The Construction of an Historic South American Composite State

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The term "state" or "polity," in light of earlier scholarship that generally emphasized stasis and its reference to a specific and particularly intricate "type" of complex society, continues to warrant critical disclosure in archaeology. Despite these advances in understanding early state development, little is still known about how and why specific semi-autonomous to autonomous territories were incorporated and organizationally integrated by higher forms of authority to solve collective problems. One such little known polity is the composite state, defined for the Medieval period in Europe. The composite state was locally centralized but regionally non-centralized and comprised of multiple complementary domains, each with their own leader and with overlapping and often distinct roles in service of a single political system. It was a partitioning political structure that was heterogeneously mixed and non-centralized, yet formed a single compound unit ruled by the consensus of group leadership, as the term suggests. This type of differentiated yet integrated political organization is considered to be the most conceptually identifiable analogy to the Araucanian polity or "Estado" (state) that formed in the middle 16th century to resist the intrusion of the Spanish into south-central Chile. The intent of the Estado was to "compose" four different contiguous domains into a regional structure to represent a non-centralized government, each with a specialized role and internally centralized leadership on the local-level. Implementing the composite pattern treated the individual or compositions as a uniform anti-colonial front to the Spanish empire. This NSF funded research attempts to achieve a more focused comparative archaeological and historical understanding (1) of the formation of and differentiated roles within a composite-like Araucanian proto-state in the early colonial period of the southern Andes and (2) of the socio-cultural and historical conditions that shaped the archaeological record of this formation and differentiation. The focus is on the archaeology of the key area in one of the four domains, Pai Cavi in Tucapel, during the early part (A.D. 1550-1650) of the Arauco War (1552-1894), when this domain's specific role was to provide food for a second domain whose primary role was to defend the frontier against the Spanish. The specific aim is to archaeologically test hypotheses related to how the political organization and role of Pai Cavi and the inferred structures and meanings of its mound, residential, public, subsistence, and administrative spaces functionedThis project provides an important case study for the transition from a lower-level complex society to a proto-or near-state polity of the Araucanian people of Chile. Sites in the study area provide an unparalleled sequence to evaluate the late pre-Hispanic and early Colonial transition to intensive cultivation and how local agricultural technologies were newly created or expanded to include raised field agriculture associated with wetland management technologies. This project also will refine the chronology of large-scale agricultural production and mound-building in this little known portion of South America and associate different mound forms with different societal functions and meanings, within the wider context of a differentiated polity. It also contributes to understanding one of the most successful indigenous groups that resisted Colonial European intervention in the Americas. The project will strengthen international collaboration and provide diverse economic and training opportunities for local indigenous communities, the Proncipal Investigator's U.S. and Chilean-based institutions, and international students. It is composed of a collaborative team that will integrate archaeology, historical anthropology, and ecology, and create research collaborations and opportunities for in-country governmental and non-governmental institutions, mainly local Mapuche communities. These findings also have implications for contemporary questions of long-term change in coupled human-natural systems, conservation, sustainable development, biodiversity, and ecological integrity in the region.