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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.

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