Our concern is with the origins of the state, conceived of as a social entity marked by greater size and internal complexity than in foraging bands or chiefdoms, in particular with the first "pristine" states which formed without the distorting influence of others.
States typically possess cities (in a range of sizes), a hierarchical social structure, diversified economies characterized by trade and labor specialization, formal institutions of government and religion, mechanisms for record keeping, coinage, etc. States were the first societal form which allowed individuals to escape the ties of kinship and custom; against this, the state possesses its own coercive mechanisms for social control, which it applies ruthlessly. The state institutionalizes violence in the form of police agencies, armies, and navies; it proclaims the virtues of peace and inflicts unprecedented destruction on its wartime opponents; it encourages the arts and sciences, maintains internal tranquility and buttresses a visciously inegalitarian social structure. The state proclaims itself as immortal, and can be abolished in an afternoon. The guardian of stability, the state is always in motion, an unfinished work constantly evolving.
The state, in short, contains contradictions. It is endlessly fascinating. As anthropologists and archaeologists, we wish to know how such Leviathans were spawned, how they maintain themselves, how they multiplied and spread themselves about the world. That is, in part, simple curiosity-- we are ourselves all residents of states, which however modern, proclaim at every opportunity their links with ancient forbearers. 1
It is as well a logical choice of subject for a discipline which studies human culture in all its manifestations. But I would also argue that the origin of the state acquires additional relevance as social critique: if it can be shown that states began "ignominiously," with unworthy aims such as aggression or social repression, then the legitimacy of both ancient and modern states is denied; it becomes possible to question the structure of modern society and easier to challenge the direction in which it is moving.2
Let us jump to the nub of the argument: our understanding of societal forms before the state is that they were characterized by economic-social relations of reciprocity and redistribution-- in the simplest formulation possible, by "primitive communism." The state, notoriously, has always been based on other principles, including great disparities of wealth and status, ascribed social ranking, and a stratified system of classes running from slave to monarch which is virtually impervious to social mobility. The question before us is whether ancient peoples voluntarily, fully aware of the consequences, abandoned egalitarianism and their personal liberty for the potential benefits of statehood, or whether the state was intentionally created to benefit a few members of society at the expense of others, and achieved its aims through coercion and violence.
We turn to more elaborate descriptions of these models, arguments in their favor, and evidence against them. Finally, we shall grope through the darkness for conclusions.
The characteristic of primitive society is "a condition of war of everyone against everyone", Hobbes wrote in Leviathan. "No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." To better their lot men combine, voluntarily giving up some of their autonomy to one person or an institution which will preserve the common peace. For Hobbes, this central power was an unrestrained monarch and the social compact an implicit agreement; others pointed to legislatures and the ultimate will of political majorities. What matters here is to what extent the model has been acted out explicitly over the subsequent years, in such different venues as the Mayflower Compact, the American Revolution, the Mejii Restoration and the UN Charter.
None of these, in the cold light of history, produced "primitive" states. They led to modern state organizations, created at a time when a "middle class" of persons of intermediate wealth and power had come to dominate or were close to dominating their society. As such, the founding documents-- "constitutions"-- stress the importance of property and its protection and have generally been interpreted as the middle class would wish them interpreted.
