2016, Justin Jennings and Timothy Earle. Urbanization, State Formation, and Cooperation: A Reappraisal. Current Anthropology 57(4): 474-493

Urbanization, State Formation,and Cooperation

A Reappraisal

by Justin Jennings and Timothy Earle

Since at least the Enlightenment, scholars have linked urbanization to state formation in the evolution of complexsocieties. We challenge this assertion, suggesting that the cooperative units that came together in the earliest cities werepremised on limiting outside domination and thus usually acted to impede efforts to create more centralized struc-tures of control. Although cities often became the capitals of states, state formation was quicker and more effectivewhere environments kept people more dispersed. Data from the Andes and Polynesia are used to support this argu-ment. In the Lake Titicaca Basin, household- and lineage-based groups living in the city of Tiahuanaco structuredurban dynamics without the state for the settlement’s first 300 years, while similarly organized Hawaiian groups thatwere isolated in farmsteads were quickly realigned into a state structure. By decoupling urbanization from state for-mation, we can better understand the interactions that created the world’s first cities.

When archaeology coalesced into a discipline during the nine-teenth century, scholars arranged prehistoric societies along ascale from simplest to most complex and then sought to explainwhy certain groups developedmore rapidly than others (Trigger1989:111). The most complex of societies were called “civiliza-tions,” noted for their cities, bureaucracies, agriculture, high art,and other features. Archaeology, of course, has changed radi-cally since early unilinear schemes, although researchers stillseek to define mechanisms of change responsible for culturalvariability (Neitzel and Earle 2014).

Twentieth-century scholars, whether culture-historical (Kroe-ber 1944; Lowie 1920; Rouse 1953), adaptive (Flannery 1972;Service 1962;Wright 1977), orMarxist (Adams 1956; Earle 1978;Fried 1967; Gilman 1981; Johnson and Earle 2000), tended toemphasize a top-down approach to cultural evolution. The or-igins of cities and states were largely seen as new managementschemes or as the result of efforts by aggrandizers who “per-suaded, coaxed, cajoled, begged, bribed, and otherwise wonover”others to do their bidding (Clark and Blake 1994:21). Althoughthe actions of aggrandizers, and later chiefs and tyrants, remainfundamental to our understanding of culture change (Earle 1997;Flannery 1998; Hayden 2001), research over the past decade hasbegun emphasizing more bottom-up, group-level approaches.

For these scholars, emergent social complexity is the “evolutionof cooperation” (Stanish and Levine 2011:13901).

From a variety of theoretical perspectives, scholars nowseek to understand why people work together in increasinglylarger and more complex groups (e.g., Blanton and Fargher2008; Boyd and Richerson 2009; Carballo 2013b; Turchinet al. 2013; Vaughn, Eerkens, and Katner 2010). This shiftingemphasis in part recognizes that an egalitarian ethos is a Pleis-tocene innovation that facilitated cooperation between fam-ilies by limiting status competition (Boehm 1993; also see Os-trom 1990; Wiessner 1996, 2002, 2009). Cooperation thus mayhave emerged against the destructive, narrow self-interest ofgroup members (Hardin 1968).

Although aggrandizers are still envisioned to persuade, coax,and bribe, they do so entangled within overlapping relation-ships that reinforce the status quo even during times of greatsocial change. This insight, of course, is not new—recall Marx’sfamous passage on how the past shapes actions (Marx 1977[1852]:300) or Machiavelli’s warning to the prince to appear torepresent tradition, seeming “to be all mercy, faith, integrity,humanity, and religion” (1950 [1532]:65). Yet our prevailingviews of social evolution undertheorize enduring, more egal-itarian, group-oriented, and bottom-up structural relations,especially during transitional eras such as incipient urbaniza-tion and early state formation.

Because evolutionary typologies draw heavily from historicand ethnographic case studies, our conception of the “ancientcity” and “ancient state” are often based on examples with longconnections between urban and rural populations (e.g., Fein-man and Marcus 1998; Marcus and Sabloff 2008). We then

Justin Jennings is a curator in the Department of World Culturesof the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto, Ontario M5S 2C6, Canada[ [email protected]]). Timothy Earle is Professor Emeritus in the De-partment of Anthropology of Northwestern University (1810 HinmanAvenue, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA). This paper was submitted20 III 15, accepted 18 IX 15, and electronically published 1 VII 16.

q 2016 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2016/5704-0005$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/687510

474 Current Anthropology Volume 57, Number 4, August 2016

extend these structures back in time to a “critical threshold”(Flannery 1972:423), “Big Bang” (Pauketat 2007:146), or “phasetransition” (Yoffee 2005:230) at the beginning of “civilization.”Emphasis is more often placed on qualitative change, with in-sufficient attention to how newfound complexity built on pre-existing lifeways (Alt 2010; Roddick, Bruno, and Hastorf 2014).Those who came together to form the first cities were largelyfarmers, herders, and fisher folk. They were likely more inclinedto form cooperative, mutually benefiting structures in these newsettings that minimized central power and resulting stratifica-tion—two features commonly associated with states.

Çatalhöyük was “just a very very large village” (of perhaps8,000 residents) that “pushed the idea of an egalitarian villageto its ultimate extreme” (Hodder 2006:98). Such egalitarian,cooperative mechanisms that maintained large village-like set-tlements may have persevered even for quickly growing cities.Using two case studies of state emergence, from the Andes andPolynesia, we argue that most people moving into new urbancenters leaned on what they knew and successfully managed tolimit centralization and stratification for decades, if not centu-ries (Ur 2014). Counterintuitively, population aggregation mayhave served at first as a brake rather than an accelerant to centralpower.

Cultural Evolution, the City, and the State

An initial opposition of urbanites to state formation is counter-intuitive because of enduring associations of these two fea-tures inmodels of cultural evolution. Documenting a “city” haslong been tantamount to documenting a “state” and a “civili-zation” (Smith 2003:12). The assumed close association of cit-ies with states has, however, relied on a stage conception usinghistorical cases, for which states were long established. Newlydetailed archaeological sequences for the growth of cities andthe emergence of city-less state institutions now question theelemental nature of the association of cities and states.

Although definitions vary considerably (see Manzanilla1997), we follow Wirth’s (1938:8) description of cities aspermanent settlements that have (1) large population size,(2) dense population nucleation, and (3) high heterogeneity inthe social roles of inhabitants. Wirth made his definition con-text specific, such that a “city” is defined relative to other set-tlements within a particular region (1938:3–8). Yet for com-parative purposes, we argue that future research must identifycross-cultural size (perhaps greater than 5,000), density (per-haps greater than 500/km2), and social-heterogeneity thresh-olds for urbanism.

Wirth’s descriptive definition contrasts with others used byarchaeologists that follow more closely Mumford’s functionaldefinition of a city as a “geographic plexus, an economic or-ganization, an institutional process, a theatre of social action,and an aesthetic symbol of collective action” (2011 [1937]:93).More functional definitions demonstrate that sites of vastlydifferent sizes boast “urban” activities and institutions that affecta larger hinterland (Smith 2007:4, 2012:337). Yet widening the

definition of cities in this manner may obscure emergent prop-erties of concentrating in one place many people of diverse so-cial roots.

Cities, as Glaeser (2011:6) notes, “are proximity, density,closeness.”A functional definition tends to conflate what citiesbecome with their process of becoming. If a state emerges—defined narrowly here as a regionally organized society com-posed of a ruling class, a commoner class, and a highly cen-tralized and internally specialized government (Johnson andEarle 2000; Marcus and Feinman 1998:4)—then a city tends tobe seen as always serving as the anchor of “region-integratinginstitutions” (Blanton 1982:431). The relationship between cit-ies, states, and other kinds of regional polities was extremelyvariable and is an area in need of further research. Wirth’sdefinition allows us to decouple the city as a population centerfrom the state as a political institution, allowing the disciplineto move away from a long-standing reliance on evolutionarystages developed from historic cases and toward one premisedon documented archaeological sequences.

