Advances in City-State Research, with an Example from Mesoamerica

Abstract

The last 20 years have seen advances in the understanding of city-states, especially in ancient Greece, where textual information fuels new theories about institutions and the ancient economy. Archaeological research makes significant contributions with data comparable across multiple city-states on settlement patterns, urban and rural development, political and ritual activities, and other materializations of institutionalized behavior. Using a new corpus of 74 city-states from Oaxaca, Mexico, I show that city-states differ from one another in patterned ways, and I argue that this variation depends on internal factors such as the social mode of production and external factors including place in regional and interregional exchange.