I would argue that most of anthropology's classic evolutionists accepted such views. Given Victorian belief in progress, successful expansion of the franchise, and the elimination of such discordant features as American slavery and Russian serfdom, the combined structure of state-and-capitalism looked like a good deal to most of our non-Marxist intellectual forbearers. Properly viewed, government was the brain and nervous system of a great social organism.4 Perhaps, in the unhappy past, the mesoderm and endoderm of social layers had been formed through military conquest of other, less advanced, societies, but on the whole things had worked out very nicely. 5 The state is well intentioned-- rational and even kind. Society as it exists is for the benefit of us all. In the hands of Emile Durkheim, this call became a paean to "organic solidarity" and the division of labor, which pleases all men because it places them where they are best fit to serve in society and thus most happy.6
If Durkheim could not imagine class strife arising naturally in the 19th century, Service in the 20th century apparently could not imagine it in prehistory. There is even a suggestion in Primitive Social Organization (Service 1962: 175) that on average archaic states were no great thing, a straightforward extrapolation along the line from foraging Bands to horticultural Tribes to agricultural Chiefdoms, with the only point of interest being that some did well enough to become empires and thus full-fledged "archaic civilizations."7
Just how all this happened was not spelled out, but it may have been beyond Service's brief. PSO was a very short book, after all, one of a series of introductory texts in anthropology aimed at interested laymen and "first year graduate students" and Service seems to have been handicapped by the profession's waning interest in kinship studies, up to this point one of the great unifying themes of social anthropology. To fill the gaps, he troweled on great gobs of then-fashionable substantivism: Bands and Tribes were held together by reciprocity, or informal sharing; Chiefdoms had redistribution. Specifically, chiefs arose to keep the peace and to coordinate transfers of surplus produce between closely associated villages; this allowed villages to specialize in particular crops, increasing their overall production. Redistribution also permitted "the pooling of individual skills in large-scale cooperative productive endeavors;" this led to a more formal division of labor and improved product quality.8
In Origins of the State and Civilization, 13 years later, Service drew much the same picture, adding only the opinion that a handful of those hard working, clever, ever-generous chiefs might be promoted by public acclaim to the rank of king and finally given the respect and social status they deserved. Otherwise, the early state continued to function in a redistributive fashion. There was no early propertied class, thus no early class warfare, and thus no repression of classes. In fact, the beginning kings had very little power of their own and no interest in using force against the lower classes. The state was stratified, to be sure, with much better living conditions for those who reached the top, but the upper strata was made up of the executive officers of the community rather than property holders. And over time, officialdom became hereditary, but this was also no affront to anachronistic egalitarians:
"Political power organized the economy, not vice versa.
The system was redistributive, allocative, not acquisitive. Personal wealth
was not required to gain personal political power. And these first governments
seem clearly to have reinforced their structure by doing their economic
and religious jobs well -- by providing benefits -- rather than by using
physical force." (Service, 1975:8)
All things considered, hereditary leadership is a most sensible arrangement. As societies become larger and more complex, they need stronger mechanisms of integration -- symbols -- and more stable leadership. Monarchs, whether chiefs or emperors, rise above the political tumult of the moment; they can act without regard for short term political advantage, they can be properly trained for their role of leadership, and they do not waste their own or anyone else's energies in ascending to office. Besides, in a pinch, they have to respond to the will of the people or be deposed.
Neglecting only "divine right" and that little echo of "the mandate of heaven," this is, in fact, the traditional argument for monarchy, good enough to put Napoleon Bonaparte on a throne and take James II off one, and I will not attempt a detailed refutation. The best rebuttal comes from Timothy Earle, who, in "A reappraisal of redistribution: complex Hawaiian chiefdoms" (1977) and other papers (Earle 1987, Johnson and Earle 1987, for example) found rather more stratification than benefit for the "disgruntled commoner population" in Polynesian chiefdoms. According to Earle, self-sufficiency at the village level was the rule in Hawaii and the Andes even during Inca times, rather than specialization and exchange. The building of irrigation systems and land reclamation was performed by local populations at the direction of local elites, but higher levels of hierarchy were not necessary, and any increases in production generally flowed upward rather than to all levels of society.
In the Inca case, commoners were directed to produce cloth as well, which was used as a form of currency. Food was diverted to artisan smiths and weavers laboring in state factories to produce luxury goods which the Incas placed in temples, bestowed on the local nobility and rulers of exterior states, and enjoyed themselves. Other than famine relief, mostly coming from locally accumulated surpluses stored in state-run warehouses, commoners received few benefits from imperial rule.10
Earle's own "causal model" of social evolution is powered by "population growth under economic [and technological and ecological] constraints" and leads through "subsistence intensification" to "economic and political integration" and "social stratification." As developed in The Evolution of Human Societies (co-written with Allen W. Johnson), through a succession of case studies, the approach seems similar to Marvin Harris's "cultural materialism." I.e., different societies can be shown to demonstrate behavior which fits with the technology at their command and the environment in which they dwell.