Though first developed during the Enlightenment, evo-lutionary stages of cultural evolution were codified by latenineteenth–century scholars, who used available ethnographicand historical evidence to rank societies into ascending stagesof savagery, barbarism, and civilization (e.g., Frazer 1890; Mor-gan 1963 [1877]; Spencer 1862; Tylor 1871). Cities and stateswere two primary indicators for civilization as a stage, and, with-out good archaeological documentation, sorting ethnographicand historical societies into distinct groups emphasized qual-itative differences (Earle and Spriggs 2015; Sanderson 2007).The quest for universal stages of development fell into disre-pute by the beginning of twentieth century (Sanderson 2007),but scholars continued to identify types of societies and in-creasingly emphasized disjuncture between types that madecultural evolution “irregular and discontinuous” (Harding et al.1960:97). For civilization, there were “urban revolutions” (Childe1951 [1936]), “step-like” shifts (Flannery 1972:423), “qualitative”changes (Johnson and Earle 2000), and “punctuational” trans-formations (Spencer 1990:11) to state-level societies.

As the archaeological record has been established in increas-ing detail over the past 3 decades, scholars have seen transitionsas messy processes leading up to cities and states (e.g., Wright2006; Yoffee 2005). Yet the idea of a stage of ancient citiesand states remains largely intact (Campbell 2009), a link mostoften referenced obliquely when we argue that ancient citiesgo “hand-in-hand” with ancient states (Manzanilla 1997:5)or that civilization is “inextricably intertwined” with state for-mation (Yoffee 2005:17). The predominant critiques of cul-tural evolution have tended to underline the extreme variabilitysubsumed under each stage (Pauketat 2007; Yoffee 1993), withsome scholars arguing that a narrow vision of civilization hasimposed a centralized, hierarchical structure on societies that,at least in some areas, appear to have been more fragmentary,horizontally organized, and heterarchical than states as classi-cally defined (e.g., Blanton and Fargher 2008, 2011; Campbell2009; Glatz 2009; Kenoyer 2008; Schortman 2014).

Jennings and Earle Urbanization, State Formation, and Cooperation 475

These critiques, though valuable, retain the sense of a stageof development by seeking largely to identify and explain moretypes within the array of cities, states, and regional polities(Neitzel and Earle 2014). The new types still tend to rely onhistorical and ethnographic cases of societies in their mostmature periods, thus often ignoring how the continuation ofpast practices shaped urbanizing settings. The enduring in-fluence of “civilization” as an object of study has led us tothink, albeit often tacitly, of cities and states arriving simul-taneously and fully formed (Jennings 2016). Most of us rec-ognize, of course, that historical trajectories lead to cities andtheir relationships with outlying communities (e.g., Fisher andCreekmore 2014:1; Smith 2003:14), and researchers have be-gun to address the deficiencies of the staged model of culturalevolution (Carballo 2013b; Drennan and Peterson 2006, 2012;Robb and Pauketat 2013). This article builds on these effortsby revaluating the links between small-scale cooperative units,incipient aggregation, and state formation (also see Blantonand Fargher 2012; Cooper 2006; Creekmore 2014; Ur 2014).

Cooperation, Aggregation, and Resistanceto the State

Cooperation—working together to achieve a common goal—is found within many animals, from ants to primates, but hu-mans are distinct in their ability to form large groups composedof genetically unrelated members (Boyd and Richerson 2009;Dunbar 1993). These human social groups vary in size andduration. Although family units are often the most stable ofthese groups, individuals participate in many other coopera-tive units that are often overlapping and sometimes in conflictwith each other (Johnson and Earle 2000). Why humans coop-erate at these scales has been of long-standing interest forevolutionary scholars, because larger groups can be easilystymied by a few self-interested individuals or “free riders”(Clutton-Brock et al. 2009; Hammerstein 2003; Ostrom 1990).The tragedy of the commons was one of the first concepts thatemphasized the contradictions of collective action (Hardin1968).

Carballo (2013a:11–13; also Carballo, Roscoe, and Feinman2014:106–108) identifies four R’s that promote cooperation:(1) reciprocity, (2) reputation, (3) retribution, and (4) rewards.According to a socioecological model, groups should form andpersevere only as long asmembers benefit fromcooperation andpunish free riders (Johnson and Earle 2000). The suprafamilycooperative units among contemporary hunter-gatherers arebased on oral, face-to-face interactions. Networks can be quiteextensive—such as in the hxaro exchanges of the contempo-rary Ju/’hoansi (Lee 1984; Wiessner 1996)—but require con-siderable effort to maintain because of the distances traveled(Roscoe 2012:45–46). Since Pleistocene people were spreadthinly across the landscape, suprafamily cooperatives wouldhave likely been similar (Feinman 2013).

About 12,000 years ago, the appearance of the first villages(coresidential groups in the low hundreds) was associated

with dramatic population growth, resource intensification,and a more sedentary lifestyle (Bandy 2008; Bocquet-Appel2002, 2008). Aggregation brought with it the opportunity toform larger, more sustained, cooperative groups, and closeinteraction between families for long periods of time wouldhave encouraged the creation of new integrative practices(Feinman 2013; Johnson and Earle 2000). Yet the size of co-operative units was effectively capped at only a few hundredpeople, a number above which villages tended to fission (Al-berti 2014; Fletcher 1995). Individuals and groups, on occa-sion, nonetheless created broader regional networks that cross-cut these divisions (Johnson and Earle 2000).

Greater levels of regular cooperation could be achieved ifindividuals acquiesced to a greater degree of hierarchy span-ning previously independent units. Yet the cross-cultural lim-itations on village size suggest that efforts to create over-arching hierarchical relations routinely failed or that fewperceived advantages existed to working in larger groups.Boehm (1993, 1999) argues that early sedentary and mobilepopulations exhibited a “reverse dominance hierarchy,” a setof mechanisms from gossip to execution that limited dom-ination. The result was less an ethos of egalitarianism and morea ceiling on the actions of potential leaders, who moved care-fully in influencing other members of their closely relatedgroup (Angelbeck and Grier 2012:550; Bird and Bird 2009:45;Boehm 1993:246; Weissner 2009:218). In limiting domina-tion, individuals in villages effectively limited the size of theircooperative units, since only groups smaller than a few hun-dred people could unite to restrict the rise of powerful leaders(Boehm 1993:240).

Gregory Johnson (1978, 1982; see also Alberti 2014) ex-plored how increasing settlement size might occur throughthe increasing coordination of smaller simultaneous decision-making units (usually households). Each household (or “basalunit”) in a growing settlement would have initially operatedindependently of the others, with their boundaries often de-fined spatially (by walls, ditches, or topographic features) andsocially (by marriage patterns, exchange, or dress; Johnson1982:398). As settlements got bigger, the basal units multiplied.More rarely, the basal units might increase in size, broadeningthe family to encompass extended families or even lineages. Alarger cooperative unit made it easier to coordinate activitiesrequiring larger numbers of participants. Cooperation betweenbasal units was further supported through an increase in thesize, scale, and frequency of group rituals that forestalled fur-ther changes in social organization, such that regular feasts,monumental constructions, and public ceremonies could beused to regularly draw individuals together who still identifiedwith a narrower subset(s) of the population.

Gregory Johnson considered how smaller simultaneousdecision-making units broke down in growing communities,and he saw settlement-wide decision-making hierarchies inplace when populations climbed into the low thousands. Weargue, however, that Johnson significantly underestimatedpeople’s commitment to their long-established, small-scale,


cooperative units. This commitment is clear among the 8,000inhabitants of Çatalhöyük, where many efforts were taken overmillennia to retain household autonomy (Hodder 2006; Hod-der and Cessford 2004). As seen in house societies throughoutthe world, the community could be held together in part byfamilies turning inward (Beck 2007; Joyce and Gillespie 2000).Group rituals performed outside of the settlement were alsoimportant to site cohesion, as were efforts to increase the sizeof decision-making units by families with greater access to ex-otic objects and ritual knowledge (Baird et al. 2011; Conolly1999; Düring 2013).

Strategies to minimize centralization and extrahouseholdhierarchy at Çatalhöyük were different from those pursuedin similarly sized sites in the Neolithic Near East (Kuijt 2000)as well as those pursued in growing communities elsewherein the world (Birch 2013). People worked hard to create newsettlements of larger size, but they often worked just as hardto make life resemble what it had been in the villages that theyhad left or outgrown. In order to live together, those living atlarger sites were willing to limit interaction with neighbors,embellish rituals, alter communal decision making, and allowfor the growth and ranking of cooperative units. They de-ferred, at least occasionally, to group leaders on some matters,such as defense. They would not, however, be told what to doby people who were perceived as outsiders (Kowalewski 2006:117, 2013:213).

