The growth of the Empire of the Triple Alliance, or Aztec empire, is recounted in a number of sources, and all of them describe how it was built through wars of conquest waged by the allied cities of Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico City), Tetzcoco (Texcoco), and Tlacopan (Tacuba). These conquests began with the overthrow of the Tepanec empire in 1428, and did not end until the Spanish conquest in 1519. The Mexica of Tenochtitlan and their allies fought and vanquished other states, and demanded tribute and submission as a price for peace. Yet recent analyses have also given us a picture of the empire as an alliance between the ruling elites of the subject states and those of the imperial centers, in which the former derived substantial benefits from being in the empire. They were dependent on the continued patronage of the imperial rulers (Brumfiel 1983), but they were given valuable gifts by these same rulers, they participated with them in lavish feasts, they received lands, and they could count on imperial support as they exploited the common people of their own realms (Smith 1986, Calnek 1982). They retained considerable autonomy, including the command of their own military force, and Hassig (1985:92ff) has characterized the empire as “hegemonic.”

A question immediately arises. If the ruling elites of the subject states derived such benefits from being in the empire, why was it necessary to wage war against them to force them into it? Part of the answer may lie in the processes by which states were incorporated into the empire, and the ways they were politically restructured once they were in it.

Introduction

From AD 900 to AD 1600 a complex and changing constellation of chiefdoms occupied much of the Southeastern United States. Called the Mississippian, after the central Mississippi alluvial valley where extensive remains from this culture were identified in the nineteenth century, this way of life was characterized by sedentary communities, intensive maize agriculture, platform mounds, and a hierarchical society. The subsistence economy was based on the intensive utilization of both cultigens and wild plant and animal resources, and large settlements were located, for the most part, on the terraces of major drainages.

The story of the emergence and evolution of these societies has fascinated archaeologists for over a century. Research emphases have changed from concerns about the origin of these “mound builders,” to interest in material culture and chronology and, most recently, to questions about the organization, operation, and evolution of these societies. As archaeological research has progressed a tremendous amount of information has been collected. Thousands of Mississippian sites are now known from the region, and hundreds have been extensively excavated. In some areas chronological resolution on the order of 100-year intervals is now possible, giving researchers the opportunity to examine political and organizational change with a fine degree of chronological control.

A rich ethnohistoric record is also available, dating from the era of initial Spanish, French, and English exploration. The earliest sixteenth-century accounts, before the native chiefdoms collapsed from contact-induced depopulation and warfare, contain invaluable descriptions of life in these societies, evidence of considerable value in the examination of archaeological materials.

This volume began with a chance meeting between Liz Brumfiel and John Fox at the World Archaeological Congress, Southampton, in 1986. We recognized our mutual interest in the internal dynamics of political development and our complementary specialties in the prehispanic Aztec and Maya. We also recognized our mutual interest in visiting Amsterdam, the site of the 46th International Congress of Americanists in 1988.

The two of us organized the symposium “Factional Competition and Political Development in the New World” for the 46th International Congress of Americanists. Participants included the two co-editors of this volume, David Anderson, Bruce Byland, Pedro Carrasco, Mary Helms, Stephen Kowalewski, John Pohl, and Rudolf van Zantwijk. Encouraged by the quality of the symposium papers, we decided to edit a volume devoted to exploring factional competition as a force of social transformation in prehispanic New World societies. To increase the breadth of coverage, we solicited additional papers from John Clark and Mike Blake, Terry D'Altroy, Fred Hicks, Mary Pohl, Helen Perlstein Pollard, Elsa Redmond and Chuck Spencer. To our regret, Pedro Carrasco had to drop out of the project; his contribution is sorely missed. Glenn Perusek, a specialist in historical materialist approaches to interest group politics and rational choice theory, generously offered to write an overview of the volume from his perspective in political science. We gratefully accepted his offer.

With the support of the editorial staff at the Cambridge University Press, we completed editing this volume in May 1992.

Introduction

Explanations of the origins of institutionalized social inequality and political privilege must resolve the central paradox of political life – why people cooperate with their own subordination and exploitation in noncoercive circumstances (Godelier 1986:13). In the following pages we address this paradox for an archaeological case from Mesoamerica.

The first chiefdoms in lowland Mesoamerica, the focus of this discussion, appear to have developed some 3300 years ago among the Mokaya in the Mazatan region of Chiapas, Mexico, during the first part of the Early Formative, 1550–1150 BC (all dates are in radiocarbon years). This period also witnessed the adoption of maize agriculture in the coastal lowlands, the founding of sedentary villages, the adoption of ceramic technology, a rapid population increase, and the beginnings of patronized craft specialization.

