Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Mechanisms Of Integration In Early States

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Examining the ways in which large-scale, politically integrated societies develop, operate, and change forms an essential area of research for social scientists today. Archaeology is particularly well suited to make significant contributions to this effort because it can study complex societies over extended periods through the analysis of material remains. However, archaeologists have tended to emphasize coercion over cooperation in reconstructing early states, despite evidence that leaders and their subjects tend to negotiate the terms of institutionalized political authority. With these ideas in mind, this project will examine the processes through which people living in rural communities cooperated with, acted independently of, or contested the mechanisms of social control instituted by leaders at political centers. The research is significant because it moves beyond simply identifying social complexity in the past by addressing why different states followed historical paths, thereby contributing to models that describe how leaders and followers participated in developing, maintaining, reproducing and reworking complex polities. Traditionally, research in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, an area that extends from central Mexico to El Salvador, examines political integration in early states from a "top-down" perspective that focuses on the strategies leaders employed to centralize and sustain their authority. Implicit in these models is the assumption that rural communities were populated by commoners whose sole purpose was to provision urban consumption at the behest of polity rulers. An alternative, "bottom-up" perspective that examines political integration from the view of rural communities is needed to rigorously test what causes centralized polities to form, persist, and collapse. This project addresses the problem by examining the organization of a complex polity that emerged in the lower Río Verde Valley of coastal Oaxaca, Mexico during the Terminal Formative period (150 BCE-CE 250). The lower Verde's first state developed by CE 100, with its primary center located at the site of Rio Viejo. Current evidence suggests that the Rio Viejo state was unstable, as the polity collapsed by CE 250, and the region's population dispersed into small settlements. This study explores the degree to which rulers at Rio Viejo maintained control over outlying areas by conducting field research at Cerro de la Virgen, a rural community located in the valley's hinterland. Cerro de la Virgen is ideal for examining negotiations between outlying communities and Rio Viejo because the site persisted through the social upheaval at the end of the Formative period. The project involves four months of excavation and laboratory analyses aimed at determining whether political, economic, and religious resources were controlled at the local or the regional level. Excavations will target public and domestic architecture to examine resource control within communal and household settings, and archaeometric analyses will provide multiple tests of the hypothesis that the Río Viejo state collapsed because its leaders failed to integrate rural populations into the broader political system.