Abstract
Author(s): Feinman, Gary | Abstract: The principal conceptual axes for explaining variation in prehispanic Mesoamerican political organization (states and empires) have shifted over time. Current perspectives build on and extend beyond the important dimensions of scale and hierarchical complexity and have begun to probe the nature of leadership and governance, drawing on collective action theory and incorporating recent findings that challenge long-held statist vantages on preindustrial economies. Recent results from and archaeological correlates for the application of this approach are outlined, offering opportunities for more comparative analyses of variation and change in the practice of governance within prehispanic Mesoamerican world and more globally.
Highlights
The principal conceptual axes for explaining variation in prehispanic Mesoamerican political organization have shifted over time
Based mostly on sustained decades of fieldwork, we know that the political organization of Mesoamerican polities varied markedly along several dimensions, reflective of geography, time, scale, and other factors
In archaeology over the last century, we have seen that many aspects of human behavior that we considered beyond the reach of the archaeological endeavor decades ago are open to far more in-depth and multifaceted examination (e.g., Hawkes 1954:161–162; Kristiansen 2014)
Summary
Archaeological findings from the lowland Maya region, the Valley of Oaxaca, the Gulf Coast, and other regions of Mesoamerica do not support the view that variation in modes of governance directly reflects long-standing cultural affiliations. Cliodynamics 9:2 (2018) (Blanton et al 1996), a causal model that defines the mechanisms and processes to account for changes and variation has only recently been proposed In the latter cases (based on external resources), leaders rely less on exactions from their immediate populace and so are freer to afford diminished representation, voice, or services to their citizens. Fiscal dependence on internal resources requires building social capital, delivering goods and services to citizens, maintenance of complex bureaucratic structures, and so affords fewer opportunities to concentrate wealth or consolidate power (Blanton and Fargher 2011). If the conceptual constructs derived from Olson, Levi, Blanton and Fargher, and others can enlighten recognized variability in the prehispanic governance of Mesoamerica, we would be able to tear down the artificial conceptual wall that long has divided our vision of past and present political formations, but doubt would be cast on long-held presumptions concerning teleological trajectories, progress, and modernization that are ingrained in our thinking and theories of why governance varies over time and space (e.g., Carneiro 1973; Lipset 1959)
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