To explain these developments, we first offer a general model for the development of hereditary rank distinctions as the outcome of competition among political actors vying for prestige and social esteem. We then apply this model to the issues of technological and demographic change in the development of social inequality in the Mazatan region.

Resources, prestige and privilege

It is difficult to imagine why people would voluntarily submit to non-egalitarian political systems. Despite this perception, the institutionalization of political privilege may have been quite simple; it may at first have been in people's best interest. Nowadays, in addressing this issue, we are hindered by hindsight and evolutionist and functionalist thinking that regards change as reaction to existing social problems.

In aboriginal American societies, factions competed for power, prestige, authority, and material benefits. A counterpositioning of structurally similar corporate groups, often in pairs, generated factional competition. This collection provides case studies on factional competition in a variety of environmental settings and on the methods for discerning factionalism across a gamut of social fields.

Theoretical approaches to conflict and change

A steady theoretical stream has attempted to explain exogenous cause and culture effect (adaptation) in the evolution of simple to more complex societies. In the positivist tradition, with Newton drawing analogy to the clock, a principal machine of his day, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social theoreticians sought the forces that set the three-fold (savagery, barbarism, civilization) “evolutionary clock” in motion (e.g. climate for Montesquieu). During the 1920s to 1950s, a “dynamist approach” focused on the basic “tensions inherent in any society” (Balandier 1970:17–18), but conflict was said to improve social functioning. Newton's smoothly running clock was transposed synchronically; groups strove teleologically to maintain the well-oiled social machine for the greater social good.

For cultural ecologists, environmental stress was the catalyst to evolution. In essence, Newton's smoothly functioning system was recast as trophic exchanges and competition. But “systems models cannot explain chronic problems generated by the very operation of the system as constituted, such as civil wars, succession disputes or tax evasion” (Gailey and Patterson 1987:5) other than as Malthusian competition for material resources – i.e., biological reductionism. Darwinian-like competition removed the dysfunctional social parts while the evolutionary clock ticked uniformly upward in the spiral of cultural evolution.

Introduction: competition among segmentary lineages

The Lowland Mayan ancestors of the Quiché entered the Guatemalan Highlands at the close of the Classic period (AD late 800s), and confederated during the Early Postclassic (AD 1100s). Factionalism permeated these political fields. This chapter examines the political and ideological transformations that resulted from competition (1) between the contending Quiché groups as well as (2) between the Quiché and the peoples they subjugated. In both contexts, the Venusian calendar for lineage identities and for timing battles intermeshed with the 260-day calendar for personal prognostication (e.g. Popol Vuh 1971:243–4); the solar calendar bound competing lineages within a state. The inter-digitating of the three calendars furnished an ideological calculus for spacing the contentious descent groups and for allotting political prerogatives. In essence, as celestial bodies traveled through various calendrical repetitions, the social actors vied for identities and privileges that mirrored cosmic orderings. The incessant competition for prestige and political leverage provided a dynamic propelling transformation of egalitarian alliances to successively more coercive and hierarchical social exchange.

The chain of political contests from ethnohistory correlates with successive transformations in settlement patterns. That is, power relations are reflected in site plans where specific architecture of known lineages is keyed to specific solar, lunar, planetary, and stellar positions and clusters, especially solstices, equinoxes, conjunctions, and helical risings/settings.

Numerology and political calculus

To summarize the Popol Vuh (1971:3–19), in the night sky Orion was the Creator of the cosmic order – The Heart of Heaven – who wedded the celestial beings (constellations) with the Green Feathered Serpent (K'ucumatz).

The Aztec or Colhua royal family in the prehispanic Mexican empire was the real heart of the political elite in Aztec society. This principal family resided in the great city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and was related by affinal and consanguineous ties to the leading families in the other important centres of central Mexico and beyond. The families of Mesoamerican chieftains were polygynous, and in many of these, including the Aztec royal family, political succession was decided by election. Where both characteristics operated together, many mothers with sons or daughters who were potential candidates for positions of rule lived together in palacecompounds with many officials who were often their own or their children's relatives. We don't have to tax our imaginations to expect a rather fertile ground for the flowering of political intrigues and the resulting factional divisions.

In addition to these two factors, two other characteristics of Mesoamerican systems of government contributed to factionalism: the almost omnipresent dual organization of local rule and the typically bilateral systems of kinship and inheritance. The dual organization meant that on every level of some importance there were two co-rulers, both occupying equal positions in the hierarchy of government but with different functions. Usually, one ruler was responsible for the external relations of the domain whereas the other was mainly in charge of the maintenance of internal order and justice. Conflicts between the two co-rulers were possible of course, and some violent ones are recorded in Toltec and Aztec historiography.