Why people chose to live in larger settlements is an im-portant question, the answer to which is likely a combinationof push and pull factors such as warfare, access to markets,and ritual elaboration (Birch 2013; Marcus and Sabloff 2008).Of particular interest to our argument is what happens tocooperative structures after aggregation. Would the reversedominance hierarchies of small-scale cooperative units breakdown in larger settlements over time? A clear, cross-culturaltrend exists toward more pronounced hierarchical societieswith increasing community size (Feinman 2013), and egali-tarianism did indeed erode at Çatalhöyük (Düring and Mar-ciniak 2006:180; Hodder 2006:253–254, 2014:5). Yet, we argue,aggregation would have initially strengthened the indepen-dence of smaller, cooperative units, limiting the reach ofwould-be rulers and channeling their efforts into more so-cially acceptable activities. These smaller collective, morefamily-oriented units could have helped to shape the politicalstructure of rapidly expanding urbanizing settlements.

Recent work on early cities highlights the overlapping, dy-namic, and often quite fragile social webs that were used tomobilize resources from these resilient, smaller units of socialorganization (Schortman and Urban 2014:174; Stanley et al.2016:138). The political organizations of the earliest Meso-potamian cities in the fourth millennium BC, for example,extended the household metaphor to encompass larger groups(Ur 2014:263). These groups functioned via face-to-face in-teractions, and families were quick to switch allegiance to otherhigher-order households when leaders failed to provide fortheir needs. Urban affairs were thus organized primarily via

kin networks: “the bureaucratic city was still far in the future”(Ur 2014:264).

The political organization of the Chinese city of Anyangwas similar as it grew rapidly between 1250 and 1150 BC(Campbell 2009). Although nominally occupying a top hi-erarchical status, royalty employed a turbulent mix of strat-egies to extend power over a growing settlement composedof “a patchwork of internally hierarchical descent-based com-munities” (Campbell 2009:831). Lineage heads engaged theking in an escalating competition of sacrifice and ancestorveneration that drew families into the city’s center, with royalauthority fitfully topping descent groups that remained orga-nized independently. The movement toward a formal, central-ized system of government was gradual and always contested.

In another example of early urbanization from central Mex-ico, much of the population of the multiethnic city of Teoti-huacan lived in some 2,300 apartment compounds. These com-pounds often acted as loci of collective action (Carballo 2013b),serving as counterweights to elite efforts to assert more over-arching control via themovement of sumptuary goods and craftspecialists (Manzanilla 2015:9210). While little is known aboutlife at Teotihuacan during its first decades, compound organi-zations were fundamental to the “complex web of ethnic andsocial differences [that was] woven originally into a corporatestructure that tried to harmonize them” (Manzanilla 2009:37;also see Froese, Gershenson, and Manzanilla 2014).

These brief, independent examples of early urbanizationsuggest a common process, by which small-scale cooperativeunits continued to operate within expanding urban settlements.Overarching political power structures worked only throughthese groups. The techniques used to establish larger, morestable cooperative groups in urban settings were in large partan extension of those used in far smaller communities andpolitical institutions (Johnson 1982; Johnson and Earle 2000).With varying degrees of success, the leaders of growing settle-ments alternately tried to increase basal-unit size, embellishgroup ritual, and, often less successfully, establish overarchinghierarchical control over certain facets of life. Seen in this light,monumental temples, public works, feasts, and even acts ofviolence were not necessarily actions taken by the “state” butrather attempts by nascent leaders to build power across settle-ments organized around cooperative units that stubbornly in-sisted on autonomy and relative egalitarianism (Swenson 2003).

If resistance to hierarchies structured many interactionsbetween basal groups in early urban settings, then settlementaggregation would constrain the power of overarching stateinstitutions to only specific and limited venues. Here the ap-parent link between urbanism and extraordinary ceremonialelaboration to develop a common identity might be critical,but the smaller-scale collective units within a city were oftenorganized into neighborhoods, where one’s identity and world-view would have been maintained via face-to-face interactions(Smith 2010; Smith and Novic 2012). Wallman’s ethnographicwork (2011) suggests that neighborhoods are more resistant tooutsiders when people’s work, religions, political leanings, and


income levels correspond (also see Hipp and Perrin 2009). Over-lapping economic specialization, as well as ethnicity, religion,dress, and cuisine (Janusek 2002; Keith 2003;Wright 2010), wascommon in early neighborhoods, creating a strong, often quiteinsular, sense of an enclave within a larger community.

The material “scaffolding” of streets, walls, trenches, andopen spaces that delineated neighborhoods would have fur-ther sharpened group divides (McIntosh 2005; Nishimura 2014;Stone 1987; Stout 2002). As distinctions between insider andoutsider developed through daily practices (e.g., Lincoln 1989:88), residents would tend to lean more heavily on preexistingcooperative units, adapting what they knew to new situations(Kowalewski 2013). The creation of a centralized, class-basedhierarchy—the basis of the state in our narrow definition of theterm—could be achieved only via the sustained efforts of in-fluential leaders working against an entrenched status quo. Theearliest cities may have therefore grown largely unstructuredby state institutions, and those that eventually fell under statecontrol would have been organized for generations through dy-namic, heterarchical relationships that linked together neigh-borhoods in collective actions, such as for mutual defense, con-struction of irrigation facilities, ormajor religious events (Froese,Gershenson, andManzanilla 2014).

We develop our argument for the relationship between co-operation, aggregation, and state formation through two casestudies, from the Andes and Polynesia (fig. 1). The first casestudy deals with the city of Tiahuanaco in highland Bolivia,demonstrating how collective efforts of small-scale coopera-tive units limited for 300 years the city’s centralization andstratification. Our second case study, from Hawai’i, demon-strates what happens when states developed without urban ag-gregation. With population more dispersed, preexisting col-lective units—and the reverse dominance hierarchies that oftenstructures relationships within them—were more difficult tomaintain in the face of efforts at state building by a ruling chieflyelite.

Case Study: Tiwanaku

By the end of the first millennium AD, the prehistoric cityof Tiahuanaco was the capital of a state that controlled muchof the Lake Titicaca Basin (Janusek 2008; Kolata 1993; Sta-nish 2003; Young-Sánchez 2004). The state is named after thecity—another example of our long-standing conflation of ur-banization and state formation—although we use here the al-ternate spelling “Tiwanaku” for the state. Urbanization beganat Tiahuanaco around 500 AD, yet the first clear evidence fora Tiwanaku state dates to after 800 AD. Tiwanaku was, ulti-mately, a regionally organized polity with a professional rulingclass, a commoner class, and a highly centralized and inter-nally specialized government. This state, however, was createdthrough the reconfiguring of cooperative, egalitarian, and kin-based cooperative units that organized city life during thesettlement’s first 300 years.

Located 3,840 m above sea level, Tiahuanaco sits near LakeTititcaca on the high, semiarid plain of the Altiplano. Thelake had long been an attractive area for settlement, becauseits abundant aquatic resources and favorable climate madecultivating potatoes, quinoa, and other high-elevation cropspossible (Kolata 1993:45). Year-round settlements could befound in the region by the end of the third millennium BC(Hastorf 2005:66), with these weakly consolidated villages of-ten breaking apart when population exceeded 200 people (Bandy2004:330). Pre-Tiwanaku villages, over time, became organizedas house societies (Beck 2007).

The creation of ritually charged sites by the end of the sec-ond millennium BC created more stable nodes in this frac-tured social landscape of autonomous farmers and herders(Bruno 2014:140; Roddick, Bruno, and Hastorf 2014:154). Theritual sites usually contained stone monoliths, a sunken en-closure, and a raised platform mound containing small struc-tures. The sites were public spaces that brought together housegroups that each worshiped its own gods and ancestors (Beck2007). Though independent, these groups would develop ashared ritual practice (Cohen 2010:343; Levine et al. 2013:303;Logan, Hastorf, and Pearsall 2012:235; Roddick and Hastorf2010:173).

The size of the basin’s cooperative units was likely increas-ing during the first millennium BC, with community leaderssometimes representing multihousehold groups and gainingstatus through ritual knowledge, alliances, acquisition of pres-tige goods, feast sponsoring, and raiding (Levine et al. 2013;Plourde 2006; Stanish and Levine 2011). Status differences,however, remained muted, with each household meeting itsown subsistence needs while likely coordinating crop rotation,fallowing, and grazing schedules at the village level (Bruno2014; Wright, Hastorf, and Lennstrom 2003). Society wasmore horizontally than vertically organized (Roddick, Bruno,and Hastorf 2014:154), with identity still tied to local groupsand leadership based on serving these groups.