As with Harris's neofunctionalism, this produces interesting discussions but all too often leads to Particularism-with-Ecology rather than to theories with predictive or retrodictive value. As a guiding principle "population growth under constraints" sheds as much light as a burnt out kitchen match. Unfortunately also, the examples chosen by Earle and Johnson are drawn from ethnography and recent history rather than archaeology; surely the use of synchronic evidence to support diachronic arguments is as objectionable in the hands of 20th century anthropologists as it was in those of 19th century evolutionists.
By definition, managers have social rank. Not infrequently, this is transformed into social status and property-- discrete peculation as a perquisite of office for underpaid administrators was a recognized, even encouraged, practice in most Western states as late as the nineteenth century. Societies engaging in large-scale endeavors, then, can be expected to acquire an upper-strata managerial class. From this position, it is but a short jump to the assumption that an upper strata of elite managers made the state possible, and but another one to the view that people of rather mediocre ability seized every opportunity offered by the embryonic state to aggrandize themselves at the expense of common folk and establish themselves in the nobility.
As Karl Wittfogel noted in the 1930's, and continued to note into the 1970's in such works as "The hydraulic approach to pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica" such opportunity is offered by "hydraulic agriculture," or irrigation, which depends for its success upon "a variety of preparatory and protective operations," just as does modern industry. (Wittfogel 1957:23) Its role in creating the state was suggested by V. Gordon Chile:
These characteristics had been noticed by English economists and political theorists as early as James Mills, and as the 19th century wore on, European intellectuals talked less about "oriental splendor" and more about "oriental despotism." With Marx, this culminated in the idea of an "Asiatic mode of production", a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't aspect of his theory of history which is still debated, and which Wittfogel as a soi-disant Marxist took very seriously indeed.
To backtrack a bit, conventional Marxism see social evolution as proceeding from primitive society-- communistic but underdeveloped, corresponding to foraging and early villages-- to slave society-- the first civilizations, in which property ownership and social classes became established-- to medieval feudalism, to capitalism, and at last to socialism and a perfected form of communism. At one point, Marx saw Asiatic society as a bridge between primitive communism and slave society, featuring a despotic government but as yet no concept of private property. He also made the connection between irrigation and this form of economy. Later, he changed his mind, seeing the Oriental mode of production as a trap into which a society might fall without ever evolving into higher forms. At other times, he toyed with the idea of Asiatic society as an alternative to classical society which might manage to break through to feudalism through some means other than slavery. (Diakonoff 1991, Engels 1942) This lack of certainty always made the Asiatic Mode of Production something of an embarrassment among Marx's followers, and it became a most impolitic subject to discuss after various political parties calling themselves communist or socialistic became prominent in India and the Far East.
Wittfogel, of course, insisted on discussing it-- Chinese political history was his specialty-- and became increasingly infuriated as his old comrades refused to publish his papers in their journals and denied right and left that the prophecies of Marx had ever contained anything as silly as the irrelevant, irreverent, and no doubt forged quotations which Wittfogel purported to find in Marx's writings.11
Finally, he exploded and published instead a damned fat square book, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, which made the case that Marx had been right almost from the start; that Asiatic society was a distinctive form of political economy, characterized by totalitarianism, torture, despair and injustice, offering a wretched, abysmal existence to its victims high and low, and probably beyond all hope of reform, no matter what name its government might assume; and that Marx and his latter day disciples had betrayed their scientific honesty by denying this in full awareness that any communist state which might come to power in the modern world would be equally totalitarian and equally despicable.
Naturally, this was published in 1957-- virtually the very peak of the Cold War. Equally naturally, the thesis was noisily embraced in the USA by ill-mannered anti-Communist dodos who hadn't read a work of history or political theory or economics in 20 years and denounced just as vociferously by kind, compassionate, caring, concerned old ladies of all sexes with the same splendid academic credentials, and by Communists everywhere.
Even archaeologists kicked the idea around. There was money for once to go out and dig and see if Wittfogel was right.