For the past three decades, the prevailing “model” that has been used by archaeologists to investigate the rise of the earliest states is that of “neoevolutionism” – the stepladder model of bands becoming tribes, then chiefdoms, and finally states (Fig. 6.1). In the late 1970s and the 1980s, however, some – but not by any means all – archaeologists (see below for references) questioned the utility of the received model, leaving the situation unresolved for the 1990s. For example:

In this essay I briefly review the arguments that have been made both for and against the typological stage–level neoevolutionary model; I further consider the social and intellectual contexts that help us understand why many archaeologists who once accepted the model now seem ready to jettison it.

Introduction

The social archaeology of non–state agrarian societies emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a concern with the growth and differentiation of social institutions within a neoevolutionary framework. Such societies were characterized as tribes or chiefdoms; or as ranked societies, a category which largely obviated the need for distinguishing between the other two. Criticisms of this approach have been of various kinds. “Processual” attacks criticized typologies in general for a failure to recognize that there is a continuum of social complexity and for bundling together a variety of different social attributes, regarded as characterizing particular social types, instead of explaining the contingent social relations between them. Other attacks have been more radical, in both substance and political intent. It has been suggested that the discourse of social complexity in which recent discussions of social evolution have been framed is merely a re–expression of the ethnocentric emphasis on progress which characterized the nineteenth century, and which Rowlands (1989) suggests is typical of the Judaeo – Christian tradition. The view may be summed up in the statement by Giddens (1984: 236) that “Human history does not have an evolutionary ‘shape’ and positive harm can be done by attempting to compress it into one.” Giddens intends this statement in both an empirical and an evaluative sense.

In search of the truly critical

Post–processual archaeology is an amorphous phenomenon; it assumes many different shapes and forms, deriving inspiration from fields as diverse as contemporary literary criticism, women's studies, and human geography. As Earle and Preucel (1987) have recently suggested, post–processual archaeology may, in fact, constitute more a radical critique of the long dominant, “new” Anglo–American archaeology of the sixties and seventies than a unified research programme or disciplinary paradigm in its own right simply due to this diversity. It is such a mixed bag that it is difficult to define a common core, a new orthodoxy that has already replaced or, at least, is trying to dislodge the positivist, systemic ecological functionalism (or what I prefer to dub “animalism” – as opposed to the overused “vulgar” or the misnamed “cultural materialism”), championed most stridently by L. Binford and his disciples.

Yet if the adjective new had the most positive connotations in American culture and American archaeology in the late sixties, defining a rebellion against all that was old, traditional, and therefore suspect, the adjective critical today seems to be accorded the highest status, possibly uniting the diverse strands of post–processual archaeology into a single critically self–conscious, reflexive enterprise.

Abstract

Archaeological theory is not independent of the problems that need to be solved: it arises out of particular problems and articulates them with others. This volume explores how widely discussed bodies of theory relate to the major problem–domains studied by archaeologists.

There has never been a unified school of archaeology: just as today, the subject has always been characterized by competing theoretical stances that often arise from different bodies of data and attendant problems of interpretation.

If “archaeology” is more than a word that completely changes its meaning according to context, however, there should be some common ground among its practitioners in various branches of the discipline. One expects some community of ideas and approaches, especially an explicit understanding of how “appropriate theory” is matched to the various problems with which archaeologists have to deal.

Typically, however, “theoretical schools” have arisen and claimed to have a privileged status in determining what constitutes valid explanation in archaeological research, and the recent literature shows that this is still the case. In historical perspective, such schools are clearly seen not only as grounded in partial bodies of empirical material but also as reactions to preceding theoretical positions and are themselves likely to be superseded.

Despite the evident dangers of advancing universal prescriptions, however, a significant part of the explicitly theoretical literature in archaeology today consists of polemical claims to novel and exclusive sources of truth.

A post–processual archaeology is, by the definition of its name, something that arises out of a processual archaeology. Post–processual archaeology itself is a reflection, in our own little discipline, of the larger post–modern movement that has so influenced academics and intellectuals in the 1980s; the “modern movement” in archaeology itself seems to have been provided, in large measure, by the American school of the New Archaeology, and by contemporary work in Britain. As post–processual has arisen both out of and against processual, so it has come largely to be shaped by processual habits – either to develop those manners further, or to turn against them. A great deal has been written about the character of post–processual archaeology, by the “pp”s themselves and now by their several critics; some of that debate is now conveniently brought together in Preucel's excellent edited collection (Preucel 1991), to which this book adds more. This paper therefore looks not at postprocessual by itself, but at four elements in the intellectual climate within archaeology of which post–processual is a part.

I chance to have been in the University of Cambridge, the place where the “p” versus “pp” argument has been most openly fought, at some busy periods: first as an undergraduate during 1970–73 when David Clarke held an intellectual initiative; and again from 1982 onwards, as a graduate student and in junior staff positions, in the era when “pp” has arisen there.