussion presuppose it. His own interpretations of Mesopotamian culture history, as well as some other sequences, include references to population growth, conict, agricultural intensication (including irrigation) and other processes widely

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discussed in the traditional literature. I conclude (to violate my own labelling stricture) that Yoffee is himself a kind of contrarian neo-evolutionist. I found the book to be very clearly written and I ran across only a few mistakes. The Aztecs in fact did have writing (contra the statement on p. 19), and the urban core of Copan had at the very most 12,000 people, not the 20,000 listed on p. 43. Sometimes Yoffee seems to contradict himself. For example, after denying any necessary teleological evolutionary changes in the rst part of the book, at the end he states that in Mesopotamia Our growth model ... holds that states are the expected products of post-Pleistocene circumstances(p. 231). Although Yoffee inveighs against the neologisms invented by processual archaeologists, he coins a few himself. Im not sure that bandishness (as a sort of catch-all stage from which more complex societies emerge) is a felicitous addition to our evolutionary lexicon. So at the end of the day do we now understand the nature and evolution of archaic states (or other complex societies) in more nuanced and useful ways than we did, say, in 1965? My own answer to this question is a resounding yes. Would this be so in the absence of so-called neo-evolutionary models? I think not. Many years ago the anthropologist Robert Redeld observed that we dont want balanced books, we want balanced libraries. On this principle I strongly recommend Myths of the Archaic State to anyone interested in social evolution. I dont nd it very balanced or real as a model of how archaeologists have comported or expressed themselves, or of the history of the discipline, but it certainly does the principal job of any robust model it makes one think. David Webster Department of Anthropology Pennsylvania State Building 409 Carpenter Building University Park, PA 16802-2304 USA Email: dxw16@psu.edu Notes
1. Interestingly, V. Gordon Childe, whose writings exerted enormous inuence on the issues of early states and urbanism, gets comparatively short shrift. So too does Morton Fried, whose (1967) examination of political power and authority I nd much more elegant than Services models, and much more focused on Yoffees own concerns.

References
Flannery, K., 1972. The cultural evolution of civilizations. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3, 399426. Fried, M., 1967. The Evolution of Political Society. New York (NY): Random House. Sanders, W.T. & B. Price, 1968. Ancient Mesoamerica: the Evolution of a Civilization. New York (NY): Random House. Sanders, W.T. & D. Webster, 1978. Unilinealism, multilinealism, and the evolution of complex societies, in Social Archaeology: Beyond Subsistence and Dating, eds. C.L. Redman, M.J. Berman, E.V. Curtin, W.T. Langhorne Jr, N.M. Versaggi & J.C. Warner. New York (NY): Academic Press, 249301. Sanders, W.T. & D. Webster, 1988. The Mesoamerica urban tradition. American Anthropologist 90(3), 52146. Sanders, W.T., A.G. Mastache & R.H. Cobean (eds.), 2003. Urbanism in Mesoamerica. Mexico City & University Park (PA): Joint publication of the Instituto Nacional de Anthroplogia e Historia & The Pennsylvania State University, 42750. Webster, D., 1975. Warfare and the origin of the state. American Antiquity 40(4), 4647l. Webster, D., 1996. Economic differentiation, stratication, and the evolution of complex societies: a Teotihuacan case sxample, in Arqueologia Mesoamericana: Homenajae a William Sanders, eds. A.G. Mastache, J.R. Parsons, R.S. Santley & M.C.S. Puche. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, 11134.

Old Issues, New Directions Katharina Schreiber

Over the past two decades or so, archaeologists attempting to come to grips with the evolution of ancient states have become increasingly uneasy with neo-evolutionary categorizations of human societies. Belaboured discussions purporting to elucidate characteristics of this culture or that, and to determine whether it was or was not a chiefdom or state not only have proven to be unproductive and non-explanatory, but more often than not are excruciatingly tedious as well. Norman Yoffee, an erudite scholar whose expertise ranges from Assyriology to general anthropology, has carefully articulated just where the problems lie, how and why they came into being, and how to move beyond them in ways that will allow archaeologists to more appropriately raise and answer questions pertaining to the origins of ancient states. Although he is not the rst scholar to address these issues, he is the rst to do so in such all-inclusive terms. 264