Aggrandizers likely challenged these principles at second-generation, larger ritual sites like Pukara. By 100 AD, Pukarasprawled across 2.2 km2 and was crowned by a 32-m-tall ter-raced platform (Klarich and Román Bustinza 2012:118). Yetthe main platform was publicly accessible, and most build-ings were ritual structures probably built by the region’s dif-ferent cooperative groups (Janusek 2008:88). A shift towarda more hierarchical society was attempted by restricting ac-cess to the main platform and controlling the production andcirculation of obsidian, stone sculptures, polychrome pottery,and other highly valued goods (Klarich 2009:298–300). Thispower grab failed: Pukara was rapidly abandoned, and theregion returned to a landscape of autonomous villages andsmaller ritual centers (Janusek 2008:95; Klarich 2005:67; Sta-nish 2003:159).

Centered on a sunken temple and a monolith, the ritualcenter of Tiahuanaco began expanding by the end of the thirdcentury AD (Marsh 2012a:213). Residential groups that movedto the settlement remained largely self-sufficient and kept their


distance from each other. They each built rectangular walledcompounds as well as ritual spaces for their particular ances-tors (Janusek 2008:97; Marsh 2012b:424–425). The result was asprawling, though lightly occupied, site with a population in thelow thousands (Marsh 2012b:454). Compartmentalization intocompounds would have eased tension in the growing commu-nity, as would the ritual elaborations occurring at the sunkentemple where each group was likely incorporated into the tem-ple through the placement of more than 200 sculpted stonetenon heads depicting gods and ancestors (Couture 2004:129–130).

Why Tiahuanaco began growing remains unclear. Thoseliving at Tiahuanaco, like those at nearby Khonkho Wankane,cultivated connections with mobile pastoralists (Smith andPérez Arias 2015:115). The settlement was thus becoming animportant stop for llama caravans in a location with abundantnatural resources. These economic factors, when coupled withTiahuanaco’s growing ritual importance (Marsh 2012a:183),likely made it an attractive place to settle despite the variouschallenges associated with aggregation. Subsistence demandscould be met by intensified agriculture, but expanding urbanscale would require a greater investment in integrative rituals.

Figure 1. Composite Google Earth image showing the Hawaiian Islands and the Lake Titicaca Basin. A color version of this figure isavailable online.


In response, the leaders of Tiahuanaco’s various coopera-tive units likely organized the construction of the Kalasasaya,a massive platform that featured a sunken courtyard andassociated rooms (Couture 2002:314–315; Kolata 1993:143–145; Vranich 2009:21). Like previous monuments in the LakeTiticaca Basin, the Kalasasaya would remain a work in prog-ress (Vranich 2009:26). The act of building and then reno-vating the monument regularly brought the basin’s dispa-rate groups together, as did the ceremonies that moved manypeople through the building as part of an “an emergent cult

oriented to the sun and sky” that crosscut previous religiousdivides (Janusek 2006:479).

A frenetic century of urbanization followed the construc-tion of the Kalasasaya, culminating soon after 600 AD withthe building of the seven-tiered Akapana platform (Manza-nilla 1992; Vranich 2009:25–26; fig. 2). The creation and on-going renovation of Tiahuanaco’s platforms, plazas, and courtswere festive events that reaffirmed and strengthened socialties (e.g., Golden and Scherer 2013:405). A civic identity wasbeing created, but it was channeled through the existing co-

Figure 2. Growth of Tiahuanaco’s ceremonial center showing the sunken temple (A), the addition of the Kalasasaya platform (B), andthe addition of the Akapana platform (C)—note the creation of rectangular compounds (Alexei Vranich 2009).


operative units that probably remained kin-based, egalitarian,and locally oriented.

The rest of Tiahuanaco “expanded precipitously” in theseventh and eighth centuries, with more andmore compoundsbuilt throughout the city (Janusek 2009:161). Population surgedinto the low tens of thousands, and, behind compound walls,there existed a wide range of art styles, craft specializations,cuisine, and ethnicities (Glascock and Giesso 2012; Janusek2002, 2004, 2008). Although the political organization of Ti-ahuanaco during this time remains unclear, little evidence ex-ists for centralized bureaucratic control classically associatedwith the state.

Residential compounds of largely self-sufficient house-holds were the “principal organizational agents of Tiwanakueconomic production” (Goldstein 2013:368; also see Janusek2009:176). As the city expanded, these compounds clusteredinto loosely defined neighborhoods (Janusek 2008:155–156,2009:167–169), and the maximal size of basal units likely ex-panded as leaders engaged in an “ever-tightening spiral offactional competition” that fed the city’s growth (Goldstein2003:166). Status differences existed at Tiahuanaco duringthis time, but the artifact assemblages of the most powerfulfamilies of Tiahuanaco were “not readily distinguishable from[those] of non-elites” (Couture 2004:134). With leaders serv-ing their respective groups as “first among equals” (Couture2004:143), Tiahuanaco remained more of a kin-based than aclass-based society. Urban life reinforced this factionalism, in-hibiting the sociopolitical transformations required for stateformation.

The intensification of agricultural production required tosupport the rapid growth of Tiahuanaco in the seventh cen-tury AD rested on a newly engineered landscape, not unlikewhat we describe for the Hawaiian Islands. Most of the ba-sin’s 12,000 km2 of raised fields were brought into cultivationafter the city’s founding (Bandy 2005; Erickson 1993). Thedramatic increase in labor-intensive raised fields, as well asterracing, brought underutilized, likely common-pool, marsh-lands and hillsides into production. The basin’s extended kin-based groups probably build these field complexes to feedthemselves. Compounds were therefore often self-supporting,but the creation of extensive agriculture facilities offered a po-tential for elite control.

Some forms of specialization emerged, creating a region-ally integrated economy. Although continuing to work exist-ing farming, herding, and fishing resources (Bandy 2005:271;Bruno 2014:141; Capriles 2013:114), rural populations shiftedtheir production regimes after Tiahuanaco’s urbanization tospecialize in certain food resources or crafts (Capriles 2013:115; Isbell and Burkholder 2002:232; Janusek 2008:173). Theserural villages, as fractured and horizontally organized as thecity itself (Erickson 1993, 2000), were clustered around ritu-ally charged sites that contained platformmounds and sunkencourts (Albarracin-Jordan 1996:196). These clusters seem tohave operated separately without Tiahuanaco centralized con-trol (Isbell and Burkholder 2002:232; McAndrews, Albarracin-

Jordan, and Bermann 1997:80; Park 2001:126). By virtue oftheir association with the city’s sacred spaces, Tiahuanaco’sresidents nonetheless had considerable influence over the co-operative units that stretched across the basin. The creationof a specialized economy, like the building of intensified ag-ricultural facilities, would have made it easier for the city’semerging ruling sector to later assert control over an emergingpolitical economy.

Despite difficulties creating a centralized state bureaucracyin Tiahuanaco’s highly fractionalized social environment, em-phasis on high-status individuals in art increased during theseventh century, and high-status compounds began movinginto the city’s ceremonial core (Couture and Sampeck 2003:263). One glaring example of creeping centralization was theplacement in the Kalasasaya of massive stone monoliths thatdepicted high-status individuals in ceremonial garb (Couture2004:130). Leaders were now positioning themselves at theheart of Tiahuanaco’s public rituals.

Around 800 AD, elites finally banded together into a rulingclass that crosscut the city’s enduring kin-based divisions.Houses were built on top of the Akapana platform (Manza-nilla 1992:54–70), and the urban core was transformed intoa space dedicated to serving the interests of urban rulers(Janusek 2008:148). A Tiahuanaco court swiftly developedthat was distinguished by elite artifact styles and supportedby a growing cadre of bureaucrats and attached specialists(Burkholder 2002:245; Couture 2004:142–143; Janusek 2008:148–150). Maize consumption rates varied across the sitebut were substantially higher among those living in the city’score (Berryman 2010:284–285). Accessibility to Tiahuanaco’sgreat monuments became more exclusive; ritual festivals trans-formed into patron-client events that strengthened centralizedpower (Janusek 2005:170, 2008:166–167).

