State Formation in Italy and Greece: Questioning the Neoevolutionist Paradigm

By Nicola Terrenato

State Formation in Italy and Greece offers an up-to-date and comprehensive sampler of the current discourse concerning state formation in the central Mediterranean. While comparative approaches to the emergence of political complexity have been applied since the 1950s to Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, Peru, Egypt and many other contexts, Classical Archaeology as a whole has not played a particularly active role in this debate. Here, for the first time, state formation processes occurring in the Bronze Age Aegean as well as in Iron Age Greece and Italy are explicitly juxtaposed, revealing a complex interplay between similar dynamics and differing local factors. Building upon recent theoretical developments in the origins and functioning of early states, the papers in this volume experiment with a variety of new approaches to old problems. Dual-processual theory, heterarchy, agency theory and weak state theory figure very prominently in the book and offer innovative, context-sensitive comparative frameworks that match the richness of the archaeological and historical record in the Mediterranean. Contributors include scholars working in Etruscan and early Roman archaeology and history, in Aegean archaeology and on the emergence of the Greek polis. A full analytical index further facilitates the cross-referencing of common themes across the geographic scope of the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Feb 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781842175583

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Preface

Nicola Terrenato and Donald C. Haggis

This volume began with a conversation between the editors several years ago in the Department of Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The proximity of our offices (across the hall) encouraged informal discussion that made us realize that in our teaching, fieldwork, and writing, we were thinking about the same problems and wrestling with the same bodies of theory that have informed or otherwise guided our approach to early state societies in Italy and Greece. We began to recognize shared themes and material patterns; for example, that political power in ancient cities seems to have been variably distributed and counterpoised, suggesting institutional divisions that could represent an active integration of earlier kinship-corporate structures into the political economies of state-level societies; that the status and nature of the clan (gens, genos or startos) were rooted in ancient social relationships and political associations, the analysis of which might help us to understand material patterns on various spatial scales in the archaeological record; and that modeling such patterns might elucidate the transference of social identities from the local or village scale to any number of regional-scale institutions. We were encouraged by such connections though we found that we were both frustrated by a discourse on state formation that remains materially circumscribed as well as constrained by the monumental theory building of British archaeology and North American anthropology. What was missing was the potential for cross-cultural comparison or even archaeological analogy between fields that are normally at home in the same departmental structure in North American universities, but frequently divided by differing research agendas and methodologies.

In efforts to break down these barriers we expanded our conversation to include members of the Odum Institute’s Faculty Working Group on Early Mediterranean Societies at Chapel Hill, exploring the results of recent fieldwork and comparable systemic contexts and similar modes and scales of social interaction in Greece and Italy. These informal meetings led eventually to a workshop, State formation and the Mediterranean: Beyond Evolutionism? conducted at the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in New Orleans (January 2003), where the panelists – Ian Morris, Donald Haggis, David Small, Simon Stoddart, Nicola Terrenato, and Vance Watrous – laid the groundwork for an open-ended larger conference, Current Issues in State Formation in the Mediterranean and Beyond, which was held in October of the same year at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That meeting brought together faculty from across the college and around the world to discuss problems in the study of early state societies in the Mediterranean, Europe, the Near East, North America and Latin America. There were thirty papers presented over three days; the list of contributors includes Russell Adams, Albert Ammerman, Anna Maria Bietti-Sestieri, Brian Billman, Martin Biskowski, Margaret Butler, Krystalli Damilati, J. P. Dessel, Peter Fibiger Bang, Michael Galaty, Laura Cahue, Trinity Jackman, Alexander Joffe, Khaled Hakami, Dale Hutchinson, Laura Motta, Carrie Murray, Helmut Lukas, William Parkinson, Theodore Peña, Daniel Pullen, Roman Roth, Ilse Schoep-Tomkins, Christopher Smith, Simon Stoddart, Nicola Terrenato, Bill Tieman, Peter Tompkins, Edward van der Vliet, Klaas Vansteenhuyse, Giorgos Vavournakis, Kathryn Waffle, Vance Watrous, Jerard S. White. Richard Blanton, Carole Crumley, Christine Hastorf, Ian Morris, Margie Scarry, David Small, Vincas Steponaitis, James Wright served as discussants. Robert Vander Poppen provided invaluable assistance in the preparation and running of the conference. The editors would like to thank various departments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill which have facilitated the numerous meetings that have resulted in the present volume: the Departments of Classics, Anthropology and Religious Studies; the College of Arts and Sciences; the Faculty Working Group on Early Mediterranean Societies (H.W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science); the Institute for the Arts and Humanities (with support of the Schwab Opportunity Fund); the Carolina Environmental Program; and the Research Laboratories of Archaeology.

