Chapter 11 Outline

Cities and States: Understanding Social Complexity in Prehistory

Introduction

Cahokia, a prehistoric site in the Mississippi River bottom lands near what is now St. Louis, offers us a glimpse of social complexity and the nature of city-states. In Cahokia, a number of loosely-affiliated and egalitarian agricultural communities changed suddenly, possibly in the span of a single generation, ushering in a new hierarchical social and political order.
In a span of about 150 years, a large, thriving urban center of between 5,000 and 10,000 people changed dramatically and the stratified society that was Cahokia disappeared.
The puzzle Cahokia represents for prehistoric archaeologists is to understand how and why such social complexity emerged there when it did, and why it didn’t last, because there are no written records.
It is difficult to figure out why this transformation from self-governance to outside rule took place. Why would people who governed themselves give up their independence to be ruled by others?
In Cahokia, political struggle and instability were common, a condition that likely contributed to the city’s eventual disappearance.
Several different theories have been advanced to understand this change and collapse:

Some archaeologists also point to an environmental collapse, caused by population growth, deforestation, and the erosion of agricultural soils.
Others suggest that warfare played a role, pointing to evidence of burials with weapons, burned buildings, sacrificial victims, and defensive stockades.
Still others note that Cahokian society didn’t so much “collapse” as split into different groups that moved off in different directions to take advantage of resources and opportunities elsewhere.

At the heart of prehistoric archaeology’s approach to understanding the rise and decline of complex societies like Cahokia is a key question: How and why did cities and states emerge, and sometimes, disappear? Within this broader question are the following problems, around which this chapter is organized.
What does social complexity mean to archaeologists?
How can archaeologists identify social complexity in archaeological sites and artifacts?
How can archaeologists explain why cities and states fall apart?

What Does Social Complexity Mean to Archaeologists?

The earliest archaeologists were Europeans educated about the classic civilizations of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Mesopotamia.
Part of the fascination these ancient societies held for nineteenth century Europeans was that they saw themselves as linked more or less directly to these older societies, which had provided the inspiration for European legal codes, constitutions, and philosophies.
These early archaeologists sought answers to these questions by excavating these ancient societies.
They believed their findings would better help them understand the principles of how societies became civilized and complex, as well as why some societies remained small and relatively simple.
Definitional issues, especially identifying the key traits and characteristics of civilizations, were an important area of interest in these early years.
Alfred Kroeber saw the great civilizations emerging from the accumulation of particular items of material culture.
V. Gordon Childe felt that the origins of cities and city-states was less about material things than about organizational arrangements.
Archaeologists agreed that there were different degrees to which specific cases fit with either Kroeber’s or Childe’s model.
It was also clear that the social, political, and economic lives of people living in societies characterized as civilizations were very different from those of people living in small-scale societies.
Most anthropologists and archaeologists refer to the differences between these societies as differences of social complexity: a society that have many different parts organized into a single social system.
All societies experience some level of social complexity. No human society is “simple”: even the most egalitarian face-to-face societies have ways of exercising power, controlling resources, and grouping people into smaller units for specific purposes.
The idea of complexity is used when the material arrangements of a society are differentiated into social or occupational classes or differences in wealth, power, and control.
Not all societies are complex societies: societies in which socioeconomic differentiation, large populations, and centralized political control, are pervasive and defining features of the society.
Complex societies typically have political formations called states: societies with forms of political and economic control over a particular territory and the inhabitants of that territory.
The other defining feature of complex societies are cities: relatively large and permanent settlements, usually with populations of at least several thousand inhabitants.
As smaller cities grew, their complexity increased, and we refer to these as city-states: autonomous political entities that consisted of a city and its surrounding countryside.
It was from these city-states that proper states and their larger cousins, kingdoms and empires, eventually arose.
Complex societies are characterized by dynamics of wealth, power, coercion, and status, in which social stratification—elites and non-elites— ensures that the labor of the non-elites benefits the lifestyles of the elites.
The question that arises here is how such structures—city-states, states and empires—emerged in the first place?
Archaeologists recognized that for complex societies to form, more intensive food production was necessary.
Elites in early cities and states began to construct a state ideology and religious ideas that explained and justified why the political elites deserved the special treatment they received and groups with less power deserved fewer resources.
Several other features have been suggested that we will consider here: population growth, contact with other cultures, and specialization and the differentiation of social roles.
Population growth was a key part of how these structures emerged. Large populations require a corresponding sophistication and scale of food production.
Importantly, societies with cities and the early hints of what would become centralized states lived side by side with small-scale and tribal societies that also produced their own food, often the same foods that were part of the diet of people in these early towns and cities.
Population growth’s relationship to complexity is that as a population grows, social conflict over essential resources such as land and water can also increase. This social conflict that results can trigger the rise of complexity.

