Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Households And Political Transformation During State Formation

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Researchers Lacey Carpenter and Dr. Joyce Marcus of the University of Michigan are investigating the relationship between ordinary households and a large-scale political transformation known as state formation. The contemporary world has diverse political systems, but most can also be defined as states,i.e., polities with authority concentrated in the hands of full-time political officials who hold specialized military, policy-making, or administrative positions. The emergence of state-level societies is a global political phenomenon that fundamentally changed the way leaders and subjects interact and the way governments extract and distribute resources. Analysis of early states has relevance to present day society because most of today's world is not only characterized by states (or nation-states), but many of these states are attempting to expand their territorial control over populations who resist domination and incorporation. However, these large and complex polities cannot support themselves or change without involvement from the households whose labor and resources are the foundation of larger systems. Carpenter and Marcus's investigation will be the first study of houses during the period of state formation in the Oaxaca Valley, Mexico, and the first to assess what impact the state had on household economy. Archaeology is uniquely situated to provide a long-term perspective (1) on societies and time periods that lack written records, (2) processes that occur over centuries, and (3) on the common people that comprise most of the population. The project will employ a local crew from the town of San Martín Tilcajete in Oaxaca, Mexico who will excavate houses. The project offers new research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students who will acquire experience in an array of excavation and laboratory methods. The research concerns the development through time of the relationship between households and governing institutions. The investigators will document how households were organized before, during, and after state formation to assess the timing and extent of any changes or continuities in daily life during this volatile era. Choices made at the household level may have enabled leaders to better mobilize resources and augment and further consolidate their authority. A suite of economic, social, and ritual changes are associated with state formation: increased social stratification, taxation, full-time military service, craft specialization, full-time merchant classes, full-time priests, among others. Households may have implemented new strategies in reaction to these institutional-level changes. A study of households occupied over multiple centuries will allow investigators to document the timing of economic, social, and ritual changes, and provide a more complete understanding of state formation. The excavation of houses from the Tilcajete polity, where a secondary state emerged in response to hostilities with the pristine state centered at Monte Albán, and the creation of an inventory of the contents of each house provide data that will be used to improve our models of how household economies are tied to larger political systems, particularly during times of profound political and economic transformation.