Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations, by Norman Yoffee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-81837-0 hardback £45 & US$75; ISBN 0-521-52156-4 paperback £19.99 & US$34.99, 291 pp.
Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations, by Norman Yoffee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-81837-0 hardback £45 & US$75; ISBN 0-521-52156-4 paperback £19.99 & US$34.99, 291 pp.
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《古代国家的神话：最早的城市、国家和文明的演变》，诺曼·约菲 (Norman Yoffee)，剑桥：剑桥大学出版社，2005 年。ISBN 0-521-81837-0 精装本 ISBN 0-521-52156； -4 平装本 19.99 英镑和 34.99 美元，291 页。
DOI：
10.1017/s0959774305000120
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发表时间：
2005
影响因子：
1.2
通讯作者：
N. Yoffee
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
N. Yoffee
一个多世纪以来，考古学家们经常被吸引，从广义的进化角度来理解人类的过去，将达尔文的思想应用于人类社会的发展。通常得出的人类发展的线性模型通常将国家视为人类进步的顶点，是经历部落、部落和酋长统治的中间阶段的旅程的终点。从20世纪40年代开始，新进化论思想在朱利安·斯图尔德（Julian Steward）和其他人关于国家起源的著作中尤为盛行。在这本书中，诺曼·约菲（Norman Yoffee）挑战了新进化方法以前的主导地位，他认为，在过去的半个世纪里，它扼杀了而不是促进了我们对早期国家发展的理解。Yoffee对国家从不太复杂的社会类型经过一系列程序化阶段发展而来的观点提出了质疑。相反，他强调了古代国家的多样性，大量利用了他对早期美索不达米亚的专业知识（来自文本和考古学）。在这里，我们看到，在城市国家社会中，等级制度与等级制度一起发挥着作用，不同地方的生活经验差异很大，尽管在某种程度上，所有这些都被认为是美索不达米亚文明的一部分。然而，约菲的书并不仅仅关注美索不达米亚；相反，他从埃及、南亚和东亚以及中美洲和南美洲提取了比较证据，以证明他所描述的实体的多样性和流动性。它们中很少符合可能从人种学中得出的模型，并且每个州在许多方面可能被认为是独特的。然而，从更广泛的角度来看，所有国家都是在更新世末期以来人类社会发生的广泛变化模式中产生的，在这种变化模式中，个人和群体为控制资源而竞争。约菲总结道：“关于早期国家研究的核心神话……有一种东西可以被称为古代国家，所有最早的国家都只是这个模型的变体。另一种方法是将每个社会（无论何种类型）视为个体和独特的，并且处于不断变化的状态。在这个评论专题中，我们邀请了一系列专门研究早期国家的考古学家来解决这个问题和这本重要的书提出的其他问题。然而，我们从作者本人的开场白开始。
For more than a century, archaeologists have frequently been drawn to understand the human past in broadly evolutionary terms, applying Darwinian thinking to the development of human societies. The unilinear models of human development that often result typically regard the state as the culmination of human progress, the end-point of a journey through intervening stages of bands, tribes and chiefdoms. Neo-evolutionary thinking was especially prevalent from the 1940s onwards, in the work of Julian Steward and others writing on the origins of the state. In the volume reviewed, Norman Yoffee challenges the former dominance of the neo-evolutionary approach, arguing that over the past half century it has stifled rather than stimulated our understanding of early state development. Yoffee contests the idea that states develop through a series of programmatic stages from less complex kinds of society. Instead, he stresses the diversity of the archaic state, drawing heavily on his specialist knowledge (drawn from texts as well as archaeology) of early Mesopotamia. Here we see city-state societies in which heterarchies play a role alongside hierarchies, and in which the varieties of lived experience varied considerably from place to place, even though all may at some level be considered to have been part of a shared Mesopotamian civilization. Yoffee's book is not, however, concerned solely with Mesopotamia; far from it, he draws comparative evidence from Egypt, South and East Asia and Central and South America to demonstrate the diversity and fluidity of the entities he is describing. Few of them conform to models that might be drawn from ethnography, and each state may in many ways be considered unique. Yet in a broader perspective, all states arise through a widespread pattern of change that has taken place in human society since the end of the Pleistocene in which individuals and groups have competed for control of resources. Yoffee concludes that ‘The central myth about the study of the earliest states ... is that there was something that could be called the archaic state, and that all of the earliest states were simply variations on this model’. The methodological alternative is to consider each society (of whatever type) as individual and unique, and constantly in a state of flux. In this review feature we invite a series of archaeologists specializing in the study of early states to address this and other issues raised by this important book. We begin, however, with an opening statement from the author himself.