Two months apart (November 1978, January 1979) three conferences were organized to compare the political and economic structures of Native American states. The proceedings of the first, held at Madrid, have been published (Economía y sociedad en los Andes y Mesoamérica, Revista de la Universidad Complutense, vol. 117); those of the second, The Inca and Aztec States, are due late in 1982. The book before us reports on the third and is different from both of the above: all the authors are anthropologists from the United States; their stress is on evolutionary changes leading to the emergence of centralized political structures.
Social stratification, insofar as it can be deduced from archaeological evidence, is a major feature of most of the essays. Authors disagree about the evidence for a “unitary theory of the origin of chiefdoms and, by extension, of the state itself,” but most are persuaded that the archaeological kindling to fuel such debates can be located.
The contribution of Richard S. MacNeish is the only one of the articles to deal with excavated materials from both Mesoamerica and the Andes. He notes that in both the inhabitants developed “pristine national states,” located in tropical, varied terrains in which “all the microzones or sub-areas had easy communication with each other, thus allowing [them] to form a similar interaction sphere throughout all the periods under consideration here” (p. 130). MacNeish claims that population pressure and warfare, suggested as triggering mechanisms, are not sufficient to explain the emergence of states; what the additional factors may be he leaves to future research.
Mark N. Cohen asks why “all forms of institutionalized central government (chiefdoms, states) evolve in so many parts of the world within such a short period.” Until about 6,000 years ago, “decentralized human systems … were nearly universal. ” Their independent evolution cannot be due to chance: “the coincidence defies credibility.” The common element along the various routes to civilization was the emergence of agriculture and population pressure (pp. 106-108).
Cohen is aware of populations that did not achieve early and pristine statehood. He suggests that given a general selection for centralization, the state is an epiphenomenon, whose emergence in particular cases is a matter for historical (as opposed to “comparative”) research.
Three of the contributions analyze “ideological factors in state formation.” Michael D. Coe stresses the relevance of a Mesoamerican religious system of wide distribution, “interacting in complex and subtle ways with economic factors to produce this highly successful polity” (p. 168). Alone among the contributors Coe shows thorough familiarity with early historical records and the pre-Columbian sources.
David A. Freidel uses the lowland Maya as a test of religion and ideology as “determinative factors in the rise of civilization and the state” (p. 188). In a well-documented brief, he argues that iconography, architecture, and ideology became homogeneous early on; “these features coupled with a strong centralization of ritual in public places, suggest that the Late Preclassic lowlands witnessed the development of a shared reality of government in the context of an iconographically simplified and conceptually centralized religion” (p. 223). “The lowland Maya evidently achieved great social size through consolidation around universal conceptions rather than by expansion. In the short run, the adaptive strategy of the Maya was highly successful and resulted in the largest and most enduring civilization in ancient Mesoamerica” (p. 227).