This transition to a more centralized, hierarchically orga-nized city was paralleled by a radical transformation in urban-rural relationships that resulted in outright “overexploitationin land use, material resources, and human labor” (Janusek2008:191). The city’s locally managed countryside was dis-mantled and reassembled. Settlements were abandoned, fieldsystems joined, regional transportation networks created, andlarge storage complexes inaugurated (Janusek 2004:232, 2008:192). The welter of ties that connected the city’s residentialgroups to outside producers was replaced by amore top-down,tightly integrated system of production. In a word, a state hadbeen created in the Lake Titicaca Basin some 300 years afterthe cooperative building of the Kalasasaya spurred Tiahua-naco’s urbanization.

Tiahuanaco first rose to regional prominence because itcatered to the desires of an atomized population locallygrounded into cooperative kin units. The size of these unitswaxed and waned over a millennium, based on the ability ofreligious leaders to metaphorically encapsulate larger num-bers of individuals as members of the same family (Hastorf2003:327). Ritual centers brought groups together, but theyalso highlighted the differences between groups—through


distinct architectural assemblages, practices, and offerings—thus reinforcing the localized, kin-based legitimization of au-thority (Bandy 2006; Beck 2007; Hastorf 2003; Roddick, Bruno,andHastorf 2014). The cooperative units that built Tiahuanacowere perhaps best characterized as house societies that werematerialized into compounds and, as basal units expanded,neighborhoods. The interplay between these units led towardgreater specialization but also reinforced the factional com-petition that for generations inhibited centralization and stateformation.

Case Study: Hawai’i

The Hawaiian Islands are located in the central Pacific, justwithin the tropics. They are unusual for their relatively largelandmass and their isolation from other inhabited islands.About 1,000 years ago, a small group of Polynesians colo-nized the islands and developed there, almost independently,a complex state-like society before “discovery” by CaptainCook in 1778. Important for our discussion, Hawaiian stateformation was not dependent on urbanization. The chronol-ogy of social development is detailed elsewhere (Earle andSpriggs 2015; Hommon 2013; Kirch 2010) but can be brieflysummarized. Early on, hamlet-size settlements scattered alongthe coast, relying on fishing and small-scale agriculture. As thepopulation grew, settlers increasingly depended on agricultureand spread to island interiors, where they cleared forests forshifting cultivation. Forest clearing accelerated erosion, and arich alluvium formed on valley bottomlands (Spriggs 1997).Wherever alluvial soils existed, farmers began to focus on in-tensive, irrigated taro fields. Engineered landscapes came toinclude irrigated pondfields for taro; fishponds; tree groves ofbananas, breadfruit, and coconut; and newly constructed reli-gious monuments, roads, and division walls (Earle and Doyel2008). Where no streams existed, farmers intensified drylandfarming, using terraces (Ladefoged et al. 2009).

For much of the sequence, little evidence exists for stronghierarchical relations. Communities probably became orga-nized as simple chiefdoms, with community chiefs managingreligious systems with modest monumental construction. Atfirst, lineage ties between chiefs and commoners probablyfollowed a typical Polynesian model, with chiefly lineagesgrounded in local communities. Bottom-up initiatives of farm-ing families and their communities likely created the wetlandlandscapes, and, as they invested their labor to build highlyproductive facilities, farmers became increasingly bound totheir land. Sometime after 1400 AD, chiefs initiated conquestwarfare to seize these facilities and the labor that made themproductive. Conquest would have transformed the propertysystem from community-based lineage structures, as typifiedPolynesian societies, to overarching elite ownership (Hommon2013; Kirch 2010). It severed the community’s rights to land,as the new ruling elite came to view community land as “a taxdistrict with a known workforce and level of productivity”

(Hommon 2013:13; also see Sahlins 1992:26) and created aclass-based society.

A class-based society was created over time, as chiefs con-trolled daily affairs and intensified surplus mobilization (Earle1980). The intensified irrigation facilities were developed wher-ever possible, and they became highly productive zones neatlydivided by field terraces, ditches, and pathways into familyplots. Concentrated in the lower valleys, the largest systemswere easily controlled (McCoy and Graves 2010), but com-moners appear to have retained some ability to opt out of theseownership structures. Small irrigation systems are found ar-chaeologically in backwoods areas, where, undocumented inthe historical record, some commoners apparently farmed inzones free of chiefly oversight (Earle 1978).

Although the potential for irrigation was limited on theless eroded eastern islands, commoners there farmed areassuitable for dryland practices (Ladefoged et al. 2009). Theybuilt terraces to slow water runoff and erosion and subdividedtheir fields with walls and trails that presumably definedproperty rights and obligations much as they were defined inirrigation complexes. The dryland fields especially producedsweet potato, an ideal pig food, such that these fields sup-ported large pig herds, a moveable wealth critical for cere-monial offerings and gift payments (Dye 2014 and commen-tary therein). All dryland farmlands were not equal; someareas were more productive, lower risk, and more engineeredthan others (Ladefoged and Graves 2008), and, like the irri-gated areas, these core dryland areas served as easily con-trolled zones producing staples and staple-fed pigs for thepolitical economy. Late in prehistory, chiefs apparently sup-ported the expansion of these dryland field systems as a meansto increase surplus production, perhaps especially in pigs.

Throughout the sequence, the settlement pattern of theislands remained dispersed, with no urban centers. The sizeof Hawaiian communities (ahupua’a) was small. A rather typ-ical “village” probably existed in the community of Waioli,Kaua’i (Earle 1978, fig. 8.1). Here, based on the 1850 land di-vision documents, 13 commoner house lots were scatteredalong the 1-km beachfront, and another 6 lots were dispersedinland along the stream and among the valley’s irrigation sys-tems. Single families occupied most (90%) house lots in thearea, with only a few being coresidential, with 2 or occasion-ally more families. The community population would havebeen perhaps 100. In light of the known population declineafter the introduction of Old World diseases and the probablemigration to emerging port cities like Honolulu, prehistoriccommunities may have been larger, but no archaeologicalevidence suggests community populations more than the lowhundreds.

On the eroded western islands, families lived in river valleys,like Waioli, which constituted natural catchment zones run-ning 10 km or so from the mountains to the sea. A condensedladder of ecozones provided general access to fishing, farm-land, and back-land wild foods; household specialization wasunnecessary (Earle 1977). With access to all resources and low


risk in irrigated agriculture, the basal unit of Hawaiian com-moners in wetland zones was the family, associated with amale responsible for work assigned by the chief ’s manager andin return receiving a kuleana (agricultural allotment; Earle1978). In the geologically younger regions on eastern islandsof Maui and Hawai’i, community territories ran in arbitrarystrips from the mountains to the sea. Unlike those in the west-ern islands, areas suitable for farming and fishing could bequite separate, and in historic times communities were orga-nized as ʻohana, extended families with specialized segments(farmers vs. fishers), and integrated by reciprocity and visitingto handle specialization and risk (Handy and Pukui (1972[1958]). The traditional Hawaiian family structure apparentlyadjusted to local environmental circumstances, being morenuclear or extended according to their subsistence condition(Earle 1977).

Although throughout the sequence commoner householdsprobably continued to solve all basic subsistence needs, chiefly“redistribution” increasingly mobilized staples and labor tofinance chiefly institutions (Earle 1977, contra Service 1962).One use of mobilized labor was to build temples that markedthe landscape and determined responsibilities of individualcommunities to support annual ceremonies (Kolb 1994). Re-sources were also poured into warriors, who helped chiefsconquer and hold land initially improved by commoner ini-tiatives (Earle 1978; Kirch 2010).

Through conquest, chiefdoms expanded in scale up to Eu-ropean contact, with an enduring tension between top-downschemes and family-organized production. During much ofthe sequence, chiefly positions were probably based at leastnominally on high-ranked lineages tied to communities, and,as polity size increased, some efforts to increase basal-unit sizeand embellish group ritual were similar to what we observein the Tiahuanaco case study. Yet the history of the HawaiianIslands differed markedly in its increasingly direct chiefly con-trol over surplus production and its complete lack of cities.

By the seventeenth century, state formation had abrogatedthe basic Polynesian lineage structure, regional rituals, andmon-umental construction. The local community became the fief ofa “foreign” chief, amember of an island ruling line, who replacedthe authority of traditional community’s chiefs. The Hawaiianstate created what were serfdoms, with farmers bound to landby law and not by lineage; commoners could not maintain ge-nealogies ofmore than two generations (i.e., to the grandfather),and the bottom-up process of self-organizing was coopted by atop-down system aimed at surplus mobilization.