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He identies a series of what he terms myths in archaeological thought, and then proceeds to demolish them one by one, using an astonishing array of case studies, from Mesopotamia to Chaco Canyon. Most researchers would agree that a good academic book presents the reader with new ideas and marshals appropriate data in support of those new ideas; it should be persuasive, logical, accurate, and well written. Norman Yoffees, Myths of the Archaic State easily meets these criteria. But this is more than a good book. It is provocative, inspirational, transformative, and so full of small (and weighty) gems that it is a pleasure to read. A truly successful book provokes the reader into rethinking their old stands on issues and to arrive at new understandings; it also provokes the reader to carefully consider whether they agree or disagree with the positions presented by the author. Such a book is inspirational in that it provides the reader with, in a sense, a new belief system, casts out old demons, and converts the reader to new ways of thinking and perceiving. And a successful book causes its readers to transform the ways in which they go about the business of doing research. This is precisely what Yoffees book does. As an Andeanist I have often been bewildered by the fact that the Andes are frequently omitted from theoretical discussions of the emergence of states, despite the fact that they were one of the half dozen places in which cities and states originally emerged. It is therefore gratifying to see Yoffee carefully considering ancient Andean states in building his arguments. But more importantly, Yoffees position has nally articulated for me just why the Andes have not played a larger role in theoretical discussions of the evolution of ancient states. I will return to this point below. Yoffee cogently argues that ancient societies did not follow a series of steps, moving holistically in lock step from one to the next, in order to arrive at the top of the ladder, the state. Rather, states exploded nova-like from beginnings much more humble: simple tribal or village societies. Pre-state Mesopotamia was characterized by a few larger sites, small centres of clusters of sites, which grew rapidly into cities and capitals of city-states. Arguing that cities are the key to early states (which he thence calls city-states), he demonstrates from several specic cases that cities emerged rapidly, virtually inhaling their surrounding populations. I nd his cases to be convincing and I note that one of his examples, that of Wari in the central Andes, supports his argument in terms even stronger than those he presents. The two settlement maps he includes, the pre-Wari Huarpa phase, and the early Wari Ocros phase (g. 3.23) demonstrate 265

a signicant transformation of the social landscape. Had he also included the following Wari phase, during which the countryside surrounding the city was almost completely depopulated, his argument would have been demonstrated even more clearly. It is not at all surprising that a Mesopotamian bias structures much of the discussion; such a bias is warranted, given the status of Mesopotamia as the heartland of cities, and given the specic research interests of the author. These biases crop up in discussions of city-states and peer polities, in the notion of an overarching civilization, and in discussions of writing and legal codes. While I am more or less convinced that cities are the key to early states, I am less convinced that they necessarily appear in multiples. This situation clearly holds in Mesopotamia, probably in Egypt, and even in the Maya region. As Yoffee notes that Teotihuacan arose as a solitary city (but still capital of a city-state), I observe that cities in the Andes also arose in spatial isolation: Wari, Tiwanaku, and perhaps Moche as well. Perhaps the key to understanding these differences lies in the fact that peer polities emerged in areas of environmental and social redundancy, and where social territories were contiguous. Cities such as Teotihuacan and Wari emerged in regions of environmental diversity, broken topography, and discontinuous social territories. I did discern, as I made my way through the text, the odd bits of teleological argument or phrasing popping up here and there. I was initially confused, thinking this was in contradiction to Yoffee opposition to neo-evolutionary thought. Only in the nal chapter did the logic of these arguments become clear, as he presented his nal myth, that states are not rare occurrences, but rather are natural and inevitable developments in the social worlds of the post-Pleistocene era. Here is where I need a bit more convincing: states come and go, yet village life has endured for millennia: before, during, and long after these bits of sociopolitical explosion. After razing the old house of cards of myths of the ancient state, Yoffee then provides the reader with some useful new directions to take, and more appropriate questions to ask of the data. Rather than asking what ancient societies are, he argues that it is more productive to ask what actors in them do; or, as he writes, citing Ben Nelson, the task is not to ask whether a society is complex but how it is complex (p. 170, emphasis in original). In these questions lie the potential for transforming the ways in which we might fruitfully address social complexity in the Andes. For example, on the coast of Peru large sites with monumental architecture appeared at the time of, or even