Years-- and the Cold War-- having passed, the answer seems to be yes and no. On the one hand, as Eva and Robert C. Hunt demonstrate in "Irrigation, Conflict and Politics: A Mexican Case":
On the other hand, Robert McCormick Adams was right in his early skepticism (dating from 1960) as expressed in The Evolution of Urban Society:
It is generally felt today that Tim Earle's refutation of Elman Service's theories in Hawaii serves also as a refutation of Wittfogel. In a simple form, the idea is finished. (Ironically, the apparent confirmation of the Hydraulic hypothesis in the late 1960's comes as the climax to Marvin Harris's The Rise of Anthropological Theory.)
Adams himself has proposed no theories, grandiose or otherwise, about the origins of states. The Evolution of Urban Society is limited to a comparison of the civilizations of early Mesopotamia and central Mexico; it stresses "'societal" variables rather than "cultural' ones" (Adams 1966:12) and argues-- against the reasoning of everyone else quoted in this paper-- that "while the onset of the transformation obviously cannot be understood apart from its cultural and ecological context, it seems to have been primarily changes in social institutions that precipitated changes in technology, subsistence, and other aspects of the wider cultural realm, such as religion, rather than vice versa." (Adams 1966:12)12
But every fairy tale deserves a happy ending. In 1964, the Chinese People's Republic began to demand that the Soviet Union return large areas of East Asia seized from China by Czarist Russia in the previous century. The USSR refused. Soon after there was fighting of undisclosed size along the disputed borders. In October of that year, the Chinese exploded their first A-bomb, pointedly telling the world that they had made this advance without help from their fraternal and socialist confreres. In 1967, the Chinese exploded their first H-Bomb. In March of 1969, undeclared combat between Chinese and Soviet troops along the Manchurian border lasted for several weeks and purportedly involved units of corps size. Off and on fighting between the socialist giants occurred through 1974. (Dupoy and Dupoy 1993)
And inside the Soviet Union, it became perfectly all right to discuss the Asiatic Mode of Production again. (Gellner 1980a; Semenov 1980; Gellner 1988: 39-69)
Fried is-- or should be-- justly famous for several definitions:
"An egalitarian society is one in which there are as many positions of prestige in any given age-sex grade as there are persons capable of filling them." (1967:33)
"A rank society is one in which positions of valued status are somehow limited so that not all those of sufficient talent to occupy such statuses actually achieve them." (1967: 109)
"A stratified society is one in which members of the same sex and equivalent age status do not have equal access to the basic resources that sustain life." (1967: 186)
"A state [is] the complex of institutions by means of
which the power of the society is organized on a basis superior to kinship."
(1967: 229)
"... I explicitly reject war and slavery as initiating conditions...
"... It should not be thought that the generally unhappy
tone of the preceding remarks indicates any feeling on my part that the
state as a form of political and economic organization would have been
better avoided. My view is that it could not be avoided. No individual
choices in the matter were ever presented in any significant sense... The
state emerged and was hard at work concentrating its power on specific
cases long before any reflective individual took the effort to isolate
and identify the novelty." (1967: 183, 196, 226)
Stratified societies are produced by population growth and "the emergence of genuine socioeconomic classes associated with markedly contrasted standards of living, security, and even life expectancy." (1967: 225) These produce "a magnitude of internal disputes, pressures, conflicts, such as is unknown and inconceivable in rank society." (1967: 225) Kinship-oriented social controls are "doomed" in the circumstances and "non-kinship mechanisms of political and economic power" come into play to "mature, coalesce, and form the state."
Stratified societies by themselves are never seen, for they are unstable. They revert to rank societies or egalitarian societies or make the transition to the state. Whichever happens, it is rapid. In the best of circumstances, the imposed social controls consist of indoctrinating the lower classes with appropriate upper class ideology-- "the sanctity of private property" or "for the good of the country" are examples13. Where slogans fail, naked force prevails.