With a wealth of historical, ethnohistorical, and archaeo-logical documentation, the precontact polities on Maui andHawai’i can easily be considered states (Hommon 2013; Kirch2010, 2012). “By the time of their initial engagement withthe West, [Hawaiian polities] had crossed a threshold markedby the emergence of divine kinship, and by the sundering ofancient principles of lineage and land rights based on kinship,and their replacement with a strictly territorial system” (Kirch2010:72). Transformative changes included the establishment

of an island-wide structure of power and authority, land-basedtaxation in labor, food, and special materials, divine kingssupported by elaborate ceremonies and personal dress, andconquest warfare. By right of conquest, all land became theproperty of the conquering ruler, the ali’i nui. At contact, theHawaiians had formed a class-based, state society.

State formation did not bring with it cities. We suggestrather that hierarchical control was partly enabled by the ab-sence of settlement aggregation, as populations were tetheredto their subsistence plots and easily monitored. As Hommonsummarizes, “Ancient Hawaiʻi exhibits no urban develop-ment, no towns, and indeed few nucleated settlements thatwarrant the label ‘village.’ ” (2013:129). Rulers built neithermonumental palaces nor impressive burial monuments. Some“royal centers” with elite residences had walled compoundsand quite impressive shrines (Kirch 2010:166–171), but thespatial scale and monumental construction of these settle-ments were modest in comparison to central places such asTiahuanaco, even early in its growth.

At the royal center at Honaunau just south of KealakekuaBay, for example, the sacred site covered only 25 ha (Kirch2010:168–170; Flannery and Marcus 2012:336). Structuresincluded major defining walls, paved platforms for religiousshrines, a former ruler’s compound with three terraces, andvarious other special structures. Although impressive, the over-all scale of the architecture was only moderate. When CaptainCook first visited the royal settlement at Kealakekua Bay, aWeber drawing (Beaglehole 1967, pl. 54) shows a shrine anda scattering of houses under coconut trees along the beach andon inland upslopes; the Honaunau complex was not illus-trated, perhaps because it was no longer of great political sig-nificance. As an insert to the 1779 Cook voyage chart (fig. 3),a sketch of the bay shows perhaps 50 houses spread along thecoast and inland (Skelton 1955, chart LV). Despite the im-pressiveness of the Hawaiian royalty as described by the earlyaccount, the royal settlements like Honaunau or KealakekuaBay were fairly simple affairs with chiefly residences and thosefor support personnel. They had no permanent residentialpopulation.

Are we simply missing the Hawaiian cities? On functionalgrounds, Smith (2012) argues that Honaunau and other Hawai-ian royal centers can be considered cities, but no populationaggregation is observed. Nothing approaches the low-densityurbanism found in Southeast Asia (Khmer Empire) and Meso-america (Maya states; Fletcher 2009). In these situations, tens ofthousand of heterogeneously organized people concentrated indistricts around central places, meeting our definition for a city.

The lack of urbanism in the Hawaiian state is remarkableonly because of our adherence to a civilization concept thatmerges urbanization and state formation. Cities did not formin Hawai’i because of an enduring dispersed settlement pat-tern, lack of storable staples, poorly developed transport (Kirch2010:75), and an absence of market-based specialization thatcreated key dynamics for settlement aggregation elsewhere.The only regional hierarchy observed was the late prehistoric


structure of religious temples (Kolb 1994), but cross-culturallyeven these monuments were modest in scale. Quite simply, theeconomic basis of the Hawaiian states did not encourage ur-banism, and the lack of large settlements did not limit pristinestate formation.

The low-density colonizing populations of Hawai’i likelyformed a fairly open society, although ideas of status weresurely retained from a general Polynesian structure of rank.The subsequent population expansion filled the landscape andintensified its use, creating circumscribed zones of highly pro-ductive agriculture eventually claimed through conquest by aruling elite (Earle and Spriggs 2015). Substantial surpluses sup-ported managers, warriors, and priests in the process of insti-tutional reformulation. A bargain between chiefs and common-ers created surplus extraction that, at the same time, requiredchiefs to maintain a moral economy with well-managed farm-ing systems, access to wild resources of uplands and sea, andceremonial legitimacy. In all situations, this bargain was crit-ical to the formation of hierarchies, but in some situationlike the Hawaiian Islands, a largely rural population had little

room to maneuver. The need for the labor power of com-moners never made them simple pawns in the process, but thefact that they became tethered to particular land allocationsmade them easily enumerated and supervised in a rural-basedpolitical economy of staple production.

Do other cases of nonurban, early states exist that wouldbolster the Hawaiian case? Because urbanism is used to definestates archaeologically, states without cities may simply havebeen missed, and research is required to resolve this ques-tion. Except for a strong historical record, Hawaii and Tongawould probably have not been recognized as states. Work onlow-density urbanism suggests that the degree of settlementaggregation was highly variable across archaic states, and nonecessary linkage between the variables exists.

Conclusions

A closer consideration of the evolution of cooperation and con-trol challenges our long-standing association between cities andstates. Cooperation evolved among humans as a mechanism

Figure 3. Insert for 1779 chart showing the royal center at Kealakekua Bay on the Island of Hawai’i (Skelton 1955, chart LV).


to thwart destructive status competition within small groups(Boehm 1993, 1999). The more egalitarian, group-oriented, struc-tural relations that shaped the lives of mobile hunter-gatherersendured in modified forms among sedentary groups—effec-tively capping inequality and village size. In those rare cases ofgreater aggregation, people adopted a variety of coping mech-anisms, including increased basal-unit size, ritual elaboration,and greater compartmentalization. They often effectively re-sisted, however, the imposition of the crosscutting hierarchicalrelations fundamental to state formation. Inclusive institutionslike those that structuredmuch of village and herder life tend tobe self-reinforcing, as they empower a broad swath of societyand keep the political playing field level (Acemoglu and Rob-inson 2012:309). Such inclusive institutions thus may haveshaped the organization of early cities as they emerged, initiallyindependent of states.

Cities, of course, ultimately anchored most ancient states.Yet later political, economic, and social structures should notbe uncritically projected back into contexts of incipient urban-ization when small, egalitarian-oriented, cooperative groupslikely prevailed. Aggregation initially worked to reinforce inter-group differences as peoples’ identities hardened in the face ofoutsiders. Those who sought to create an overarching statestructure would have needed to break the power of these self-sufficient groups by creating top-down mechanisms of controlthat included the use of priests, craft specialists, and warriors.State formation processes varied widely, in part because ag-grandizers in different regions wrestled with quite disparaterelationships linking urban populations together (Blanton andFargher 2008, 2011, 2012). The focus at Tiahuanaco was onritual, as an emerging elite used city-wide (if not region-wide)celebrations to assert a privileged position while still honoringthe smaller cooperative units that structured life in the settle-ment. This, however, was a multigenerational process—a Ti-wanaku state formed only 300 years after urbanization began.

When the link between urbanization and state formationis sundered, it becomes easier to recognize those cases of non-urban state formation as well as those cases where urbanismdid not result in a state (Kenoyer 2008; McIntosh 2005). In ourHawaiian case study, we see the former occurring within anenvironmental context that restricted aggregation. Those liv-ing in Hawai’i, like those in the Titicaca Basin, were resistantto attempts at creating hierarchical relationships beyond thecommunity chiefs that controlled their modal units. Leadersworked for their people, and in both cases cooperative groupswere likely hostile to attempts to interfere with local lifeways.Yet Hawaiians, dispersed in isolated farmsteads, were closelytethered to their land. They could not aggregate and thus couldnot as easily slow efforts at hierarchical control and state for-mation.

Tremendous variation existed in the percentage of a pol-ity’s population that lived in it its primate center. The rangeof chiefdom populations living in central places varied widely,from 3% to 100% (Drennan 1987), and research on low-density urbanism stresses howmature, long-lasting states have

developed without the classic city model (Fletcher 2009). Thelink between settlement sizes and political centralization isnot straightforward (Duffy 2015)—a sparsely settled site likeHonaunau could be a royal center with deep and wide-rangingimpacts on surrounding communities.