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prior to, the emergence of agriculture as the dominant subsistence strategy. Few would dare call these states, but they certainly are complex along several axes. Likewise, the great pilgrimage/ceremonial centre at Chavn de Huntar was complex in many ways, but does not t classic denitions of any particular stage of socio-political complexity. Armed with these new questions, we can address a society such as Nasca, moving beyond pedantic discussions of what it was, and begin to discern its various axes and trajectories of complexity. Analogous to the case of Chaco Canyon discussed in Chapter 7, Nasca society displays a high degree of rituality, with an over-arching ceremonial and mortuary system, along with a distinctive centre that was the locus of pilgrimages; there is evidence of structured system-wide economic exchange, and complex social differentiation. Nasca also represents the ultimate in artistic expression, with ceramic and textile art reaching levels of beauty and technical sophistication rarely (if ever) achieved in the ancient world. Our difculty in describing social complexity in Nasca has been the direct result of the inability of neo-evolutionist models to deal with societies in which there is no division between politics and religion. As Yoffee expresses it, [t]he embeddedness of politics and major aspects of the economy in ritual cannot be explained in neoevolutionist thought (p. 173). Finally, Yoffees book may inspire a reader to reconsider research directions in their more general areas of scholarship. Well into the book Yoffee makes the crucial observation, that, bequeathed a legacy of neo-evolutionism, archaeologists arent used to nding uniqueness, and it makes them uncomfortable (p. 173). This statement claries in my mind the reason that the ancient Andes are so seldom included in discussions of the evolution of ancient states, and I can see that the fault lies in part with the way in which Andeanists go about their business. There are so many unique aspects of ancient Andean societies that it has always been difcult to pigeonhole them within specic societal types. For example, the Inca Empire, perhaps the one unquestioned state (see Yoffees Law) in the Andes, had no formal writing system, nor was economic organization structured around a system of markets. Its capital might not even be classed as a city. Many Andeanists have been loath to use such terms as state or empire for one of two reasons: either they feel these terms more accurately apply to societies of the Old World and represent a European bias on the part of researchers who use such terms, or they consider Andean societies to be so unique that they simply cannot be described by any 266

sort of inclusive or comparative terminology. Thus Andean archaeology has become a sort of closed system in which Andeanists speak to other Andeanists, but rarely consider contributing to scholarship beyond their borders. In turn, non-Andeanists who might want to turn to Andean data for comparative purposes dont know quite where or when to nd it. Perhaps armed with the new series of questions outlined by Yoffee, Andeanists will feel more comfortable dealing with issues of complexity, while still appreciating the uniqueness of Andean societies. In sum, Yoffee has not just written a good book: logical, convincing, and accurate. He has written a book that provokes the reader to consider carefully the ideas presented, inspires the reader to rethink and revise older ideas, and transforms the ways in which future research will be conducted. With the publication of this articulate and enjoyable book, archaeologists are better equipped to challenge the past. Katharina Schreiber Department of Anthropology University of California at Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, California 93106-3210 USA Email: kschreiber@anth.ucsb.edu

Reply
When Graham Clarkes World Prehistory: an Outline appeared in 1961 as a modern synthesis of prehistoric archaeology, the reviewers praised the book abundantly and noted how valuable it was for the understanding of the evolution of cultures and how it afforded new research into the comparison of societies. They all lauded the wisdom of the author and the accuracy of his research except in the area in which the reviewer was himself or herself a specialist. I am especially pleased that the ve specialists enlisted by CAJ to review Myths of the Archaic State have not recorded numerous errors in my accounts of the archaeology in their regions of expertise. Its something of an out-of-body experience to read reviews of ones books did I really say that? but I thank the reviewers for their generous words expressing interest in the book. Naturally, I have some slight disagreements with some of their critiques, but I shall not try the patience of readers by entering into debates with the reviewers. Rather, I briey discuss two themes that cross-cut the reviews and have considerable interest in the eld: How can study of the history of archaeol-

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ogy lead to the construction of modern archaeological theory? And how can the comparative method in studying ancient cities, states, and civilizations be rehabilitated after archaeologists have laid aside the stages and types of neo-evolutionist theory that masqueraded as cross-cultural comparison? David Webster humorously nds that much of his career could be placed within the interval of perdy I am supposed to have identied as what might be called the heyday of neo-evolutionist theory. (I infer by his use of term interval that Webster has now recovered from his former theoretical malady.) Webster and Roger Matthews wonder whether my account of neo-evolutionism and its effect on the development of archaeological theory isnt a caricature, a straw-man. This view is answered in part by Philip Kohl who points to at least one new book that seems to indicate that neo-evolutionist theory still exists. In any case, I am less interested in claiming that neo-evolutionism perniciously lingers than in understanding why it ourished in the rst place. Perhaps Webster is right in thinking that my move in 1993 to the University of Michigan, a zestful redoubt of neo-evolutionism, has over-sensitized my perspectives in archaeological theory. I was certainly surprised to nd strong resistance (but not from all my colleagues) to any critique of neo-evolutionism and indeed of new/processual archaeology. Webster wonders whether archaeologists were really obsessed with nding types in the archaeological record, but it is easy to cite dozens of titles (from University of Michigan dissertations alone and quite a few written in the Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, as well as other, less dogmatic places) that show that the identication of a neo-evolutionary stage seemed to be the goal of the inquiry. Bruce Trigger writes that archaeologists who opposed processual archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s risked disciplinary marginalization. Now, perhaps more in the UK than in the USA, it seems hard for some archaeologists to critique post-processual archaeology. Surely the time is right for some good symposia and conferences on the history of archaeology that are not simply backward-looking. Processual archaeology was not simply an intellectual embarrassment or an elaborated methodology posing as theory. Seen in its historical and social contexts, it was a necessary step in moving towards a modern archaeological epistemology in which the contextual appropriateness of social theories are investigated. Although post-processual archaeology unfairly abandoned social evolution and comparison in favour of neo-antiquarianism, it also presented or at least legitimized new openings into the 267

