Communication, Computation, and Governance: A Multiscalar Vantage on the Prehispanic Mesoamerican World

Feinman, Gary M.; Carballo, David M.

doi:10.23919/jsc.2021.0015

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 94 publications

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“…In egalitarian urban societies, we find the means of specification distributed amongst everyday households, while in stratified societies with predatory institutions, these same technologies were monopolized to create extractive forms of interest-bearing debt (Green, 2020). Likewise, collectivity produced a more widely distributed form of collective computation, while authoritarianism limits the flow of information (e.g., Feinman and Carballo, 2022).…”

Section: What Is Evidence For Good Governance In the Ancient Past?mentioning

confidence: 92%

Of Revenue Without Rulers: Public Goods in the Egalitarian Cities of the Indus Civilization

Green

2022

Front. Polit. Sci.

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The archaeology of collective action addresses a widespread myth about the past–that premodern societies were despotic, and only produced public goods when everyday people convinced a separate and distinct ruling class to provide them. Archaeological evidence from the Indus civilization (~2600–1900 BC), home to the first cities in South Asia, reveals that Indus cities engaged in a remarkably egalitarian form of governance to coordinate different social groups, mobilize labor, and engage in collective action, thus producing a wide range of public goods. These public goods included, but were not limited to, water infrastructure, large public buildings, and urban planning–all of which helped Indus cities invent new technologies, grow, and thrive. Many intersecting institutions contributed to Indus governance, including civic bureaucracies that gathered the revenue necessary to mobilize labor in pursuit of collective aims, as well as guild-like organizations that coordinated the activities of numerous everyday communities and ensured the equitable distribution of information within Indus cities. A wide range of large and small public buildings, information technologies, and protocols for standardized craft production and construction attest to this egalitarian governance. Through these institutions, Indus governance incorporated the “voice” of everyday people, a feature of what Blanton and colleagues have described as good governance in the past, in absence of an elite class who could be meaningfully conceptualized as rulers.

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Section: What Is Evidence For Good Governance In the Ancient Past?mentioning

confidence: 92%

Of Revenue Without Rulers: Public Goods in the Egalitarian Cities of the Indus Civilization

Green

2022

Front. Polit. Sci.

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“…The persistence, or apogee, of a settlement might also be related to inequality levels. Apogee is often dependent on governance, with higher levels of inequality in political leadership leading to shortened settlement duration (23)(24)(25)(26). At the same time the calculation of apogee lengths allows us to assess the durability of inequality regimes.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Five Thousand Years of Inequality in the Carpathian Basin

Duffy,

Wilkes,

Skorna

et al. 2024

Preprint

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The emergence of sedentary farming economies, especially in contexts intensified by plow agriculture, has been argued to underpin marked increases in economic inequality and its intergenerational transmission across Eurasia. To assess this presumed causal relationship, we examine relational (burials) and material (house sizes) inequalities in the Carpathian Basin, a large region in central Europe, from the time the first farmers arrived in southeastern Europe through the next five millennia to the Bronze Age. We find that although farming did increase the potentials for both relational and material inequalities that potential was rarely reached, and then only for short durations. A series of leveling mechanisms, which shifted over time, are identified including the removal of material wealth from circulation, community fission, and investments of surplus labor in infrastructural investments. In the Carpathian Basin, only after at least five thousand years were the intergenerational potentials of material wealth transmissions more broadly realized.

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“…Archaeological analysis of inequality in Mesoamerica remains an active area of scholarly inquiry, and other analyses of governance have yielded preliminary results showing that more collective forms of governance were more prevalent than initially expected (Carballo et al 2022; Chase 2021; Feinman and Carballo 2018, 2022; Thompson and Prufer 2021), although additional research is still needed. The complexity of measuring income versus capital (Piketty 2014:50–52, 266–267) creates additional challenges for directly applying the game theory models from Boix (2015).…”

Section: Three Comparative Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding and calculating household size, wealth, and inequality in the Maya Lowlands

Chase,

Thompson,

Walden

et al. 2023

Ancient Mesoam

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Inequality is present in all human societies, but building a robust understanding of how that inequality developed and persisted for centuries requires historical and archaeological data. Identifying the degree of inequality (or disparity) in ancient communities can be addressed through a variety of methods. One method becoming standard practice in archaeology evaluates inequality through quantitative analysis of robust settlement data. In this Compact Special Section, we assess household size as a potential reflection of wealth inequality among Classic period (a.d. 250–900) Maya settlements. First, we generate house-size data from both pedestrian and remotely sensed LiDAR surveys. Then we use those data to calculate Gini coefficients and Lorenz curves, which provide measures of variation. Gini coefficients range from 0 to 1, where 0 reflects perfect equality and 1 indicates perfect inequality, regardless of the actual values in the distribution. Both area (m2) and volume (m3) provide different, complementary metrics to investigate residential size as a metric for wealth inequality among Classic Maya Lowland settlements. Proposed mechanisms that generate inequality include the intergenerational transmission of wealth and differential access to resources; however, addressing these and other pathways for how inequality develops and persists, and how it was maintained in the past provides insight into similar processes of systemic inequality worldwide.

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Communication, Computation, and Governance: A Multiscalar Vantage on the Prehispanic Mesoamerican World

Cited by 9 publications

References 94 publications

Of Revenue Without Rulers: Public Goods in the Egalitarian Cities of the Indus Civilization

Of Revenue Without Rulers: Public Goods in the Egalitarian Cities of the Indus Civilization

Five Thousand Years of Inequality in the Carpathian Basin

Understanding and calculating household size, wealth, and inequality in the Maya Lowlands

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