And Fried, again like Service, preferred to quote ethnography than decipher archaeology, which left his reconstruction safely abstract and unpeopled. Let me quote, then, another reconstruction, covering much the same ground, with more specificity:
"Naturally, the amount of the first surpluses could not suffice for everyone. At the same time, not all the people of the territorial community had the same opportunities to ensure their livelihood at the expense of others. The persons in the most favorable situation were, on the one hand, the military chief and his entourage and on the other hand, the high priest. (It is assumed that in the lands with fluvial irrigation, the latter was also the manager of irrigation activities.) Not uncommonly, one leader could be both the military chief and the high priest. The members of the council of elders also ranked higher than the rest of the community members and even different household communes could have unequal authority and power.
"The formation of a class society is governed by strictly logical laws. In order to maintain the highest growth of the means of production and cultural and ideological progress, a society requires people freed from productive labor. This certainly does not mean that a society consciously releases the best organizers, the most profound thinkers, and the most outstanding artists from production work. It is not those who are best capable of utilizing the surplus of produce in the most rational way who acquire it. It is, rather, those who are in a position to do so: individuals who possess resources of sheer physical strength or who have the daring or the arms or the ideological power; it is they who also appropriate the organizational power. Most of these individuals exploit the labor of others without thereby benefiting society as a whole. A certain percentage, however, are people who are really able to promote the technical and cultural progress of a society.
"It is precisely this accelerating progress that allows
us to call the very first society a civilization... Accelerating progress
distinguishes the first class society from barbarism, the level that even
most developed primitive society cannot exceed...." (Diakonoff 1992: 34-36)
I quote this partially to show a different style of narrative, one which actually contains as much jargon and theory as a Western text, but manages to be considerably more intelligible to first time readers-- I hold it up as a good example-- and partially to show a different approach to explanation. Both Fried and Service are ethnographers; they wanted to show us social evolution and they did so with snapshots taken along the way-- this is a tribal society, this defines a society with ranking, etc. Diakonoff and his associates seem to have approached the same goal as if making a movie-- here is the instant at which social classes are born, view the First Exploiters, imagine what they are saying to one another, sense the resentment of the rest of the community, endure, endure!
Which is propagandistic to be sure-- but I deliberately searched the book for a passage that a Marxist might find evocative, about as likely a prospect as finding a few kind words for George Washington in an American history text. It's not objectionable bias, in other words. Looked at closely, it's just Fried's tune in a different key, without the dissonances.14
I think Fried knew that too and wasn't willing to face the music.
The state is formed when two expanding societies which cannot escape from each other come into conflict and one conquers the other and attempts to hold its conquest. Automatically, this creates a society with two or more social classes, one favored by the authorities and one not. Automatically, an instrument of state power becomes a permanent institution; automatically, eternal repression becomes an objective of the greater community. Automatically, the concept of property-- and of theft-- comes into being. What else is this conquering entity but a state or chiefdom?
In the simplest form, societies are bound together by simple propinquity and geographical barriers, as were villages in the valleys of prehistoric Peru. In the Amazon jungle, similar cramped confines were provided by patches of fertile land along the rivers. Villages may also be bound to a location by the presence of multiple enemies. Thus the concept of circumscription can be generalized.
What forces societies into inevitable conflict in Carneiro's model is population expansion. Elizabeth Brumfiel was not able to test the model itself, but in "Regional Analysis in the Eastern Valley of Mexico: A Test of the "Population Pressure" Hypothesis" (Brumfiel 1976) she attempted the next best thing, tackling the difficult task of operationalizing-- creating a measure for-- population pressure.
The suggestion is that population pressure can be "expressed in a simple correlation between the relative number of inhabitants at each village and relative productive potential of agricultural land available to each village." If all the villages in some area share the same technology and the same environment, then population pressure exists when all inhabitants enjoy the same sort of diet; this is apt to be the case only when all production is devoted to subsistence. On the other hand, if this correlation is not found, then the overall economy has reserve capacity and the population is not under stress.
After examining the larger village sites for the same Mexican valley during two different periods of prehistory, she concluded that while population had increased and there was some evidence of movement towards a state or states, the population's exploitation of the valley had remained essentially the same on a per capita basis. Relative to the available resources, the population had been sparse during the Late Formative period, and it was still sparse during the Terminal Formative period. Consequently, state formation was possible without general population stress. (As a concession, she thought it possible that communities might crowd against one another during or after the formation of the state creating an impression of population stress in a localized region.)
