Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization

Green, Adam S.

doi:10.1007/s10814-020-09147-9

Cited by 34 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 143 publications

(159 reference statements)

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“…Distributed power (collective) tended to occur with sizable bureaucracies, dispersal of public goods, and reliance on local or "internal" sources of revenue to fund governance. Social scientists may not agree on what accounts for this institutional variance, but organizational diversity in the premodern past is becoming much more broadly recognized (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012;Bevir, 2012;Stasavage, 2020;Green, 2021).…”

Section: Governance At Monte Albanmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Foundation of Monte Albán, Intensification, and Growth: Coactive Processes and Joint Production

Nicholas

Feinman

2022

Front. Polit. Sci.

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Most early sedentary villages (c. 1500–500 BCE) in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, were situated on or near well-watered land. Around 500 BCE, a new hilltop center, Monte Albán, was established at the nexus of the valley's three arms, where agriculture was far riskier due to unreliable rainfall and a dearth of permanent water sources. During the era of its establishment, not only was Monte Albán larger than any earlier community in the region, but many other settlers moved into the rural area around Monte Albán. This marked shift in settlement patterns in the Valley of Oaxaca and the underlying processes associated with the foundation of Monte Albán have long been debated. How can we account for the immigration of people, some likely from beyond the region itself, to an area where they faced greater risks of crop failure? One perspective, reliant on uniform models of premodern states as despotic, viewed the process from a basically top-down lens; leaders coerced subalterns to move near the capital to provide sustenance for the new center. Yet more recent research has found that governance at Monte Albán was generally more collective than autocratic, and productive activities were centered in domestic units and not managed from above. Based on these new empirical foundations, we reassess earlier settlement and land use studies for the Valley of Oaxaca and view this critical transition as initiated through coactive processes in which new institutions were formed and new relations forged. Shifts in defense, ritual, domestic organization, craft production, and exchange all coincided with this episode of growth fostered by joint production, which intensified agrarian yields through increased domestic labor investments.

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Section: Governance At Monte Albanmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Foundation of Monte Albán, Intensification, and Growth: Coactive Processes and Joint Production

Nicholas

Feinman

2022

Front. Polit. Sci.

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“…In building empire, the Aztec employed a diverse mix of cosmological, bureaucratic, and patrimonial messaging and communication (to a far greater degree than in prior eras); the governing practices of the empire likewise were intermediate between collective and autocratic [24,71] . At the core of the Aztec empire, political and economic integration was more organic and interconnected [20,21] , so that the prior organizations of previously autonomous city-states were broken down and reconfigured [151] . At the same time, in distant provinces, local rulers were left in place.…”

Section: Prehispanic Mesoamerican Temporal Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Communication, Computation, and Governance: A Multiscalar Vantage on the Prehispanic Mesoamerican World

Feinman

Carballo

2022

J. Soc. Comput.

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Writing has often been put forth as one indicator of civilization. This correspondence dovetails with the even broader cross-species expectation that the degrees of social complexity and levels of computational communication should closely correlate. Although in a general sense across human cooperative arrangements, a basic relationship between these variables undoubtedly exists, more detailed and fine-grained analyses indicate important axes of variability. Here, our focus is on prehispanic Mesoamerica and the means of computation and communication employed over more than three millennia (ca. 1500 BCE-1520 CE). We take a multiscalar and diachronic analytical frame, in which we look at 30 central places, six macroregions, and Mesoamerica as whole. By unraveling elements of "social complexity", and decoupling computation from communication, we illustrate that institutional differences in governance had a marked effect on the specific modes and technologies through which prehispanic Mesoamerican peoples communicated across time and space. Demographic and spatial scale, though relevant, do not alone determine time/space diversity in media of computational communication. This article is part of the theme issue "Evolution of Collective Computational Abilities of (Pre)Historic Societies".

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“…Second, processual models are now considered as too narrow (Yoffee 1993; McIntosh 2005; Kenoyer 2008); councils, competing clans and other social structures that were more flexible and less hierarchical could also organise large populations into state-like entities (e.g. Green 2021).…”

Section: Complicating the Processual Early Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Complicating an early state: a social network analysis of agents in Wari art (c.AD 700–850)

Gibbon

Knobloch²,

Jennings³

2022

Antiquity

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Processual models of the early state envisioned hierarchical societies with stable social and political structures. More recent research, however, has questioned this vision. Here, the authors explore Middle Horizon (AD 700–1000) Wari state iconography to provide an example of early state social and political organisation from the Central Andes. Social network analysis (SNA) of human figures (‘agents’) depicted in Wari art identifies links between individual agents, as visualised on objects and between the objects’ findspots. The results suggest that the Wari state was more heterarchical than previously imagined. Similar applications of SNA could be used to explore the iconographic evidence of other early, pre-literate states around the world.

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Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization

Cited by 34 publications

References 143 publications

The Foundation of Monte Albán, Intensification, and Growth: Coactive Processes and Joint Production

The Foundation of Monte Albán, Intensification, and Growth: Coactive Processes and Joint Production

Communication, Computation, and Governance: A Multiscalar Vantage on the Prehispanic Mesoamerican World

Complicating an early state: a social network analysis of agents in Wari art (c.AD 700–850)

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