See “Thinking Like an Anthropologist: Robert Carneiro on the Role of Warfare in the Rise of Complex Societies.”

Trade is another way to examine the emergence of very complex formations such as city-states.
The “trade model” of state formation holds that states and complex societies have tended to form where there is interaction among groups of people of different ethnic backgrounds with access to different resources.
Trade arises because people want the objects, foods, or raw materials that neighboring groups produce that are not available at home.
Trade and exchange also create alliances between societies.
Most trade models of state formation focus on the key role that a specialized class of traders plays in managing markets and market places.
Additionally, providing military protection of markets and caravans is crucial.
All of this is accomplished by collecting taxes and tribute.
The “production model” of state formation is driven by craft specialization, leading to new social roles for food producers and craftspeople who produce useful objects like stone tools and pottery.
The resulting food surpluses could feed the specialists and gave rise to a military class.
True control of production came with construction of irrigation canals and systems that developed in many early states, especially in the Middle East.
The level of political and social control exerted by ancient elites lays the basis for what early archaeologists referred to as hydraulic despotism: empires built around the control of water resources by despotic, or all-powerful, leaders.
Images of ancient despotism are reasonable at various times and places, but they are biased because there were so many Mesopotamian scribes writing about everything imaginable in cuneiform script.
Much of what we can infer about these states comes from what the rulers, their scribes, and stone-workers left behind in the form of relief carvings, palace art, and monumental stonework engraved with cuneiform writing.
Recent archaeological findings have motivated a reinterpretation of the so-called kingdoms and empires of bronze age Mesopotamia.
Most of these formations were rather short-lived and really city-states rather than vast empires. The evidence suggests that most of the kingdoms were organized more like estates that served the needs of particular temples.
Two processes were at play in these city-states:

urbanization: the 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 associated with religious shrines, temples, and leaders flourished during this time, along with the emergence of record keeping devices like cylinder seals and cuneiform tablets.
The question that arises in these ancient Middle Eastern cities, city-states, and states, is why would previously independent people working fields and herding sheep, goats, or cattle, surrender their independence to a local leader in their own community or, even more surprisingly, to a leader in a city some distance away?
One likely reason is that leaders enforced their control via police forces and armies. The development of warriors probably began when larger clans started coercing smaller groups nearby. Additionally, when people started specializing in crafts and trades, they needed protection and found that in more powerful elites.
As mentioned before, the rise of early states seems more linked to social arrangements than brute despotism.
In the later Neolithic (7,000-5,000 BCE), settlements were growing in size and density, but there is little evidence of social inequality.
With more control over agricultural production given to ruling elites, the likelihood of despotic kingdoms grows.
Importantly, social complexity does not always emerge on the basis of social inequality. Some societies may have social groups organized into broad regional relationships by building on individual relationships rather than central authority.

One example of this kind of social complexity is found along the north coast of Papua New Guinea today. Nearly 200 politically independent communities are economically integrated through individual exchange relationships between pairs of friends, friendships which are heritable and persistent over hundreds of years. Patterns of specialization are quite complex and the social system is too diffuse for any sort of monopoly to persist for any length of time.