Brumfiel's paper is significant since it provides a method-- the only one I know of, in fact-- for recognizing population stress, a concept much used in archaeological discussion (cf Binford 1968), and since she obtained significant results which flew in the face of conventional reason. With some trepidation accordingly, I point out that her approximations were crude and her survey of sites far from complete. On the other hand, back of the envelope calculations suggest that more complete site data, incorporating the smaller villages she neglected, would leave her conclusions unchanged (they might actually point in the direction of less pressure as population increased)15. So the results ought to be accepted. Population pressure, per se, did not lead to state formation, just as Adams had said ten years before.
On the other hand, Brumfiel's conclusions invalidate only the most dispensable portion of Carneiro's theory. Other researchers have attacked his history. Specifically, in the Peruvian valleys he cites as demonstrating his case, wars between neighboring villages are not visible; the Moche and Chimur states, for example, established themselves by attacking villages in adjacent valleys, despite the presence of nearby smaller communities which would have offered safer targets for aggression.
This leaves Carneiro's argument that conquest produces states, but it's not a new argument. The distinctive portions of his theory appear to have been refuted-- always an embarrassment for a theory. Carneiro may be comforted by the thought that he brought warfare back as a contender in state origin circles; according to Haas, no one else had touched the idea since the death of Herbert Spencer (Haas 1982: 134); in the mid 1970's other academics were proposing similar theories. (Haas 1982: 136-140)
I think it is fairly clear that all of these theories, boiled down, come to similar conclusions: whether intentionally created or not, at least in its beginnings the state has benefited some rather than all persons; it has been fraudulent from the start, violent from the start, aggressive from the start; it has never functioned as anyone other than a psychopath would hope.
And we are stuck with it. The flawed choice cannot be undone.
So I will give you one more quote, from Friedrick Hayek, an economist who has also speculated about the meaning of state society and the mystery of its origin:
Nighty-night.
Footnotes
1. Why else would American post offices resemble Greek temples?
2. Not that such radicalism is the goal of any particular anthropologist or archaeologist, of course, but knowledge can be subversive.
3. A term-- as much else-- stolen from Haas 1982.
4. Ruminating, no doubt, dispatches from Herbert Spencer.
5. The English, it's been noted, avoided the siren call of Gobineau's racism by pointing to the success of diversity in their own nation, where Norman aristocrats, stout Anglo-Saxon yeomen, and feckless Celts happily coexisted in mutual respect and harmony.
Meanwhile, between 1840 and 1870, better than 10% of the population of the British Isles emigrated.
6. Quoting from Haas (1982: 68):
7. The details can be quibbled with, but that would divert us from the goal of general comparisons of theories. Jonathan Haas, who admires Service, spends much of his 1982 book taking gentle exception to the sort of flaws that in my estimation a Caesar should atone for; I see no point in repeating his arguments in more strident tones.
On the other hand, quibbling can be fun too, so see Yoffee's "Too Many Chiefs? (or Safe Texts for the 90's" (Yoffee 1993).
8. Antonio Gilman (personal communication) notes that on the contrary, specialized labor production is identifiable in the archaeological record by greater quantities of inferior standard goods; the slipshod mass-distributed pottery associated with temple rations in Uruk and Jemdet Nasr-period Mesopotamia for example.
9. Perhaps. Peter the Great gave Russia a hereditary aristocracy based on service in 1718, which didn't show signs of falling off from its ideals until... 1741 or so.
But that's history, not anthropology, and irrelevant.
10. On the other hand, they hadn't received many benefits before the Incas took over, either.
11. Well, that was the Thirties. The official view as of 1990 or so, at the last point when an official view mattered, was that Marx's ideas had indeed altered with time, and that his final formulation of the issues, which was to be taken the most seriously, was that expressed for him in Engel's Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State.
