Ancient Civilizations of the World

Theories on the Origin of the State

Neoevolutionism

• Julian Steward: Multilinear evolutionism

1902-1972

Social evolution will have assumed different trajectories and will have moved at varying speeds in different regions of the world depending upon the ecological and technological resources that were available. Robert Carneiro has of late termed this position multicausality.

• Steward pioneered the concept of levels of sociocultural integration.

“In the growth continuum of any culture, there is a succession of organizational types which are not only increasingly complex but which represent new emergent forms.”

Elman Service proposed the following four levels of sociocultural integration in Primitive Social Organization (1962):

Band Tribe Chiefdom State

Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle have modified these levels somewhat in The Evolution of Human Societies (1987):

Family Level Societies

The Regional Group

Chiefdoms

States

This class is concerned with just the later two levels.

Complex Chiefdoms

• Society is organized into conical clans.• Social rank is determined by ones’ descent with

respect to an apical founding ancestor. Ancestor veneration is an important dimension of religion.

• The chieftain often claims a semi-sacred status.• There is an aristocracy of people recently

descended from chieftains. • The chieftain controls access to critical

resources like land or bulls.

• Chieftains and aristocrats set themselves apart from commoners by the consumption of sumptuary or prestige goods.

• Chieftains can appropriate the labor, goods, and women of commoners by various means.

• Chieftains are war leaders and chiefdoms are caught up in high levels of interpolity violence.

Weak States or Complex chiefdoms as an intermediary evolutionary stage

• In the 1940’s Aidan Southall studied an agro-pastoral people in Uganda called the Alur. They had lineages and chiefs, and recognized the ritual authority of a central chieftain, but otherwise chiefs were politically autonomous.

Southall called this society a segmentary state.

• I noted that a similar type of political system existed in Early Medieval Ireland, which I termed a composite chiefdom.

• It is clear from the Irish historical record from the Early Middle Ages that chiefdoms would also assume new identities and form chiefdom confederacies, i.e. the Éoganacht.

The Irish province of Munster in the eighth century AD

Some scholars, e.g. Norman Yoffee, have argued that some societies transitioned to state-level complexity without having passed through a chiefdom stage of social complexity.

In his view Mesopotamian society transitioned from communities led by councils of elders to states.

20th Century Theories of State Origins

Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957) Man Makes Himself (1936)

Childe, a Marxist, is often viewed as the last of the Victorian speculative theorists (he still used terms like “savages” and “barbarian”).

• Neolithic Revolution – desiccation of the Eastern Mediterranean after the Ice Ages led to humans animals concentrating around permanent sources of water. Animals were receptive to being fed by humans.

• Cultivation of grain led naturally to the accumulation of a surplus.

• A mixed farming economy (agro-pastoralism) led to the expansion of the population.

• The Neolithic economy lead to new technologies and increased sedentism, especially in Egypt and Mesopotamia due to the effort involved in improving the river bottom land for farming, and the inception of arborculture = fixed capital resources.

• The Urban Revolution – metallurgy, trade, and warfare called specialists into being, and specialists stimulated the growing of agricultural surpluses and population expansion.

How have Childe’s theories fared?-“Oasis theory”: Tested at Abu Hureyra,

Syria – more on that later.

-Craft specialization as a prime mover.

Other Marxism-inspired theories:-Hydraulic hypothesis – Karl Wittfogel

-Trade as a prime mover – Frankenstein and Rowlands “prestige goods system”

Ecology, demography, and social systems in the 1960’s and 70’s

• Boserup, Ester (1965). The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure.

• Kent Flannery: The cultural evolution of civilizations (1972) Systems theory.

• Mark Nathan Cohen: The Food Crisis in Prehistory : Overpopulation and the origins of agriculture (1977).

Robert Carneiro and Social Circumscription 1970

• Carneiro is a specialist on South America.

• His theory was inspired by the coastal valleys of Peru. These river valleys are geographically circumscribed by lifeless deserts.

• Social circumscription: when faced with adversity or economic hardship, people within egalitarian societies will move to a new locality. Population growth may lead to a situation when there aren’t any open areas for people to move to – then violence ensues as communities fight over resources.

• Carneiro’s model is a conflict model of social evolution.

Critique of Models involving Population Pressure

• In Ancient Mesoamerica (1981) and other publications Richard Blanton, Gary Feinman, and Stephen Kowalewski offer evidence that increases in social complexity in the Valley of Oaxaca in southern Mexico followed population declines.

Other Key Variables

Ideology: is what those influenced by Marx call religion (Marx equated religion with “false consciousness.”).

• In 1972 Robert M. Netting put forth the idea that as populations increased most social institutions of egalitarian societies were too weak to deal with all of the attendant problems. People turned to religious specialists (shamans) due to the respect that accrued to them due to their ability to influence the supernatural = latent power.

• Power: the ability to make someone do something that they would not otherwise do.

• The latent power of shamans was transformed into active power.

• The first leaders then were priest-kings (sacred kingship). As time goes on, these functions may separate.

• Agency: the role played by individuals and their motives. The view is to identify strategies by which individuals may manipulate the social system and accumulate power.

• Those scholars focusing on the acquisition of power are often inspired by Marxist theory – which sought to explain how social classes came to monopolize power in historical societies through a process of class struggle.

Dual Processual Theory (1996): Richard Blanton; Gary Feinman, Stephen

Kowalewski, & Peter Peregrine

• “Network” strategies vs. “Corporate” strategies for obtaining power.

Individuals following a network strategy aim to monopolize sources of power, establishing small-scale networks of personal dominance.

Within a corporate strategy, power is shared across the social structure and the monopolization of power is inhibited.

Dual processual theory acknowledges the differences that early states exhibit in their organization.

It has a fundamental weakness in that they can point to no historical examples of societies organized in a “corporate” fashion. Instead archaeological examples like Teotihuacán are put forward.

The Collapse of States

• Joyce Marcus and Joseph Tainter view complex states as inherently expensive and unstable.

• In many localities efforts at agricultural intensification, after initially yielding gains in food production, may have damaged fragile environments beyond immediate recovery, e.g. Copan in Honduras.