How Can Archaeologists identify Social Complexity from Archaeological Sites and Artifacts?

Material objects are an expression of people’s social relationships and help shape social relationships, including those related to wealth, power, and status.
By itself, in isolation, an object recovered in an excavation can’t necessarily 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: a group or collection of objects found together at an excavation or site.
Evidence of their manufacture and distribution in a site or region as well as contextual clues can connect individual artifacts to similar or related artifacts.
Tarascan empire in what is now the western Mexican state of Michoacán is a fresh example how we can identify and understand social complexity.
Tarascans organized the second-largest state in Mexico probably in an effort to counter the military and political pressures exerted on them by the Aztecs.
Evidence of their emergence, as well as the social distinctions and power relations within it, comes from diverse sources: population growth and settlement patterns; soils and land use patterns; monuments and buildings; mortuary patterns and skeletal remains; and ceramic, stone, and metal objects.
Over time the growing city became spatially segregated and divided into special function zones. Manufacturing zones also appear, supporting specific activities such as pottery-making and stone tool manufacture and indicate a degree of occupational specialization. Carefully planned public zones were created where large monuments, plazas, and ball courts were built, all under direct control of administrative and religious authorities.
Soil and land use studies offer useful perspectives on connections between population growth, agricultural expansion, and soil degradation. This evidence indicates that the growth of population centers created soil degradation.
Because they transform a landscape and require substantial engineering and collective labor, monuments and buildings are important symbols of power, wealth, and even connection to the divine order.
Changes in the location and contents of Tarascan burial sites over time, including the preparation and treatment of bodies, types of burial goods, and mortuary facilities, correlate with increasing population and indicate social differentiation.
A notable shift in mortuary practices takes place with the consolidation of state power during the 1400s.

Before this period, mortuary objects in elite burials were imported from other distant powerful political and social centers, such as central Mexico.
Later objects come from areas under Tarascan control which archaeologists interpret as indicating the consolidation of a distinctly Tarascan identity among elites, an identification that supports the consolidation of Tarascan state power.

Changes in everyday objects such as ceramic pottery vessels and figurines, stone tools and weapons, and metal tools, weapons, and ornaments are also tied to increasing social complexity. In connecting these objects to their sources, archaeologists have demonstrated that expanding trade networks and administrative control brought raw materials from new and distant locales both outside and from within the growing empire.
Changes in production and distribution patterns of obsidian and metals support a similar picture of the empire’s social complexity.
The important point about all this evidence is that in isolation, none of these findings would automatically suggest the existence of social complexity, but together they can create a compelling picture that highlights the rise of state power, social divisions, and social inequality.
Since empires, cities, and states do not usually survive for more than a few centuries we may ask why, after mustering the specialization and organization of production, do most complex societies not persist?

How Do Archaeologists Explain Why Cities and States Fall Apart?

The romanticizing of the rise and fall of civilizations leads us to wonder if we are misinterpreting or misunderstanding the course of these ancient states.
Jared Diamond’s argument is that the root cause of societal collapse is environmental.
It is a compelling argument, but is much like viewing a low-resolution digital image: from far away, the image may seem clear, but up close it dissolves into disconnected parts.
This and many other arguments are all attempts to explain collapse: the rapid loss of a social, political, and economic order or complexity.
When we delve deeply into the archaeological evidence, most cases for total societal collapse fall apart.
Archaeologists mostly agree that collapse is an incredibly rare phenomenon, and what is typical for most human societies is the ability for transformation and resilience: the ability of a social system to absorb changes and still retain certain basic cultural processes and structures, albeit in altered form.
The classic historical examples of great empires that ended did not generally end from collapse but were usually the result of internal fragmentation, lack of strong central institutions, or more powerful foreign armies.
Here we examine two other emblematic examples of apparent collapse—the Four Corners area of the U.S. Southwest and the Classic Maya—and demonstrate that abandoned ruins do not mean that the people themselves did not survive, although they may have undergone substantial social transformation.
In the late 13th century CE the Ancestral Pueblo (“Anasazi”) people who lived in Mesa Verde and the rest of the Four Corners region picked up and moved away, leaving behind well-preserved cliff-dwellings, mesa top pueblos (villages), farming terraces, towers, reservoirs, and irrigation systems.
Many explanations have sought to answer the question of why, including environmental explanations erosion, soil depletion, dropping water tables, and violence.
Environmental stresses are not the singular cause of the Four Corners depopulation.
Archaeologists have begun to view this abandonment as a social strategy, not of failure, but of resilience so that the people migrated to take advantage of opportunities elsewhere.
Many of these groups simply migrated to other areas with more abundant resources.