Yet to call Honaunau a “city” both obscures the transfor-mative aspects of population aggregation and chains us to adeeply flawed civilization stage of development that equatesurbanization and state formation. State formation is a central-izing process that brings people together under a ruling class.The political center of a state might be constantly on the move,as in the theater state of nineteenth-century Bali (Geertz 1980),or, as in Inca Cusco, have its population intentionally re-stricted to elites and their retinues (Farrington 2013). Havingmany people in one place tends to make hierarchical controlmore difficult to assert and maintain, and leaders must de-pend on positive attractions, such as ceremonial elaboration,rather than on cruder means of control through the politicaleconomy.

Cities are thus not the harbinger of the state that theoriesof cultural evolution have long assumed. These sites may in-stead represent one of the hardest settlement types in whichto control people, because of their fluid and faceless (to ad-ministrators) character. Divisions between neighborhoods canbe difficult to overcome, and assertions of crosscutting hierar-chies are frequently rebuffed. Seen in this light, early state for-mation was often more difficult in urban settings. Centraliza-tion, when it occurred, was often a fraught, multigenerationalprocess that emphasized resource mobilization to supporthyperelaborated ceremonialism and solutions to emerging urbandisorder.

CommentsMichael E. Smith and José LoboSchool of Human Evolution and Social Change, Box 872402,Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-2402, USA([email protected]). 30 XI 15

We applaud Jennings and Earle for helping archaeologistsdisentangle the processes of urbanization and state formation,but we think they have gone too far in separating the two. Asa result, they have missed what may be the most importanteffect of urbanization on human society: its generative role asa driver of social change. By insisting on a drastic separationof urban and state processes, the authors leave no room forexploring the generative role of social interactions resultingfrom settlement aggregations (of which urbanization is themost salient example).

We draw on a recent review article that summarizes socialscience research on the generative role of social interactions inurban life (Latham 2009). Latham emphasizes the value of see-


ing “urban life as generative of ways of living with others—rather than seeing it as a distinctive way of being, in and of itself”(p. 892). He discusses “the generative capacity of the urbanenvironment” (p. 893). He first asks (p. 893), “Why is it thatpopulations agglomerate together in the first place?” Thisquestion motivates considerable archaeological research onancient settlements (Birch 2013; Schachner 2012). These andother studies identify defense, political administration, andeconomies of scale as major drivers of settlement aggregationin the past (Smith 2014).

Once people are living together in settlements, their patternsof social interaction work to generate social change. Latham(2009:893) describes this process as follows: “Through spe-cialization, the unexpected mixtures, the concentration of re-sources, and the challenges of living in a dense, heterogeneousenvironment, urban life creates a productive dynamic thattranscends the sum of its parts.” Whereas the social scienceresearch reviewed by Latham approaches the generative prop-erties of cities from a qualitative, descriptive perspective, re-cent work on urban scaling now provides a causal and quan-titative account of the ways that population concentrationcreates social and economic change. The analytical standpointis that cities and, more generally, settlements are networks ofsocioeconomic and cultural interactions embedded in physi-cal space.

If indeed there are underlying social processes common topopulation nucleations across time and geography, then thereought to be similar empirical relationships between populationsize—widely recognized as an important social driver (Car-neiro 2000)—and various important characteristics of citiesand settlements. Such relationships have been studied andmodeled for contemporary urban systems, for which popula-tion size predicts density, quantity of infrastructure, and thelevel of many socioeconomic outputs, all with impressive reg-ularity (Bettencourt 2013; Bettencourt et al. 2007). This workis now being extended to premodern settlements, guided aswell by the hypothesis that the relationship between popula-tion and settled area in particular bears the imprint of themanner in which inhabitants interacted with each other ina settlement (Cesaretti et al. 2015; Ortman and Coffey 2015;Ortman et al. 2014). The overlap and differences between thesocial interactions responsible for—and facilitated by—theprocesses of urbanization and state formation call for addi-tional research attention, requiring creative use of data as wellas theorizing informed by comparative perspectives.

We would also like to comment on the dubious statementby Jennings and Earle that early states may have found itharder to control their subjects if they lived in cities. Thisclaim flies in the face of considerable evidence from aroundthe world that expanding states and empires have often movedrural peoples into cities in order to control them more effi-ciently (Chisholm 1968:124; Silberfein 1989:262; Stone 1998:84). The Spanish colonial policy of congregación (“congrega-tion”) in Latin America is a well-documented example inwhich natives were forcibly moved into towns in order to se-

cure their labor and religious conversion, resulting in a ma-jor urbanization in many areas (Gibson 1966). Perhaps urbancorporate groups in the earliest cities did oppose state for-mation, as Jennings and Earle suggest, but this proposal willrequire far more data and analysis to evaluate. The natureof state control in relation to urban versus rural contexts ishighly variable and far more complicated than they indicate.

To recapitulate, we worry that by setting too rigid a distinc-tion between the processes of urbanization and state for-mation, Jennings and Earle are unable to analyze the sociallygenerative effects of urbanization and city life. The alternativeperspective we promote, based on scaling theory (Bettencourt2013; Bettencourt et al. 2007), suggests that Jennings andEarle’s hypothesis that cities preceded states could be extendedto argue that urbanization processes may actually have con-tributed to state formation. We thank Jennings and Earle foropening an anthropological dialogue in this emerging arenaof interdisciplinary research.

Jason UrArchaeology Program, Department of Anthropology, HarvardUniversity, 11 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138,USA ( [email protected]). 19 XII 15

I am delighted to see a particularly strong wedge being drivenbetween arbitrarily fused settlement types (“the city”) andpolitical formations (“the state”). This bond is a legacy ofone of the most influential articles ever written, V. GordonChilde’s “The Urban Revolution” (Childe 1950; Smith 2009),which, despite its title, was more about sociopolitical orga-nization than it was about population nucleation. Archaeol-ogists have been conflating them ever since, although chal-lenges have been mounting in recent times (e.g., McIntosh2005; Smith 2003). Jennings and Earle also show a healthyskepticism for “revolutions” generally, the idea that past so-cieties would acquiesce to rapid and radical social change;archaeological revolution is another legacy of Childe’s whosetime has passed.

One should not entirely throw the baby out with the bath-water, however. The “urban state” is a recurring combinationof settlement type and political form. It gets a lot of attentionfrom archaeologists because it is highly visible (much easierto locate and excavate than, for example, the mobile court of anomadic confederacy). Furthermore, early urban states appearto Western archaeologists as the first steps in the developmentof our own societies, hence as the archaeology of our ownorigins. It is important to recognize that the urban state is onlyone possible combination, as Earle’s Hawaiian case study il-lustrates. Nonetheless, it is remarkable how frequently thissettlement type and this political formation coincided in thepast. An important question to ask is why this combinationrecurred so frequently. This frequency is at odds with the au-


thors’ claim that urban form is actually a deterrent to politicalcentralization.

Jennings and Earle’s willingness to reconsider “the city” asa type and to recognize the significant variation within placesthat are given that designation is welcome and refreshing. Iwant them to bring the same critical reassessment to “thestate,” a concept that they spend far less time defining. Intheir argument, the state is “defined narrowly here as a re-gionally organized society composed of a ruling class, a com-moner class, and a highly centralized and internally special-ized government”; details are added in a few other places,almost always with “class” as the critical element. The authorsmake important arguments against projecting backward laterpolitical, economic, and social structures, but I am concernedthat the use of “class” (and another concept that they invokeless frequently, “bureaucracy”) in contexts of initial centrali-zation of authority is just such a projection. In the case withwhich I am most familiar, ancient Mesopotamia, some of themost centralized phases were based on the metaphorical ex-tension of the household to encompass neighborhood, city,and even “state” political organization, in other words, usinga kinship model (Schloen 2001; Ur 2014). Instead of the ver-tical social divisions implied by “class,” Bronze Age Meso-potamian society was characterized primarily by horizontaldivisions between large households (Stone 2007). Projectingthe bureaucratic state onto it ignores its basis in kinship rela-tions. Early political formations are probably best envisionedin multivariate space, in the same manner proposed for earlycities by Cowgill (2004). I would suspect that Tiwanaku andHawaii were equally diverse and suffer from being lumped intoa general category of “the state,” especially when such a cate-gory is defined by bureaucracy and class. Such a reformulationcomplicates comparative studies such as Jennings and Earle’s.