study of ideology, landscape, and social memory in the past. If I can read my own students perspectives on the history of archaeology as signalling a generational change, there is no longer a need to hoist banners of theoretical purity and exclusionism. Science and the language of mathematics can be employed alongside interpretations of human agency and unexpected behaviours. It is said that Noam Chomsky gave his rst paper to a conference on linguistics to an audience that sat in stony silence through the paper. At the rst break, a disheartened Chomsky went for coffee and was approached by a distinguished scholar. Mr Chomsky, he said, I just want to tell you that you didnt convince a single professor in this auditorium. But you convinced all their graduate students. This is more or less what happened to Lewis Binford and his acolytes in the early 60s and a generation later, to Ian Hodder and his followers. Students of both archaeologists got jobs, much against the prevailing opinion of senior onlookers. We are now in a position to assess the reasons these paradigms were self-consciously constructed as well as to recover the legacy of Childe and Braidwood who, in the passage of time, seem increasingly to have got many things quite right. Just for the record, I would like to clarify in response to comments of Webster about my training that I enrolled in archaeology and anthropology courses before I began my study of Mesopotamian languages, history, and archaeology, and that I excavated (in the American Southwest with Paul Martin, Jim Hill, John Fritz, and Mark Leone) before I studied Akkadian and Sumerian. My role model as I began Mesopotamian studies was Robert Adams, who combined his eldwork with deep readings of the secondary literature in Mesopotamian historical studies and who saw Mesopotamia as an example of worldwide social evolutionary processes. My aim was to become a kind of academic mirror-image of Adams, expert in the sources for Mesopotamian history while maintaining close attention to archaeological research in the ancient Near East. As is well known and reected in the comments of Kohl and Matthews and in many works of Trigger, archaeological and historical data complement and supplement each other and are occasionally (and intriguingly) contradictory. Adams always had an appointment in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago as well as in the Department of Anthropology, and I went to the University of Michigan (from my job in the Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona) to take up positions in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and in the Department of Anthropology. I hope that my anthropological lens informs my

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research into Mesopotamian societies and that my research in Mesopotamian history grounds my comparative studies in anthropology/archaeology. I do not mean this slight personal history to be a confession or (partial) disclosure of anything. Rather, as archaeology (and anthropology) become more historical, and history becomes more anthropological (and archaeological), I do not apologize for following in the tradition of Adams (and Trigger), who have long seen that disciplinary borders can impede research. Various ways of breaking down academic boundaries so as to launch new kinds of student training and to form new collaborative research programs should be encouraged; better research questions and better social theory will ensue. The second theme of the reviews concerns the goals and methods of comparison in archaeological theory. Matthews, Trigger, and Kohl have noted that new trends in archaeological research stress the fragility of states and the degree of conict in the earliest cities and states. Whereas these topics are hardly novel, new insights into the archaeological study of the limitations of royal and centralized power (integration) in early states are of much interest to a wide range of social scientists and humanists alike. New research on various aspects of power, indeed, gets to the nitty-gritty aspects of evolutionary change as Webster puts it. Little about the limitations of power in early states, whence came various sources of power, and how individuals had to make choices among their various identities as conict inevitably arose, were undertaken by the neo-evolutionists. Philip Kohl and Katharina Schreiber have as-

serted that controlled comparison (and necessarily pointed contrasts) among the earliest states and complex societies can lead to new and interesting research questions. For Kohl, Bronze Age Eurasia cannot be protably compared to Iron Age societies in the same region, even if the latter were historical descendants of the former. For Schreiber, Nasca (and indeed other Andean societies) had unique aspects, and the capital of the Inca empire was not even a city, although Wari and Tiwanaku certainly were the capital cities of empires. (Matthews notes that in Mesopotamia the seeds of imperialism might lie in cities, which it seems to have been in Wari and Tiwanaku. Cities can be both fragile and expansionist!) Schreiber also provides interesting reasons why city-states as peerpolities did not occur in the Andes or at Teotihuacan. These reviewers have commented that archaeologists are now less disconcerted with attributing uniqueness to their study areas than they once were. Archaeologists also increasingly nd that social institutions do not t together in packages, and Schreiber quotes Ben Nelson who wrote that the task is not to ask whether a society is complex but how it is complex. Only through comparisons, of course, can one begin to say why one social organization or one trajectory of change is unlike others. These ve reviewers are united in contesting simplistic evolutionary schemes, mechanical comparisons, and determinist explanations of how societies develop, persist, collapse, regenerate. As Roger Matthews and Bruce Trigger have rightly pointed out we have a lot of work to do.

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