See “Doing Fieldwork: Studying What Happened After the Migration from the Four Corners with Scott Van Keuren”

The Classic Maya (400-900 CE) of the Mesoamerican lowlands, a prototypical ancient complex state society, is our second example.
This was a society of extreme political centralization, rigid social hierarchy, colossal monuments, population centers housing tens of thousands of people, and a hieroglyphic script.
During the 8th and 9th centuries, royal dynasties disappeared, courts no longer functioned, monumental building projects ended, and important centers were abandoned, mostly without evidence of violence.
There are dozens of explanations, the most prominent being:

Escalating warfare between rulers of city-states.
Out-of-control population growth leading to environmental degradation, erosion and soil depletion.
Drought, resulting from climatological change.
Inability of rulers to adapt to changing economic conditions and social conflict.

It is important to keep in mind as we evaluate these arguments is that the Maya people never disappeared, the history of the Maya being one of social change and resilience, as the existence of seven million Maya today attests.
Late Classic period evidence of the lives and events of Maya royalty have more accounts of warfare than other historic periods. This is evidenced in stelae: carved limestone slabs.
Whether or not population growth was out-of-control depends on the method of estimating population density. The accepted method involves counting the number of structures per square kilometer and assuming about five people for each, then subtracting a fraction of the total for the fact that not every structure was residential.
A high estimate for the Classic-period Maya lowlands is 150 people per square kilometer, considerably lower than the population density of Los Angeles (2,700 per square mile). As to whether or not the fragile soils of the region could or could not sustain large populations, recent studies of landscape modification during the Classic period indicate that Maya farmers were especially aware of this fact, and practiced soil conservation techniques.
While there is good evidence that the climate during the 8th and 9th centuries was especially dry, there is no evidence to suggest that water shortage was uniform.
There is no doubt that political crises and social conflict eventually rendered the Maya leaders irrelevant. Economic changes, such as a shift in commercial activities and population from the interior lowlands to the coastal Yucatán peninsula, may have played a role in undermining these leaders.
So what really happened to the Classic Maya?

We know that Maya farmers dispersed throughout the countryside and only occasionally congregated to the once occupied centers.
Certain social and political structures persisted, including statecraft based on inherited nobility and social hierarchy.
None of this suggests collapse but rather transformation.
The important point here is that different polities experienced different histories of transformation—some held on longer than others because of their specific political, ecological, historic, and perhaps even climatic conditions.

Each of the factors considered here can reinforce or mitigate the others. A degrading environment can lead to increasing conflict, which in turn can lead to the undermining of political authority.
What is key in the examination of collapse, transformation and “disappearance” of any civilization is simple: there is no uniform experience or explanation for the depopulation of a city or state.

Conclusion

Partly as a result of what they leave behind, ancient complex societies can be easily viewed as stories of high human drama and tragedy. Possibly because we currently face the consequences of global warming, the disappearance of previous societies holds great fascination.
If we step back from the more dramatic elements of these stories, a focus on complexity is a means by which archaeologists can study the dynamics of social integration and transformation in ancient societies.
Cases such as Cahokia or the Tarascan empire allow us to better appreciate these stories as human cultural processes.
All archaeologists agree that any explanation of complexity must be rooted in the actual evidence of artifacts and remains themselves. It is this which allows us insight into how and why states, cities, and other complex societies emerged, and in some cases, declined.