In any study of origins, the specter of teleology is alwayspresent. It may be lurking in a couple places here. Collectiveaction at Tiwanaku, for example, seems in this reconstructionto have been motivated by opposition to the centralization ofauthority, that is, something that had not yet come into beingand that certainly had not yet attained the negative conno-tations that “the state” carries today. The authors also statethat “people worked hard to create new settlements of largersize,” which implies that “people” had envisioned the city andthen (collectively?) strove to bring it into existence, despite thefact that such a settlement form was not previously known tothem. For these reasons, reconstructions in which initial po-litical centralization and population nucleation are the unin-tended macro-scale consequences of intentional micro-scalesocial action are preferable (for my own attempt, see Ur 2014).

Overall, this contribution has done much to stimulate myown thoughts on urban origins and state formation. I findone of the authors’ conclusions very difficult to accept, how-ever: the idea that urban social contexts might impede politi-cal centralization. Early literate urban polities and more recentstates have frequently used urbanization as a means of po-litical control. Geography matters, and populations that are

distant will be more difficult to control than populationsnearby, as has been well argued by Gil Stein in his “distanceparity” model (1999). The Spanish colonial powers rulingover what had once been Tiwanaku understood this as well;their policy of reducción took low-density rural settlementsand brought them together in nucleated towns (for a recentcoastal Andean discussion, see VanValkenburgh 2012). Again,there is some danger of teleology here; what mature citiesdo does not necessarily explain why early cities came about.Nonetheless, the distance parity model goes a long way to-ward explaining why the urban state has been the rule, ratherthan the exception, in humanity’s 5,000-year urban history.

Reply

We sincerely thank the commentators for their insights, whichhelp extend our central argument. In our reply we discuss threeissues that they raised: urban scaling, the inception (and thusdefinition) of the state, and the relationship between stateformation and urbanization.

Urban Scaling and Culture Change

Smith and Lobo draw attention to the salient literature onurban scaling that suggests that cities are “open-ended nu-clear reactors” fueled by population aggregation (Bettencourt2013:1441). Some properties change in a linear manner—increasing in step with population growth—while others aresub- or supralinear. Cities are thus seen as categorically dif-ferent from villages (Pumain 2012:102) and, by their densesocial networks, encourage, if not demand, the shifts in inno-vation, craft production, and decision making that are inte-gral to the creation of the state (Carneiro 1967, 2000).

We agree that the creation of cities is a generative driverfor subsequent social change and the maturity of state struc-tures. Nonetheless, the urban-scaling literature underestimatespeople’s resistance to the changes associated with potentialstate control. This literature is based on the assumption that“cities exist to the extent that they create and sustain largesocial networks” (Ortman et al. 2014:3). Yet the first gener-ations of people that came to Tiahuanaco, as well as manyof the world’s earliest cities (Jennings 2016), sought to curtailthe creation of overarching political control. They built walls,ditches, and redundant infrastructure to limit interaction be-yond the extended household and neighborhood, and in manycases they sought to replicate, as best they could, the socialstructures that governed their previous pastoral and villagelifeways.

Urban scaling should be paired with the parallel processof settlement fission, another robust, cross-cultural processwherein settlements tend to break apart after they exceed a


threshold of a few hundred people (Fletcher 1995). Smith andLobo cite the African and Latin American examples for theconsiderable efforts made by the state to nucleate population,but these cases exemplify the actions of mature states withfully developed military institutions of control. No evidenceexists for such control in the first cities. Resistance to living inlarger groups does not disappear as settlements grow (Birch2013). Instead, it must be overcome in order to unlock thepotential that cites as social reactors engender for the financeof mature states.

Defining the State

Ur suggests that our definition of the state as a regional, class-based society with a centralized and internally specializedgovernment pigeonholes a wide variety of political forms intoa narrow construct. His suggestion correctly points to thelimitations of social typologies (Neitzel and Earle 2014). Inpart, we employ this definition of the state because it remainsthe most commonly held one in archaeology today (Feinmanand Marcus 1998; Flannery and Marcus 2012; Trigger 2003).More importantly, a narrow definition allows us to distinguishstate governments from earlier, regionally organized politiesthat often developed around urbanizing settlements.

State formation is a multigenerational process. In The Po-litical Machine, Smith (2015) explores three stages of stateformation in the Bronze Age Caucasus; Ur (2014) looks sim-ilarly at the long process of state formation in southern Meso-potamia, as does Campbell (2009) for China. Those seekingto build a sovereign nation wrestled with deeply held conceptsof household, kinship, and social order that continued to struc-ture society even as population nucleated into cities. Leesonemphasizes that “self-governance,” rather than state governance,is the norm in human history and that “individuals who areunable or unwilling to rely on government to facilitate socialcooperation find their own, often surprising ways to do so”(2014:211). Self-governance can be remarkably effective, last-ing hundreds of years and encompassing thousands of indi-viduals.

The work of Roderick and Susan McIntosh at Jenne-jenoprovides a particularly compelling example of self-governancein an early urban setting (R. McIntosh 2005; S. McIntosh1995). This city in the inland Niger Delta of Africa was hometo a heterogeneous population of 27,000, but no evidence ex-ists for centralized governance or a class-based society. Onemight suggest that Jenne-jeno was a different kind of state,but we argue that those living on the settlement’s clusteredmounds were emphatically “organized against the state” (Clas-tres 1989). The first indications of a state-like society occur onlynear the end of Jenne-jeno’s occupation, when the urban land-scape was redesigned around a chief and his palace. Tiahua-naco’s circa–800 AD transformation—300 years after the set-tlement began urbanizing—also heralded a seismic shift to anew kind of society that emphasized class differences, even askinship ties remained important. By employing a narrow def-

inition of the state, we underline how long self-governancestructured life in the earliest cities.

State Formation and Urbanization

The commentators suggest that the nucleation of populationswould aid, rather than hinder, political centralization. This wascertainly the case in later states, where administrators creatednucleated settlements to make the population more legible(Scott 1998). We question, however, whether nucleation be-fore state formation—as we argue in this article—would op-erate in the same manner. Neighborhoods are ubiquitous incities from their inception (Smith 2010), with boundaries thatare often deeply inscribed architecturally and socially. Similardivisions, of course, were found in places like Hawai’i, wherepopulation was more dispersed, but cities throw these divi-sions into sharper relief and disrupt the rhythms of daily life(Schachner 2012). Identities are constructed through inter-action (Díaz-Andreu et al. 2005), and it was not easy to forma body politic across a fractured urban landscape.

The Tiwanaku state came into being through an “ever-tightening spiral of factional competition” (Goldstein 2003:166).A similar bottom-up process was occurring in Hawai’i as a kin-based system was ramped up to encompass larger and largerkin groups. In the seventeenth century, this system was sweptaside for a society based on a class-based structure, with a newproperty system ruled by divine kings. The factional compe-tition spiraled higher at Tiwanaku because the close proximityof rival leaders accentuated the differences between them andthus made it difficult to find common ground. Moreover, class-based societies often require that unequivocal distinctions bemade between rulers and subjects. In dispersed populations likethat of Hawai’i, it was easier to crown a “foreign” ruler than itwas in urban centers, where aspirants were more tightly yokedto neighborhoods known by all.

We share our colleagues’ conviction that political consoli-dation is difficult without population nucleation, but innova-tive property relations tethering commoners to their produc-tive irrigated land provided the effective means of control inthe nonurban Hawaiian landscape. Once states form, consid-erable effort is often made to bring scattered groups closer toadministrative nodes. Yet urbanization can inhibit state for-mation via concentrated efforts at self-governance by thosewho oppose centralization. Ur rightly points out that urbanstates are ubiquitous in the ancient world. Was this “general”association of early urbanism with states in the Middle Eastmediated by the caging effect of the engineered landscapesof intensive irrigated agriculture that were so common there?As emphasized by Smith and Lobo, the general association ofurbanism with states is probably due to the effects of scaling,as state-like structures facilitated city-spanning connectionsthat unlocked the full potential of its inhabitants. While non-urban states formed more rapidly, urban states may have beeneasier to sustain and could take advantage of the power lawsthat lead to the disproportionate concentration of wealth, in-


novation, and specialization in cities. The Hawaiian case rep-resents the potential for decentralized control over intensifiedstaple production but also its limits. The emergence of citiesprovides the foundation for a much more productive economydriven by greater surplus extraction.

—Justin Jennings and Timothy K. Earle

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Documents

2016, Justin Jennings and Timothy Earle. Urbanization, State Formation, and Cooperation: A Reappraisal. Current Anthropology 57(4): 474-493