The back of this book, the product of a conference at the Getty Museum in 2017, excerpts from Norman Yoffee's introductory essay: “The central theme of this volume is to undermine some traditional themes that naturalize the state and legitimize its historical claims to permanence.” The chapter authors provide detailed, substantive, and stimulating analyses of the essentially political struggles between rulers and peoples in nine regions of the world manifesting ancient complex society, mostly argued as state-level society, as best they can discern them given their variable records. The volume takes a fresh and granular approach to studying the contingent and negotiated nature of political power wielded by many groups and factions through their representatives rather than the monumental symbols of it designed by states and rulers to project it as a natural and enduring condition of humanity. Yoffee and his colleagues rise to the occasion in this book.
Tom Dillehay and Steven Wernke demonstrate that the fractal nature of Andean society was embedded in state formation and expansion, a source of political strife and attenuated economic obligation. The Inka Empire expanded rapidly, but it also led to high costs, constraints on resource extraction and management, and divided loyalties, which themselves drove further expansion, of both the Inka Empire itself and its core vulnerabilities. The mediated state, wherein the highest levels of authority negotiate effectively with semi-autonomous lower levels of authority, was the most successful in Andean civilization.
In an essay about ancient China, Li Min argues that tensions between state agents and diverse political and social networks contributed to the fragility of Bronze Age cities. He also recognizes aspects of legacy and resiliency, in the form of feasting rituals associated with Taosi tombs that emphasize the primacy of farmers over herders. Legacy is also reflected in the establishment of a military cemetery at a sacred mountain (Changshan) near the city of Taosi.
The lowland Maya, famous for the so-called Maya collapse of the late first millennium AD, are reframed by Patricia McAnany, here and elsewhere, as dynamic, resilient, and regionally variable in episodes of political consolidation and dissolution. She asks whether Maya royal courts were destabilized by periods of drought. This was probably the case, but droughts likely provided the final blow to a network of royal courts situated within an already politically fractured landscape. To borrow a term from James Scott (Against the Grain: A Deep History of the First Agrarian States, 2017, pp. 202–209), “politicide”—rather than “ecocide”—appears to have been a major contributing factor to the dissolution of royal courts in the Maya lowlands. McAnany further makes the case that fragility varied not only through time but also with the different institutions of political succession that Maya kingdoms deployed.
Old Kingdom Egypt, cogently evaluated by Ellen Morris, lasted 800 years and was more resilient than fragile. Experimentation was displayed in the development of the royal funerary cult beginning in the First Dynasty, with significant changes in sacrificial practices associated with the establishment of divine rulership. Pharaonic governments periodically responded effectively to discontent when tyrannical rule became too burdensome. This was not always the case, and course correction did not work in the First Intermediate period, but fragility was not a constant dynamic.
Timothy Pauketat has long advocated models of the rapid rise and collapse of Cahokia, in Illinois, with the implications of fragility relevant to the comparative design of this book. Here, he compares Cahokia with Chaco and reviews the arguments regarding the possible political and social institutions fostering their trajectories. He makes the intriguing suggestion that the fomenters of social complexity in these two cases may have known about each other, which is plausible in light of the possibility that societies of the American Southwest knew about Mesoamerican states, much farther away.
Like North American societies, the Indus civilization does not have textual history. Cameron Petries's fine-grained review capably marshals archaeological evidence to show that Indus cities were integrated with a large and residentially fluid population of towns, villages, and hamlets in ways that led to politics characterized by constant negotiations among diverse groups.
Peter Robertshaw's study of complex societies in Africa is a welcome insistence that this vast continent be brought into the comparative discussion of global antiquity. The politics in these instances are much like those of other parts of the world, and the data show both fragility and resilience at work.
Miriam Stark's magisterial synthesis of historical and archaeological evidence of Khmer civilization in southeast Asia underscores how intricate the politics of power are shown to be when texts are available. Fragility is not a new theme regarding charismatic rulership here, but Stark effectively situates this theme within an archaeological perspective.
Yoffee and Andrea Seri argue that early Mesopotamian states and cities were inherently fragile. Cities were more resilient than states, embedded as they normally were in populated countrysides with social and political institutions binding them together. But those populations also resisted. The arresting example of the demolition of the ziggurat at Uruk challenges the enduring model of the importance of temple governance in this cradle of urbanism.
This is a book for our times, worth reflecting on as we think about how archaeology can contribute to charting paths forward.
