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THE RISE AND DECLINE
OF CITIES AND STATES
Chapter 11
Cahokia offers us a glimpse of social
complexity
• A thriving city of 5,000-10,000
people
• Disappeared as people dispersed
• How and why did such social
complexity emerged there when it
did, and why didn’t it last?
• Why would people who governed
themselves give up their
independence to be ruled by
others?
SOCIAL COMPLEXITY IN ANCIENT SOCIETIES
At the heart of prehistoric archaeology’s approach to understanding the rise and decline
of complex societies is a key question: How and why did cities and states emerge, and
sometimes disappear?
• When archaeologists talk about social complexity, what do they actually mean?
• How can we identify social complexity from archaeological sites and their artifacts?
• Why don’t cities and states always survive?
An archaeological focus on the rise of cities and states reveals much about how, why, and
when humans shifted from small-scale face-to-face societies to larger scale social
groupings in which inequalities of power and social hierarchy are more common. Yet social
complexity is not always associated with social inequality and hierarchy.
WHAT DO ARCHAEOLOGISTS MEAN BY SOCIAL
COMPLEXITY?
The earliest archaeologists were Europeans
• Educated about the classic civilizations of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Mesopotamia
• Saw themselves as linked to these older societies, which had inspired European legal
codes, constitutions, and philosophies
• Believed their work would explain why societies became civilized and complex or
remained small and relatively simple
Social Complexity is when a society is divided into many separate subgroups where
one or some exercise control over others, control resources, and experience
inequalities relative to other groups.
THE ORIGINS OF “CIVILIZATIONS”
Alfred Krober
• the great civilizations emerged from
the accumulation of particular items of
material culture
V. Gordon Childe
• the origins of cities and city-states
about organizational arrangements
The social, political, and economic lives of people living in
civilizations were very different from those of people living
in small-scale societies
There are two main theories about the origins of complex societies
COMPLEX SOCIETIES
Complex societies: societies in which
socioeconomic differentiation, large
populations, and centralized political control
are pervasive and defining features
• Typically have political formations called
states and cities
• Characterized by dynamics of wealth,
power, coercion, and status, in which social
stratification ensures that the labor of the
non-elites benefits the lifestyles of the elites
CITY-STATES
• As smaller cities grew, their complexity increased, and we refer to these as city-states
• Proper states, kingdoms, and empires eventually arose from city-states (Examples include
Rome, Athens, Sparta)
• Self=-governed city where the urban center is the primary focus of governmental control
• The cite is the whole of society and has all the component peoples, specialists, and
functions
How did such structures—city-states, states and empires—emerge in the first place?
HOW DO COMPLEX STRUCTURES EMERGE?
• More intensive food production was
necessary for complex societies to form
• Elites in early cities and states began to
construct a state ideology and religious
ideas
• Explained and justified the special
treatment elites received and the fewer
resources allotted to groups with less
POPULATION GROWTH
• Large populations require a sophistication and scale of food production
• Early complex societies lived side by side with small-scale and tribal societies that
also produced their own food
• As a population grows, social conflict over essential resources such as land and water
can also increase
• This social conflict can trigger the rise of complexity
TRADE
• “Trade model” of state formation
• People want the objects, foods, or raw materials
that neighboring groups produce
• Trade also creates alliances between societies
• Providing military protection of markets and
caravans is crucial
• Accomplished by collecting taxes and tribute
SPECIALIZATION
The “production model” of state formation: driven by craft specialization, leading to
new social roles
• Roles include food producers and craftspeople who produce useful objects like stone
tools and pottery
• The resulting food surpluses could feed the specialists and give rise to a military class
CONTROL OVER PRODUCTION
• Construction of irrigation systems that developed in many early states led to true control
over production
• The level of political and social control exerted by ancient elites lays the basis for
hydraulic despotism
• Images of ancient despotism are reasonable at various times and places, but are biased
because there were so many Mesopotamian scribes
URBANIZATION AND RURALIZATION IN CITY-STATES
• Two processes at play in these city-states:
• Urbanization—process by which towns grew as residential centers as opposed to being
trading centers
• Ruralization—process in which the countryside was configured as a contested no-man’s
land lying between competing city-states
• Monumental architecture flourished, along with the emergence of record-keeping
devices like cylinder seals and cuneiform tablets
HOW CAN WE IDENTIFY SOCIAL COMPLEXITY FROM
ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES AND THEIR ARTIFACTS?
• Material objects:
• Are an expression of people’s social relationships
• Help shape social relationships
• By itself an excavated object can’t tell us much about dynamics of wealth, power, and
status
• Evidence of such things usually comes from close analysis of different kinds of
objects, often as an assemblage, or a group of objects found together at a site or
excavation
THE TARASCAN EMPIRE
• Tarascans organized the second-largest state in
Mexico, probably to counter the military and
political pressures exerted on them by the Aztecs
• Evidence of complexity:
• Population growth
• Settlement patterns
• Soils and land use patterns
• Monuments and buildings
• Mortuary patterns and skeletal remains
• Ceramic, stone, and metal objects.
The Tarascan Empire (in green). The Aztec state
is shown in orange.
THE TARASCAN EMPIRE
• The growing city became spatially segregated and divided into special function zones
• Soil and land use studies indicate that the growth of population centers created soil degradation
• Monuments and buildings are important symbols of power, wealth, and even connection to the
divine order
• Changes in mortuary practices including the location and contents of Tarascan burial sites over
time that correlate with increasing population and indicate social differentiation. A notable shift
takes place with the consolidation of state power during the 1400s
• Before shift: mortuary objects in elite burials were imported from other distant powerful political and
social centers
• After shift: objects come from areas under Tarascan control
• Changes in everyday objects also indicate social complexity Changes in everyday objects
reflect increasing social complexity
• Expanding trade networks and administrative control brought raw materials from new and distant
locales
• Changes in production and distribution patterns of obsidian and metals support a similar picture of the
empire’s social complexity
WHY DON’T CITIES AND STATES ALWAYS
SURVIVE?
• Diamond’s argument: the root cause of societal
collapse is environmental
• While compelling, it is like viewing a low-resolution
digital image—from far away, the image seems clear
but up close it dissolves into disconnected parts
• Archaeological evidence does not support most
cases for total societal collapse
• Archaeologists mostly agree that collapse is an
incredibly rare phenomenon
TRANSFORMATION AND RESILIENCE
• The classic examples of collapsed great empires
were instead the result of:
• Internal fragmentation, lack of strong central
institutions, or more powerful foreign armies
• For Example: The Four Corners area and the Classic
Maya demonstrate that abandoned ruins do not
mean that the people themselves did not survive
• May have undergone substantial social transformation
but these people have never disappeared
CONCLUSION
• By focusing on complexity, archaeologists can study the dynamics of social
integration and transformation in ancient societies
• how did societies grow;
• how did people reorganize their economic, political, and social patterns to accommodate
growth;
• and the context in which societies confront political, ecological, and social challenges not
by disappearing but by transforming through migration or political reorganization
• Archaeologists continue to debate whether these processes of transformation and
complexity are more or less uniform, and, thus the expression of universal principles
such as intensifying conflict and warfare or trade and production. Nevertheless, all
archaeologists agree that any explanation of complexity must be rooted in and
emerge from the actual evidence of artifacts and remains themselves.