Integrating a diversity of fields and perspectives, geographic and cultural spheres, and methodologies, the conference proved to be fertile testing ground for a comparative study of state formation in prehistoric and classical Mediterranean sphere. The present collection of essays builds on all these preparatory steps and aims at bringing to the forefront current work in the Aegean and Italy, comparing and contrasting approaches to the problem of state formation in each region. Most of the chapters included here derive from papers given at the conference, but they have been thoroughly revised and updated. Several other contributions were solicited by the editors to cover potential lacunae. As we strived for internal consistency and balance, the range of the volume was limited to the Greece and Italy, also to keep its size under control. All the participants in this prolonged gestation process are here very gratefully acknowledged. Laura Motta read and commented on the whole manuscript, providing essential editorial and substantive help.

1

Introduction

Nicola Terrenato and Donald C. Haggis

In the past two decades, traditional developmental and gradualist paradigms for the emergence of complexity and of state societies, in Old World archaeology and beyond, have been challenged by the development of new theoretical frameworks as well as by new approaches to archaeological and environmental contexts. Our definitions of the state, our methods of interpretation – and, to a certain extent, even the recovery and analysis of data – have been transformed in a number of important ways. The debate has, however, tended to become mired in an increasingly sterile opposition between evolutionist frameworks and critiques steeped in postmodern thought (for a review, see e.g. Yoffee, 2004). The former did not stray far from reductive and fairly stilted models, which were almost always met with radical accusations of political incorrectness and colonialist sympathies by the latter. While there is an increasing need to have more context-sensitive interpretations than the classic ones, originally formulated in the 1960s and 70s, many are reluctant to abandon the concept of state formation (and urbanization) altogether, as a hopelessly value-laden formulation (see also the papers in Haas, 2001; e.g. the critique in Patterson, 1991). In other words, there is an evident tension between the need to go beyond the reductionist framework that has long prevailed in the scholarship and the uneasiness that a radical abandonment of the very concept of state involves.

Now some space for a discussion that transcends these fossilized positions seems finally in the process of being carved out. The epistemological stance that characterizes the new approaches is based on a more discerning form of critical thinking, one that evaluates the individual elements of the traditional doctrine rather than accepting or discarding it in toto. The credit for this development goes to those who are trying to take on board recent theoretical developments but are at the same time refusing to declare ipso facto any comparative analysis of state formation pointless and ideologically suspect (see for instance Feinman and Manzanilla, 2000). It is being recognized that there are many different ways of conceptualizing early states and not all of them are based on the same set of assumptions. In order to fruitfully discuss state formation processes in different cultural contexts, you do not need to assume either the existence of a unilinear developmental sequence for human societies or any etic, objective status for the concept of state. It is sufficient that enough participants in the discourse, for whatever reason, agree on a working definition of state to have, if this really is what is needed, a perfectly relativist and yet locally valid discussion of its formation.

Another important theoretical underpinning of the new discourse is the radical deconstruction of the teleological component that has long been implicit in state formation theories (see Terrenato, below). The transition to statehood can be seen as a process that is neither natural nor spontaneous, neither linear nor necessarily positive. An approach of this kind opens up new research paths into the complexity of hierarchical levels, the role of pre-, non- and anti-state structures and the motivations of the agents in the process. In such as context-sensitive and bottom-up framework, the state as a comparative concept may still prove useful in a very different kind of discourse from that in which it was originally conceived.

In parallel with the new developments, we finally see Mediterranean specialists showing a serious and sustained interest for state formation. It is no coincidence that the debate concerning the Aegean and Greek world, for example, has been particularly active, with the publication of a wealth of important new evidence and interpretative syntheses (see the wealth of references in the Aegean section below). Yet, it is undeniable that the position of these key geographic contexts in the wider field of state formation studies remains peculiar. Greek and Roman archaeologists and historians in particular have entered the debate very late and most are still extremely wary of generalizations or simplifications. As a result, there has been no sustained attempt at adopting an explicitly comparative approach and at integrating data-sets from a wide range of neighboring geographical contexts. This is undoubtedly at least in part connected with the general reluctance to broad-based comparisons exhibited by most classicists. Moreover, Mediterranean studies in general missed out (in terms of intellectual history) on the great comparativist wave of the 1960s and 70s and they now do not possess a large body of existing literature that can be taken as a baseline or even reaction against such an approach.

Having said all this, Greek and Roman archaeologists maybe able turn their status of latecomers to the debate to their advantage. Precisely because very few of them, if any, have any vested interests in classic state formation theory, their scholarship can range more widely and explore new directions more freely, with no danger of running afoul of their own earlier stances (or of those of eminent figures in the field). Even more importantly, they operate in contexts that are dense with historical information and detail, where more nuanced and subtle approaches can be built and evaluated within a much more precise chronological framework. Finally, the abundant ethnohistorical sources are nowadays paralleled by a wealth of high-quality archaeological information, coming from surveys, necropoleis, early cities, as well as from pottery and environmental studies. A critical mass of data, models and cases of study seems to have been reached, so that Mediterranean archaeologists may finally be able to sit at the some theoretical table as the specialists in traditionally strong areas, such as Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia or, more recently, China, especially at a time when the pace of fieldwork in some of these regions has considerably slowed down.

However, before a new era in Mediterranean state formation studies can begin, there are some fundamental problems that need to be addressed. There is first and foremost a vastly underestimated reflexive issue, which is still very far from being properly explored. The unique position of Greece and Rome in the makeup of modern western culture clearly plays a role in the traditional difficulty of establishing any form of comparison with other cultures and contexts. The twin myths of Greek democracy and Roman citizenship are a very cumbersome baggage when trying to place these two cases of state formation in a broader (even if not normative) perspective. In other words, it is particularly hard for classicists to take a fresh look at the available evidence without sharing at some level in the deep-seated assumptions that were laid down by nationalist historians in the early 1800s and that have not been fully metabolized yet (Terrenato, 2005). Then there is arguably a substantive issue, having to do with the popularity, longevity and variability of city-states (as opposed to larger territorial empires; see the references in van der Vliet, below). Compared to other more homogeneous regions, its exceedingly complex system of interactions between different kinds of social entities across long distances is much harder to box into a simple flowchart diagram. This latter aspect, though certainly challenging, may in the end prove beneficial, now that the broader theorizing is shifting towards more sophisticated and context-sensitive frameworks. Precisely the richness and diversity of the cultures involved and of the surviving evidence (including an unparalleled wealth of textual material) may bring the central Mediterranean from the margins to the center of the discussion of state formation (Osborne and Cunliffe, 2005). The central Mediterranean in particular, with its unparalleled large cast of characters and richness of narratives and events, may eventually turn out to be an ideal case of study to try out new models and ideas (Small, 2009).

The course that needs to be charted is thus one that steers clear of the epistemological pitfalls of social Darwinism and teleology, while still maintaining a useful place for state as a broad conceptualization. What may be needed is a new body of theories that can work without the normative, positivistic and reductionist assumptions that have been effectively criticized in recent years. The new models must be sophisticated and rich enough to be relevant in the analysis of complex case-studies, rather than dictating a top-down unilinear developmental line. Some useful tools are already in the literature. Heterarchy, for instance, makes room for a complex network of shifting and contextdependent power relationships. This may turn out to be a useful descriptor of the intricate interplay among the plurality of relevant subjects that are identifiable in state formation contexts in Greece and Italy. Precisely this multiplicity of agents, having a variety of different agendas and priorities, brings up the issue of the relationship between the emerging state structure and the other existing foci of power in the community. Kin groups, clans, corporate entities, cultic societies are only some of the possible players in the state formation game.

Also, once the teleological component is removed, another related issue emerges: what are the motivations and rationales behind the individual actions leading towards state formation? Agency theory may perhaps be of help in unraveling the tangle of diverging and often conflicting behaviors within incipient states (Blanton and Fargher, 2008). Furthermore, consideration of the nature of state organization once some kind of equilibrium is reached, generations after the event, may also throw light on the original desired outcomes and on the balance of forces at play. The key role of clearly pre-state entities such as the gens still had many centuries after the formation of the Roman state could indicate that early states were not as omnipotent as misleading modern analogies suggest. The state can turn out to be a much more fragile result than the sum of its supposedly constituent parts. Such a ‘weak’ definition of the state allows us to leave most of the traditional related ideological baggage behind and may open up new bottom-up ways of describing and interpreting the process.

As recent intensive archaeological surveys reach publication stage, their results have generated vast amounts of new archaeological and environmental data, as well as regional perspectives that allow us to analyze the changing physical structure of pre-state and state territories, and to recognize scale and environment as two crucial variables in the evaluation of the origin and ultimately the form and function of the state. Environmental studies, regional ceramic studies, and the analysis of floral and faunal remains from excavation contexts have offered insights into the nature of pre-state societies, as well as the changing character of human-landscape interaction and the nature of regional integration during periods of state formation. While all of this data clearly has a bearing on the issue of state formation, theories that allow connecting it with state formation processes have not progressed as far as they could have. There is clearly the need for more and more sophisticated thinking on how archaeological data can be used to study the process. With the obsolescence of systems theory approaches and the realization of multilinearity and local variability, we need much more flexible and context-specific tools. All this takes on particular relevance in the case of environmental and productive evidence. General ecological models have been often advanced, but there is a marked scarcity of middle range theorizing on how ecofactual evidence should be integrated in specific historical reconstructions. More case-studies are required, investigating if and how is food production affected by political change. The environmental evidence is also key to a realistic view of what sustains state structures and of their relationship with underlying long-term subsistence activities.

The Aegean

In the last generation of scholarship, the conceptualization of the problem of state formation in the Aegean has changed, especially among those working on Crete, progressing beyond the polarizing opposition of developmental perspectives – independent, gradualist, and largely evolutionary models on the one hand (Branigan 1988; Warren 1987), and punctuated, discontinuous or neo-diffusionist trajectories (Cherry 1983; Watrous 1987) on the other. While cross-cultural interactions (Watrous 2001; Rutter 2001; cf. Schoep 2006; Parkinson and Galaty 2007) are still seen as important variables affecting the formation and structure of state-level societies in both Crete and mainland Greece, recent approaches have largely abandoned the construction of explicitly developmental and causal hypotheses – models of state-formation per se – realizing not only the inherently reductive tendencies in those constructs, but that the societies in question represent culturally diverse and chronologically and regionally varied manifestations of sociopolitical elaboration. Discussion has shifted to questions of complexity – and ways of defining and measuring complexity – effective scales of analysis, and definitions of integration and organization within definable archaeological contexts and data sets. Theoretical frameworks and diachronic perspectives on culture change have not been utterly left behind, but methodologies tend to be ground-up in their interest in reexamining and redefining cultural context as well as new data sets. New approaches to the problem of the state-formation have effectively caused us to back up a bit, recentering the discourse on the data themselves, the definition of the state, the operative social and political interactions that make it work, and critical reevaluation of concepts of state and pre-state society. Rather than assuming a dominant economic or political function of the center – the dependence on notional frameworks derived from essentially economic-redistributive models of staple finance, agro-literate structure, and social storage (for a review, see Haggis 1999b) – recent approaches explore the diverse social mechanisms evident in material patterns, using methods derived from parallel sets of problems outside of the Aegean sphere. This crosscultural and even comparative trend has encouraged the adaptation and integration of concepts of heterarchy (Small 1995; 1997; 1998; Schoep 2002; Haggis 1999a; 1999b; 2002; 2007); factionalism (Schoep 2002); segmentary states (Knappett 1999); and applications such as Marcus’s dynamic model and Blanton and colleagues’ dual processual theory (Parkinson and Galaty 2007).

To speak of Aegean state-formation is of course to encompass three very different forms of state and very likely three different processes of formation in three different culture periods: Minoan Crete (c. 2000–1800 BCE), the Mycenaean mainland (c. 1600–1400 BCE), and the Greek Aegean (c. 700 BCE). And while it is generally acknowledged that Minoan and Mycenaean palaces represent very different culture groups and forms of state-level societies, it is becoming clear that on even on Crete, where we assume a degree of continuity, the emergence of palaces was an uneven and inconsistent phenomenon operating on various spatial scales; even changes between Protopalatial (c. 2000–1680 BCE) and Neopalatial (1680–1450 BCE) phases suggest different forms of palatial organization (Knappett and Schoep 2000; Haggis 2002). Similarly, in the Greek Aegean, not only are diverse forms of state apparent (Morgan 2003; Hansen 2006), but even among city-states and polis-like varieties, there are apparently diverse chronologies and patterns of formation. Our understanding of the development of ancient city-states has been improved in recent years by these crosscultural perspectives that emphasize agricultural specialization, the establishment of new political roles and patron-client relationships, and changing patterns of socioeconomic interaction between city and countryside (e.g., Smith 2003; Nichols and Charlton 1997; Schwartz and Falconer 1994). And while the emergence of Minoan and Mycenaean palace states was apparently neither uniform nor consistent geographically or culturally, the Greek city-state follows a similarly complex and uneven trajectory. The polis, however defined, is recognized as a new kind of polity, demonstrating a level of sociopolitical elaboration very different from its Early Iron Age village roots, while its emergence can be seen to involve a phase transition, an increase in complexity, in which new urban and rural relationships were formed, and in which local kinship systems were not suppressed or controverted, but restructured in new venues of economic interaction and social competition (cf. Yoffee 1997).

The seven papers in this section represent strands of this current discourse, dealing with questions of centralization, hierarchy and integration on various spatial scales, regions, culture groups, and periods in the Aegean, from the Early Bronze Age to the classical period. Daniel Pullen focuses on Early Bronze 2 in central and southern Greece, looking at the first indications of emerging state-level complexity in the Aegean sphere. The period has long been characterized as a proto-urban phase of cultural development (cf. Cosmopoulos 1991), encompassing a chiefdom-like political organization, evinced by a three-tiered settlement hierarchy; primary centers with fortifications and distinctive architectural forms such as the so-called corridor houses – exceptionally large buildings with regular design features and presumably semi-public and administrative functions. In Pullen’s analysis regional studies are brought to bear on the distribution of certain artifacts that correlate to elite building types, and a potential structure, creating an overlay of qualitative as well as quantitative indices of integration. In the south Argolid, artifacts (such as terracotta roof tiles and impressed hearth rims), site location (proximity to coastal and arable zones), and site sizes (distinctively large primary centers), inform our understanding of relational hierarchies in the region. The continuity of occupation at large sites throughout the Bronze Age emphasizes the importance of the developed settlement hierarchy in EB 2. What is interesting here is that the distribution of certain artifacts – sealings, seals, impressed hearth rims, tiles and metals – and their use contexts are analyzed on both the regional and single-site level. The material pattern of centralization, which is quite long-lived at a number of sites (lasting throughout the Early and Middle Helladic), is secondary to the distribution of material symbols of a dominant ideology. In the Argolid and elsewhere, these are relatively short lived phenomena within Early Helladic IIA, as are both fortifications and corridor houses – and a concomitant extensification of land use and discernable site-size hierarchy. Thus the hierarchical settlement structure indicating regional integration is as ephemeral as the dispersal and reduplication of symbols of a central administrative authority. This is not to say that the proto-urban pattern is necessarily weakly integrated, but it does emphasize the small-scale and incomplete nature of the structure.

Damilati and Vavouranakis’s comparison of Early Bronze Age and Neopalatial Crete is a critique of different effective analytical scales of integration in what we have always presumed to be pre-state conditions at Mochlos and Myrtos Phournou Koriphi on the one hand, and palatial contexts on the other. In their view, ritual and ritualized activities in the Prepalatial period – principally the southwest cluster at Myrtos and the Early Minoan cemetery at Mochlos – reinforced local value systems, ideational frameworks that intensified the boundaries of social interaction within local communities. Rather than being inherently weak, fluid, or necessarily egalitarian in structure, the use of symbolic architecture (such as house tombs) and artifacts (such as figurines, elite drinking vessels, or rhyta) reproduced and fixed the order and boundaries of sociopolitical organization. Indeed evidence for such structured relationships can be found reduplicated at the local level across Prepalatial Crete, though not in exactly the same material forms. In Damilati and Vavouranakis’s view, these localizing tendencies contrast sharply with the fully-formed state-level Neopalatial landscape, in which architectural features, such as the Minoan hall, emerge as active symbols of dominant ideology perhaps emanating from Knossos itself. The transformation of architectural codes of communication in LM I, on the local level, indicates a distortion and alteration of the distinctly palatial if not Knossian vocabulary, ultimately undermining the meaning and effectiveness of the symbolic currency, and allowing alternative local interpretations, expressions and perhaps intended meanings. The authors effectively challenge traditional evolutionary paradigms of state-level organization and complexity pointing to contrasting perspectives of integration: the EM examples are durable structures, while the LM I indices are short-lived and ultimately co-opted and contested if not utterly controverted by localizing tendencies.

In a sense, the Cretan picture strongly suggests a restructuring which may be a process of transference of kinship-corporate identities from the village or cluster, the local, to any number of regional scales. In Damilati and Vavouranakis’s Prepalatial case, local and regional integration was successfully maintained through rituals within the context of the settlement and cemetery. At the end of the Prepalatial period, these same forms of social behavior (or even actors) became reintegrated into other venues, eventually into the architectural framework of the palace itself, which itself undergoes considerable change from MM IA until LM IB. It is not just a matter of scale, but a matter of symbolic transference and integration. It is a cognitive restructuring, to use Blanton’s language, but not a shift from localized patrimonial rhetoric of dominant kinship groups to the communal symbolic language of a sacred landscape – rather it is a reshaping of the communal symbolic language that was ultimately based in the microregional interaction of kinship-corporate groups. The problem is in defining the nature of this interaction without resorting to extremes of egalitarian village-farmers or ephemeral chiefdoms mobilizing wealth through limited network strategies.

The inherently weak integration of Neopalatial symbolic systems recalls in certain aspects Pullen’s distribution of architectural and artifactual indices of complex regional interrelationships in the EB 2 Peloponnese: the hierarchy of settlement and reduplication of elite buildings suggested by the presence of roof tiles and impressed hearth rims, point to the existence of ephemeral micropolities that may survive in some form after EH IIA, but with drastic changes in sociopolitical structure and presumably economic influence in the wider region. The Yoffeesque dead-end trajectories of cycling individualizing chiefdoms looks applicable to the mainland with peaks as it were of small-scale centralization in the distribution of corridor houses in EH II, the complexly stratified settlement patterns in the south Argolid, encompassing marginal environments, and even arguably international styles of architecture and ceramics. While we lack ruler iconography and unequivocal evidence for patrimonial rhetoric, the architectural focal point of the household-as-public-building and reasonable evidence of a prestige-good centered system and surplus centralization are sufficient to suggest active network strategies in EH IIA. Settlement patterns, even if dispersed and complex, may mean that there was an active process of local colonization and restrictive linear regional integration; their stability was ultimately based on their control of local environments in concentric and proactive economic and social exchanges.

Vansteenhuyse, also working on Crete, examines the nature of centralization in the Neopalatial period, considering different aspects of regional integration normally used to characterize the emergence of Minoan palaces as political and economic centers of smallscale states. His critique of the concept of territorial definition and differentiation allows him to disengage economic functions from political and ideational spheres of influence, questioning the notional underpinnings of the palaces as centers of redistributive economies of scale. The exercise is effective and spatially vivid, with Knossos emerging as cultural and therefore, if anything, ideological center (cf. Soles 1995). While Damilati and Vavouranakis would question perhaps the ultimate effectiveness and longevity of this ideological importance or impact on the landscape, Vansteenhuyse’s approach accords well with recent ceramic studies that see palaces as less economically central or centralizing and more variable in sociopolitical functions (Day and Wilson 1998; 2002; Knappett and Schoep 2000; Haggis 2007); the notion of palatial territory has reemerged as spatially incoherent in analytical terms – both fragmented and segmented, but defined by cultural, principally kinship and corporate, associations, rather than strictly defined economic or political boundaries. The symbolic capital and means of ritual competition afforded by local elites in Vansteenhuyse’s model, while emanating from a Knossos center, required a local and subregional negotiation of terms, roles, and relationships – such are the features that characterize Damilati and Vavouranakis’s Neopalatial landscape.

In the case of the Mycenaean palace-state, Rodney Fitzsimons challenges monolithic perceptions of the function of palatial architecture, showing diachronically changing forms of elite display that relate to different sociopolitical conditions in different periods of the notional palace state. His survey of monumental architecture at Mycenae paints a picture of emergent local elites in stages of regional and interregional competitive interaction, beginning with a wealth-finance and perhaps network-oriented system of prestige good distribution and consumption. The shift from grave circle to tholos, and then from tholos to palace represents not only different scales of integration, but the changing material expression of dominant ideologies in the landscape: the local discourse among emerging elites in the shaft graves seems to become replaced first by elaborate tholos tombs and eventually the citadels themselves that express an interregional koine of palatial architectural monumentality. Behind these monumental forms is of course an apparently expanding state-level political organization and mobilized labor pool attested in other material and textual evidence for the LM III period. While the shift in architectural emphasis from materially rich tombs to monumental palaces might indicate a transition from localized kinship-oriented network-like structures of the MH–LH II, to the corporate conditions of the palace state, Fitzsimons effectively points out the lingering and re-created visual and symbolic connections between citadels and tombs, and thus the continuing importance of local kinship structures. Like Pullen’s corridor houses of EH II, and Damiliati and Vavouranakis’s Neopalatial hall, the material expression of the palace – architecturally, the citadel-as-palace state – seems ultimately and inexorably dependent on links to the local kinship corporate group, either conceptually or historically; the palace’s interregional viability appears as ephemeral and mutable as its physical form.

Turning to the early Greek state, van der Vliet, like Vansteenhuyse, calls into question the economic, essentially agricultural and redistributive, centrality of the Aegean State – in this case the polis – emphasizing the variable and fluid character of economic interaction. He sees evidence for generalized reciprocal exchange and market systems of the early city-state indicating negotiated social relationships within fragmented networks of kinship and corporate groups. Political structure was also variously arranged, constituting competitive interrelationships between elites – different levels of aristocracy – and various social groupings of citizenry and commoners. In van der Vliet’s view, these dynamic sociopolitical interactions comprise not merely a balancing (or resolution of conflict) between constituents or tendencies – elites and commoners, or aristocracy and the demos, but the integration of corporate-group relationships. Fostered by essentially sequential hierarchical arrangements, the critical and effective functions of these diverse social groups or sodalities form an arguably heterarchical organization of regimes within an oscillating corporate and collective dynamic. While this is not to deny the importance or identity of the individual in the formation of the state, neither monarchy nor tyranny was ultimately sustainable in practice. The regional diversity of this dynamic process – and indeed the sheer variety of forms of Greek state society that eventually emerged – challenges not only monolithic definitions of the polis, and polis-like states, but the way in which we visualize concepts of centralization, territoriality, and complexity in examining emerging and emergent state societies. The localizing, idiosyncratic, and corporate character of regime building in van der Vliet’s survey resonates strongly with Damilati and Vavouranaki and Vansteenhuyse’s perception of the economically and politically decentralizing tendencies in the Minoan examples, and their understanding of variable spheres and social dynamics of integration.

The issue then becomes not one of centralization, but how underlying local social structures – such as kinship-corporate groups that form a fundamental and normative social unit in the Aegean, not unlike Gil Stein’s (2004) lineage groups for northern Mesopotamian towns – become integrated or transformed into an identifiable larger scale organization that characterizes our perceived shift from network to corporate power relations. The papers in this section go a long way in sorting out these issues. It is interesting that by following Ian Morris (1987), Blanton (et al. 1996) sees an essentially network-like structure for the pre-state Greek landscape, the rank-distinctions in Early Iron Age princely burial gradually giving way to strongly corporate features of the polis, with its temples, civic institutions and communal cemeteries – the now famous shift in depositional behavior from the cemetery to sanctuary. While we think in terms of the reorganization of demes and tribes in the creation of poliadic structures of the city and sanctuary, what we are perhaps really seeing is the integration of preexisting kinshipcorporate behavior, not the replacement of kinship with corporate that seems to be at the core of our application (or misapplication) of the bifurcated opposing tendencies of the dual processual model. In David Small’s view (cf. 1997; 1998), the elite-lineage modes of economic interaction of the Early Iron Age remained only weakly integrated into the political organization of emerging city states; in his argument, the polis then represents multilateral economic and political systems; highly decentralized economic and social behavior that was rooted in oikoi – lineages that encouraged ultimately heterarchical and oscillating structures, but little economic centralization.

The Aegean section thus concludes with David Small’s analysis of classical Priene, a vivid test case for exploring the implications of the application of dual processual theory to an emergent Greek polis. Disaggregating a multiplicity of institutional components within the city-state, Small’s contribution has both a synchronic and diachronic vividness and potential application: over time, there is a traceable increase in network strategies even within supra-household civic contexts within the city – these are the poliadic corporate structures par excellence: the sanctuary, prytaneion, bouleuterion, and perhaps the theater, stadium, and gymnasium. The fully formed Greek city contains a wide range of social interactions, and equally diverse venues for sociopolitical interaction evinced in historical, epigraphical and archaeological records. Rather than as opposing tendencies or analytical extremes, Small’s nuanced approach shows the coexistence and dynamic interaction of corporate and exclusionary ideologies playing themselves out in civic contexts at Priene. Power relations in the city may have been promoted or legitimized in the public assembly, but the varying degrees of exclusivity and utilization of network strategies of the household (andron), prytaneion and bouleuterion, tell us that the underlying structure of the social organization and economy transcends the corporate language of the polis as citizen-state.

Italy

The papers in the Italian section represent well the variety of approaches that can be taken, at this point in the debate, in regards to state formation in Central Italy. As this is a relatively new field of research, certainly compared to other parts of the Mediterranean, there are more avenues that still need to be explored, as well as models than can be fruitfully tried out. This does not mean, of course, that there was no effort devoted to the subject in the past. Several scholars (primarily based in Italy) have produced, at least since the 1980s, important theoretical and applied contributions centering primarily on Rome itself and on South Etruscan centers like Veii, Vulci, Caere and Tarquinia. As pointed out in the contribution by Stoddart and Redhouse, the original case to which C. Renfrew applied his Early State Module was precisely Etruria. Soon after that, evolutionist models were tried out on early Rome (e.g. Guidi, 1982) and a debate slowly took shape (for a full review of this literature, see Terrenato and Motta, 2006). In spite of this, it is only very recently that a wider audience has been brought in the conversation and that specialists in Italy have began to reach out to other scholars engaging similar problems in other areas and periods. So this is a very exciting stage in this particular area of research and the papers collected here take full advantage of many new opportunities to look at the state formation phenomenon from different perspectives.

A group of papers are primarily concerned with the material structures that underlie the emergence of states. They of course follow in the great tradition of functionalist social anthropology and processual archaeology, but with much greater theoretical sophistication, as well as with an ability to model the complexities of settlement, production and trade with much greater accuracy than it was possible before (cf. Guidi, Piperno and Cremaschi, 1992). The more recent work of Colin Renfrew is of course a primary source of inspiration here, with its attention to how material variables play out on landscapes, within social groups and across different communities. Much more than in classic US-based neoevolutionism, a keener sense of space and of multidimensionality allows those approaches to escape the extreme forms of reductionism and oversimplification that have plagued earlier studies in this vein.

A perfect case in point is the paper in this volume by Stoddart and Redhouse. Taking the X-tent concept as their methodological starting point, the authors analyze the emergence of city-states in Southern Etruria by grounding it in the realities of the landscape of that region. They calibrate the original spatial analysis to take into account the morphology and hydrology of the area on the one hand, and on the other they use estimates of site sizes to produce a predictive model of settlement aggregation and hierarchization. A great strength of this work is that it adopts a bottom-up approach to state formation, in which the main agents are the individual sites, rather than political abstractions like central power or state bureaucracy. The paper also clearly exemplifies the impact that archaeological data of better quality is having on this kind of studies. Southern Etruria and the Tiber valley were the cradle of systematic survey in Italy, thanks to the pioneering fieldwork conducted there by the British School at Rome in the 1950s and 60s. This large body of data is now providing the basis for a wholesale reconsideration and resurvey by a large international team of which the authors are a part (Patterson, 2004).

Long-distance connections have an even more important role in Pena’s contribution to this volume, which operates in a comparable theoretical environment. It however focuses on endogenous rather than exogenous factors as the primary triggers for state formation in Southern Etruria. Again taking advantage of much improved ceramic and settlement archaeology, it hypothesizes a direct link between Greek and Phoenician trade and local emergence of city-states. Drawing heavily from ethnographic comparanda, it reconstructs a system of gift exchange and barter progressively empowering local elites and providing them with the status and the accumulation of wealth that are necessary to their successful establishment as state leaders. Evidence from the multicultural emporia that are being excavated along the Tyrrhenian coast and from the growing number of relevant shipwrecks is brought to bear on an old question completely changing the degree of resolution that can be achieved. Such a sophisticated exchange model goes a long way towards explaining the macroscopic role that exotic imports have on elite self-representation and interaction throughout the peninsula. Rather than propounding an alleged universal model, the author evaluates this particular instance of state formation in its own terms. The careful combination of a comparative framework and of a