12. Which shows what you can get away with when you have tenure.
13. Fried's examples. We might add "To get rich is glorious."
14. Doubtlessly shipped to Siberia.
15. The issue is the inclusion of small-- under 30 hectare-- villages. Assuming 5 km radius catchment areas, it is virtually impossible for the local populations to put a strain on the local environment, and so they lower the average population stress within the valley. If the number of small villages increased in the same proportion as the valley's population-- about 20 % over a 200 year period-- given that resource use per capita for the larger villages was essentially unchanged, the average resource use per capita for the total population might actually decrease.
Of course, at some point, the valley would be littered with villages and catchment areas would overlap sufficiently that such calculations would no longer be valid, and population pressure would be apparent. But that hadn't happened by the Terminal Formative, which was the original prediction of those who saw state formation as the product of population pressure.
Very clever work, actually.
16. Original citation: Hayek, F. A. 1978, The Three Sources of Human Values, London School of Economics and Politican Science, London, p 20
Binford, Lewis R. 1968, "Post-Pleistocene Adaptations" in Sally R. Binford and Lewis R. Binford (eds) New Perspectives in Archaeology, Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago pp 3123-341
Brumfiel, Elizabeth 1976, "Regional Analysis in the Eastern Valley of Mexico: A Test of the "Population Pressure" Hypothesis" in Flannery 1976, pp 234248
Carneiro, Robert L. 1970, "A theory of the origin of the state", Science, 169:733-738
Childe, V. Gordon 1936, Man Makes Himself, Penguin Books, Hammondsworth
Diakonoff, I. M. (ed) 1991, Early Antiquity (translation of Istoriya Drevnego Mira vol 1: Rannyaya Drtevnost', Nauka Press, 1989), translator: Alexander Kirjanov, project editor: Philip L. Kohl, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Dupoy, R. Earnest and Dupoy, Trevor 1993, The Harper Encyclopedia of Military History, 4th Edition, HarperCollins Publishers, New York
Earle, Timothy 1977, "A reappraisal of redistribution: Complex Hawaiian chiefdoms" in Timothy Earle and J. Ericson (eds), Exchange Systems in Prehistory, Academic Press, New York
----- 1987, "Specialization and the production of wealth: Hawaiian chiefdoms and the Inka empire" in Timothy Earle and Elizabeth Brumfiel (eds), Specialization, Exchange, and Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 64-75
Engels, Frederick 1942, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan, (4th Edition, 1891) International Publishers, New York
Flannery. Kent V. (ed) 1976, The Early Mesoamerican Village, Academic Press, New York
Gellner, Ernest (ed) 1980. Soviet and Western Anthropology, Columbia University Press, New York
----- 1980a, "A Russian Marxist philosophy of history" in Gellner 1980
----- 1988, State and Society in Soviet Thought, Basil Blackwell, Oxford
----- 1988b, Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Haas, Jonathan 1982 The Evolution of the Prehistoric State, Columbia University Press, New York
Fried, Morton H. 1967, The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology, Random House, New York
Harris, Marvin 1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York
Hunt, Eva and Hunt, Robert C. 1978, "Irrigation, conflict, and politics: A Mexican case" in Ronald Cohen and Elman R. Service, Origins of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution, ISHI, Philadelphia
Johnson, Allen W. and Earle, Timothy 1987, The Evolution of Political Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, Stanford University Press, Stanford
Semenov, Yuri I. 1980, "The theory of socio-economic formations and world history" in Gellner 1980, pp 29-58
Service, Elman R. 1962, Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective, Random House, New York
---- 1975, Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution, W. W. Norton & Company, New York
Wittfogel, Karl A. 1957 Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, Yale University Press, New Haven
----- 1972, "The hydraulic approach to pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica" in Johnson and MacNeish (eds) The Prehistory of the Tehuacan Valley, vol 4. University of Texas Press, Austin,
Yoffee, Norman 1993, "Too many chiefs? (or, Safe texts for the '90's)" in Yoffee and Sherratt, pp 60-78
Yoffee, Norman and Sherratt, Andrew (eds) 1993, Archaeological Theory: Who Sets the Agenda?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge