American Scientist

Archaeological Perspectives on Political Economies. Edited by Gary M. Feinman and Linda M. Nicholas. xiv + 346 pp. University of Utah Press, 2004. Cloth, $80; paper, $39.

Social scientists who study ancient societies now commonly use the term political economy to emphasize that economic systems fundamentally involve social and political relations. Even though archaeologists have long understood that the main developmental thresholds of sociopolitical complexity—such as the emergence of chiefdoms, cities and states—can be related to changes in economic behavior, we have only recently begun to grapple with the real complexities of integrated political and economic systems. The research questions emerging from the analysis of political economies are still derived from material patterns in the archaeological record: How was the agricultural landscape managed? How was food produced and redistributed? How were raw materials acquired and worked to produce goods for local use and consumption or exchange? And in what cultural context?

Archaeological Perspectives on Political Economies, edited by Gary M. Feinman and Linda M. Nicholas, takes on these questions, juxtaposing 12 very different case studies of political economies from around the ancient world: Charles Stanish discusses the evolution of chiefdoms in the Lake Titicaca region; Timothy R. Pauketat looks at cultural practices in Mississippian chiefdoms, including Cahokia; Robert Adams reflects on the economy of early southern Mesopotamia; Gil Stein examines the economic organization of urbanism in northern Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C.; Andrew Sherratt considers how prehistoric societies in the Old World were altered by contact with the first urban communities there from 4000 to 500 B.C.; Glenn R. Storey examines the Roman imperial system; Anne P. Underhill and Hui Fang discuss early state economic systems in China; Patricia A. McAnany discusses labor obligations and luxury goods in ancient Maya societies; editors Feinman and Nicholas dissect the Prehispanic Mesoamerican economy of Oaxaca; Cathy Lynne Costin describes the craft economies of ancient Andean states; Laura Lee Junker looks at political economy in chiefdoms and states of Southeast Asia in the historic period; and Anne Brower Stahl presents some comparative insights into the ancient political economies of West Africa.

The chapters on the Mississippian Southeast, Latin America and Meso-potamia reflect in part the continuing resonance of the groundbreaking comparative work of contributor Robert Adams and in part the dominant perspective of anthropology departments in North America. The inclusion of articles on China, Southeast Asia and West Africa is brave, given the all-too-common tendency to focus on the ancient Americas or Near East. Although a polite nod is made to the Mediterranean (in the contributions of Sherratt and Storey), the book lacks fieldwork-based studies of early (pre-Roman) Italy, the entire prehistoric and classical Aegean, ancient Egypt and Anatolia. These puzzling and noticeable gaps emphasize the great divide separating anthropological and classical archaeology.

The papers in Archaeological Perspectives advocate an integrative approach, reinserting discussion of purely local cultural configurations into broad questions of regional economies and political structures. More important, the authors look at aspects of the ancient economy (such as agricultural specialization, exchange, the appropriation of surplus by elites and changing urban-rural relations) as the activities of real people who shaped political institutions and related to one another as parts of a sociopolitical process. The book also brings up an important question: How can diverse case studies of such sociopolitical relationships facilitate a meaningful cross-cultural dialogue on political economies?

The diversity of perspectives and theoretical approaches presented here and the extremely detailed, culturally specific examples provided make this a difficult book to read. They also left me wondering about the ultimate outcome of the scholarly exchange that was the book's genesis (Archaeological Perspectives is the product of a roundtable held at the Snowbird ski resort in October 2001). The papers stand solidly on their own. There is little evidence of whatever actual conversation there may have been among the contributors, and there are few cross-references between the papers. Feinman's introduction is excellent but brief, and the book lacks a concluding chapter piecing together the diverse strands of the discourse. Readers are left to sort out the connections between the papers for themselves and to search for broad themes.

One is the question of labor: What were the social institutions and relationships that structured the processes of production and consumption and informed the political organization? Stanish considers how a ranked society may have evolved out of an egalitarian one in the Titicaca basin during the Middle Formative period (1300 to 500 B.C.). Why did individuals decide to organize themselves to work cooperatively, agreeing to a division of labor based on craft specialization? The answer, he argues, lies in the way social relations were configured by public feasting carried out in a ritual landscape. Such feasting reinforced cooperation locally while intensifying competitive display regionally.

Pauketat is similarly interested in the social processes of labor mobilization. He emphasizes that in Mississippian chiefdoms the social acts of production and consumption—and the social identity and meaning of the laborers themselves—were constantly in flux. People redefined themselves with each new social event, such as the construction of a monument or the performance of a ritual.

This regional and temporal variability of labor mobilization and allocation is echoed in Stein's treatment of northern Mesopotamia. Here an essentially conservative "tribal" structure thrived in areas where lineage-based corporate groups seem to have maintained a precarious urbanization. In northern Mesopotamia, cities were maintained not through a centralizing economy linked to the ideology of the temple, as in the south (the subject of Adams's paper), but by a segmented structure of diversified farms with cereal crops and herds of sheep and goats. Stein's paper, an outgrowth of his earlier work on formative Ubaïd temple economies, argues that the environmental instability of the northern alluvium, where rainfall varied greatly from one year to the next, necessitated a tribal sedentary pastoralism that stymied the centralizing role of the temple and reinforced local kinship divisions. That is, local economy determined the regional political structure, the settlement patterns, the types of mortuary and the temple architecture.

McAnany's study of the Formative and Early Classic Maya periods also examines changing patterns of labor procurement and management. Her discussion of Maya temple ideology resonates with the papers contributed by Pauketat and Stein. The temple ideology became the means of mobilizing labor and centralizing power in the Formative period, when the first pyramids were constructed—not as elite tombs, but as dedications to divinities. The fascinating result of regional integration was a reduction in local procurement networks (as at the village of K'axob, in what is now Belize) and a concomitant intensification of local identity politics, which led to the construction of local plazas and then eventually to the development of a system of governance with regionally centered royal courts of divine rulers. The play of different scales of interaction over time is clearly key in tracing the emergence of networks of hierarchical obligation.

The social dynamics of labor mobilization is but one of many isolated strands of the book's discourse on political economies. At the core of that discourse is the contributors' belief that a truly comparative perspective can be generated only by a detailed empirical understanding of local and regional economies on multiple spatial scales in diverse culture regions. But the sheer complexity of the data from specific case studies introduces a myriad of local culture histories and environmental variables—and regionally unique sociopolitical configurations—that need to be examined and analyzed before cross-cultural comparisons can be drawn or broad theoretical frameworks constructed. We can see how economic activities may help to promote or develop political institutions; or how political systems affect or shape the local or regional economy. But the distinctions between "economy" and "social structure" are nevertheless derived from our analytical constructs. As this book demonstrates very effectively, the cultural reality proves to be more complex; economic activities are inextricable and indistinguishable from social and political institutions and processes.

The ground-up, largely fieldwork-based and scale-sensitive slant of this book is compelling and serves as a potent antidote to the traditional top-down hierarchical approaches to ancient state-level societies that have dominated archaeological discourse for the past four decades. It is perhaps odd, or at least interesting, that the book's contributors make little or no reference to two other recent forays into the political economies of early states, city-states and cities: Archaeological Views from the Countryside: Village Communities in Early Complex Societies, edited by Glenn M. Schwartz and Steven E. Falconer ( 1994), and The Archaeology of City-States: Cross--Cultural Approaches, edited by Deborah L. Nichols and Thomas H. Charlton (1997). (Another book, The Social Construction of Ancient Cities, edited by Monica L. Smith (2003), was not available at the time the papers in the volume under review were written.) The ways in which these works diverge may well be embedded more in departmental and institutional structures than in disciplinary or methodological biases.Embracing as it does the same broad cultural and chronological scope of these other collections, Archaeological Perspectives on Political Economies should help to stimulate a new generation of wide-ranging comparative views.—Donald C. Haggis, Archaeology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill