Responses

Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, Texas 78249, USA ([email protected]). 2 IV 24

Comparative studies encourage us to reflect on how or why some societies follow similar developmental trajectories in an effort to render a broader view of human history. In comparing Formative Peruvian and Copper Age Iberian societies, the authors propose that early regional organizations with exceptionally large monumental landscapes (“central-place systems”) began as community-dominated institutions created through collective action (CA) and were later co-opted by leaders who transformed them into elite-dominated regional institutions—that is, political economies (PEs). They also suggest that these PE institutions eventually collapsed because of elite overreach, but not before they shaped a framework for future political centralization (the “ratchet effect”). They propose that this evolutionary trajectory is a result of the dialectical relationship between CA and PE processes that oscillate in dominance. This is a thought-provoking and valuable analysis, and their evidence for how bottom-up and top-down processes articulate is a major contribution—something that anthropological studies too often ignore when privileging one perspective (top-down or bottom-up) over the other. In my commentary below, I seek greater clarity on certain points while recognizing that not all of them could have been addressed at the scale of the analysis performed. Many inquiries emerge from my perspective as an archaeologist of the Andes.

First, I take issue with how CA is given a somewhat supporting role in the development of the societies examined. CA is correctly identified as capable of organizing large-scale monuments and regional institutions. But once elites are observed to have “flipped the coin” toward PE, CA appears again in the evolutionary sequence only as a force for or evidence of “collapse.” Similarly, the authors categorize early CA institutions as precursors. The categories we assign to ancient people matter, and I would like to leave more room for collective and community-oriented institutions to be seen as mature social forms in their own right, not simply as precursors, disrupters, or outcomes of collapse. In this vein, I find the assertion that in CA-dominant societies the “rules of cooperation functioned when political coercion was ineffectual” a woefully limiting way to describe how and why people choose to build decentralized institutions. Even if imperfect analogs, examples of socially complex but politically decentralized societies (e.g., Angelbeck and Grier 2012) may serve as helpful fodder for thinking through challenging archaeological data, such as the evidence from Early Formative Casma for exclusive residential spaces but no strong indication of elites themselves.

I echo the appeal made by McAnanay and Yoffee (2009a) that we carefully consider what is at risk when we identify societies as outcomes of collapse. I recognize that the authors use the term to trace why and how traditions of monumentality and ritual ended, but I see the potential here for a slight reframing: when elites co-opt a CA institution to establish a PE, they may initiate a process of social erosion that leads to collapse precisely because the institutions they seek to control were designed to serve a collective, not individual interests. I do not say this simply to be provocative; I think that it would be a productive way to examine the CA-PE processes the authors are interested in.

I also think that it is possible that we are looking at a much more interesting coexistence of overlapping CA and PE institutions in Casma than the metaphor-based model of flipping the coin allows for. For example, the evidence from Las Haldas suggests that some Early Formative ritual centers may have been recognized as nonelite spaces; further evidence for this may lie in the persistence of Las Haldas rituals during the subsequent period of “collapse.” These data seem to complicate the view that Las Haldas was one of several second-tier centers serving a three-tiered settlement hierarchy. Furthermore, I am not fully convinced that Casma elites provided irrigation as a service. After all, ample ethnographic and archaeological evidence supports that large-scale irrigation systems can be organized through CA (e.g., see Carballo, Roscoe, and Feinman 2014; Erickson 2006; Ostrom 1990), and the location of Casma temples in irrigation zones could be because of the central role of ritual in organizing these tasks among a collectivity.

At the outset of the paper, ritual is presented as a powerful mode of practice in the lives of ancient people and as a framework for theorizing the past. But some statements about monument building and ritual having “offered … social drama in … routine lives while simultaneously creating opportunities for control by emergent elites” cast ritual as little more than a diversion for the everyday farmer. Moreover, the authors do not inquire into who the elites were that co-opted early CA institutions. Were they skilled shamans who were essential to ritual success, or were they simply charismatic individuals with political acumen? This seems important to consider before theorizing how individuals co-opted ritual—and whether it counts as co-opting or something else entirely.

This leads me to ask: How do distinct ontological underpinnings, specifically the human-thing relationships that shaped how people interacted with monuments in different societies, implicate different kinds of political action (see Bauer and Kosiba 2016)? Do the mechanisms, pathways, or possibilities for elite control change if the monuments in question are persons? The authors discuss “dependency relationships of debt and obligation,” but these relationships are identified only between people and their leaders, diminishing other relationships of obligation, such as those Andean people had with powerful nonhuman beings, be they mountains or temples. What if refurbishing a temple—that is, the very practices that produced monumentality—was the paramount ritual act, performed as part of a relationship of care for and reciprocity with a mound being? All such possibilities implicate a set of practices with social, political, and material outcomes. But they require incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing and feminist Andean scholarship (e.g., de la Cadena 2015; Rivera Cusicanqui 2023, inter alia).

Not all of my questions can be answered definitively using existing archaeological data. Yet I believe that our search for cross-cultural patterns can be strengthened by centering how the people we seek to understand experienced and shaped meaning in the world.

Department of Anthropology, Boston University, 675 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA ([email protected]). 19 XII 23

This article makes a significant contribution in seeking to better integrate two frameworks from broader social science literature through the comparative analysis of two intermediate (“chiefly”) societies in the archaeological record. I commend the authors for pooling data sets from their research in the coastal Andes and southern Iberia to better illustrate points of convergence and divergence. While I agree with their central thesis that “multiple pathways to complexity exist … building monumental landscapes structured by ritual offered people social drama in their routine lives while simultaneously creating opportunities for control by emergent elites,” my own perspectives on the articulation between these frameworks and the tensions between social integration and differentiation that manifested in early built environments for public ritual differ slightly. I offer thoughts on other means of reconciling political economy (PE) and collective action (CA) frameworks within the context of larger-scale societies documented archaeologically, drawing on some examples from my own study region.

If conceptual models of societal organization, such as PE and CA, represent metaphorical tools in our interpretive toolbox, possessing the right tool for a particular interpretive task benefits from having a diverse selection to draw from or, as social scientists, we are merely armed with the proverbial hammer, seeing only nails. Social theory frameworks have long placed variable emphasis on coercion versus voluntarism, “push” versus “pull” motivations, hierarchical versus heterarchical bases of power, and related poles along such axes. PE models, historically tethered to the nineteenth-century social theory of Marx and others, tended to characterize the sociopolitical organization of early intermediate- and large-scale societies in exploitative terms, but they are inadequate in capturing the variability represented in cases from the archaeological and historical records documented in the century and a half since. From its elaboration as a coherent body of theory in the 1960s to its recent comparative applications to archaeological and historical cases (e.g., Blanton and Fargher 2008; Carballo 2013a), CA theory has offered a productive, interdisciplinary framework for expanding PE by considering generative processes that emerge when people act as contingent cooperators to manage and access resources, contribute to fiscal financing, and advocate politically.

CA research, therefore, often has overlapping interests with traditional research on PE, but it is free from the latter’s more unilinear trajectories of increasing coercion and despotism, assumed to come with increasing societal scale. Critically, CA operates across nested social scales—ranging from a few cooperating households to political confederations between large states. Half a century ago, Renfrew, Todd, and Tringham (1974) questioned the artificial boundary between voluntaristic chiefdoms and coercive states by proposing an axis of sociopolitical variability between individualizing and group-oriented chiefdoms, later generalized to other societies with those possessing more of a group orientation “capable of significant collective action” (Renfrew 2001:103). As Stanish et al. note, citing Levi (1988), systems of fiscal financing (an issue firmly within PE) can be correlated with, or even determinative of, the degrees of CA and public-good allocation based on whether fiscal streams are grounded more in staple goods and labor provided internally by members of a society, or more in wealth goods and spot resources acquired by leaders externally through elite exchange networks, monopolization of scarce acquisition zones, war booty, or other measures. Leaders are, therefore, not absent in CA approaches—in fact, they are observable even in relatively egalitarian settings, if only situationally (Glowaki and von Rueden 2015)—and the differences in these frameworks are not simply “bottom-up” CA and “top-down” PE. Rather, CA frameworks deal with issues of PE in a way that allows for consideration of the motivations and agency of all social actors, not simply the most powerful.

When evaluating the monumental ritual precincts of early intermediate-scale societies, a CA approach may therefore consider the formal attributes and accessibility of these built environments in assessing degrees of collectivity, and relevant data for these cases are provided in tables S1 and S2. In Formative Period Central Mexico, many early ritual precincts encoded elements of both heterarchy and hierarchy, with open plazas accessible to all abutting elevated temple platforms accessible to a much smaller segment of the population (Carballo 2016). The mutual monitoring afforded by plazas and other spaces for large public gatherings and the differential access to ritual spaces provide important lines of reasoning to gauge degrees of collectivity and parse whether rituals engendered solidarity or distinctions. Relevant iconography and monuments designed to distinguish powerful individuals or groups also represent important lines of reasoning in CA frameworks, as do calculations of the carrying capacities of various spaces and visibility indexes within them.

Applied to these two cases, I imagine that Sechín Alto’s 41-hectare plaza could have accommodated the population of the Casma Valley several times over. Do the authors envision its huaca complex to have been highly restricted in access, or would its acropolis-like formation have allowed for access by larger groups, yet not the entire population of the settlement? And it is often erroneously assumed that militaristic iconography, like the depictions in Sechín, is characteristic of less collectively organized societies, when mutual defense or offense is often one of the primary drivers of CA. In the Iberian cases, impressive megalithic complexes like the Dolmen of Menga would have accommodated fewer participants in the interior, but the authors propose ritual practices relating to more unifying cosmological principles rather than elaborate burials. Even the monumental tombs of the period seem to emphasize mortuary collectivism and can be unifying in that everyone has ancestors, rather than making mortuary distinctions that celebrate particular individuals or lineages over others. Here, the distinction between sites in the Antequera versus Sevilla regions likely has more to do with the natural trade artery of the latter and the ability of local elites to gain exclusionary access to spot resources such as metals or ivory, as the authors note. Rather than the Antequera region representing more of a CA model and the Sevilla region representing more of a PE model, I would argue that both can fit within a unified framework drawing on the insights of each to consider variability in sociopolitical organization and ritual.

Negaunee Integrative Research Center, Field Museum of Natural History, 1400 South DuSable Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60605, USA ([email protected]). 19 XII 23

In 1984, Bruce Trigger (1984:275) declared “Archaeology at the Crossroads,” flush with debate, fractionalization, and discussion concerning how to reconcile volumes of recent material findings with extant conceptual perspectives. Now, 40 years beyond this prescient essay, the state of contemporary theory in archaeology and its juxtaposition with a tsunami of new empirical discoveries and synthetic compilations is more like a sclerotic bottleneck. Over the past seven decades, a bevy of new field techniques (compositional analyses, ancient DNA, lidar), along with new electronic tools for data storage, manipulation, and synthesis; new scalar vantages in the field (e.g., systematic regional surveys and household archaeology); and a more fully global scope for field projects, have contributed to a massive influx of information at the same time that the quality and documentation of that information have also tended to be finer. At point, the two regional cases in focus here, the Formative Period in the Casma Valley of Peru and Copper Age Iberia (Guadalquivir), have rarely before received key roles in comparative narratives and investigation. Yet while the quality, quantity, geographical breadth, and multidimensionality of archaeological data are achieving new heights, the effective harnessing and dissemination of those findings to provide more global perspectives on humankind’s collective past are stymied by conceptual inertia (Park, Leahey, and Funk 2023), which concretizes assumptions and categorical distinctions drawn from long-entrenched theoretical frameworks (e.g., Feinman 2023; Feinman and Neitzel 2020). Here, in commenting on this essay, which seems betwixt in a conceptual shift, I illustrate both inferential breakthroughs and the potential clarifications and refinements warranted in regard to lingering frameworks and presumptions.

Grounded in empirical content, Stanish et al. compare and contrast the two aforementioned historical sequences at a millennial scale beginning before the advent of sedentary life and through the construction (and then cessation) of monumental construction episodes. By starting to decouple a suite of attributes often glossed categorically as “social complexity,” the authors’ principal contribution is the recognition that massive collaborative construction efforts were undertaken in each region at times when there was no indication of ostentatious or aggrandizing leadership or explicit interpersonal coercion. Here, they productively part company with the notion that people are innately selfish, willing to collaborate only when forced from the top down (e.g., Carneiro 1970). In lieu, they offer collective action harnessed through ritual as the chief mechanism for cooperation. They also productively note that the episodes of monumental building were economically underpinned principally by agrarian or staple finance (D’Altroy and Earle 1985), and they recognize that leadership and small status differences were present (e.g., at death), although these distinctions were muted.

Globally, the two focal cases parallel other cooperative labor investments in massive ritual structures at Göbekli Tepe (Dietrich et al. 2012), Poverty Point (Grooms, Ward, and Kidder 2023), Hopewell (Miller 2021), and Aguada Fénix (Inomata et al. 2020), in contexts in which explicit personalized status display or indications of concentrated political power were not present. The recent report of a mobile Paleolithic population in Siberia constructing a fortification seems to offer a further example (Piezonka et al. 2023) of cooperation without top-down enforcement, although defense and not ritual may have been the impetus for cooperation.

In the Guadalquivir case, the authors tie the shift away from monument building to the increasing role of long-distance exchange (wealth finance) and the emergence of more expressed distinctions in political power and its economic underpinnings. They describe this shift as an oscillation to more monopolized control of resources and greater expressions of inequality, which they see as a manifestation of a political economy framework in which coercion always was a factor. The seeming inference is that whereas collective action, staple finance, muted power, and cohesive ritual are key forces in middle-range societies (as seen in the two focal cases), political economy, monopolized resources, and more expressed, concentrated power (coercion) were more explicitly expressed at scale, in states.

If I am interpreting their inference correctly, it not only somewhat misreads collective action theory as amplified by Margaret Levi (1988) and Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher (2008), who explicitly considered variability in the fiscal financing of governance, but also discounts that globally, many preindustrial urban societies (states) were organized through distributive power arrangements without personalized power or a high degree of coercion (e.g., Blanton and Fargher 2008; Feinman and Carballo 2018). For example, Teotihuácan had leaders, but power was distributed and not highly personalized (Carballo 2020), and such a perspective certainly does not put one in league with the notion that stratification was entirely absent. At the alternative end of this scale, the argument has been made that if the key resources that fund leadership and governing institutions can be monopolized by a select few (external resources) at scales larger than hundreds (Feinman and Neitzel 2023), they can finance degrees of concentrated power. At relatively low demographic densities, such practices have been found for the middle-range societies of the European Bronze Age, as one of the authors of this paper has amply discussed (e.g., Earle 2021).

Although the authors expressly recognize that regional histories have taken different paths, the seeming effort to linearize and categorize a transition from collective action to political economy is more than a semantic issue. Such a perspective reinforces a stepwise view that societal transformations conform to a uniform path (Sahlins and Service 1960) in which leadership transitions from “system serving” to “self-serving.” Are the authors trying to imply that the role of ritual is generally cohesive and most relevant in smaller-scale social contexts? Such views are clearly at odds with what we now know about different ritual behaviors, the ways that they foster and reinforce social ties, and how they vary not just with scale, but in relation to degrees of concentrated power and the institutions of governance (Feinman 2016, 2020). If archaeology is to contribute to a truly global history, then we must move beyond the long-held myths, presumptions, categories, and dichotomies that have structured the discipline since its academic inception. Those notions were heavily grounded in synchronic cases that were pyramided into an imagined past steeped in the biases of Eurocentrism (see Blanton et al. 2022; Feinman 2023). Cases such as those outlined here are yielding new empirical vistas characterized by nonuniform, winding paths that bring us to the present. Understanding and drawing comparative insights from this historical variability requires a theoretical structure more aligned with other historical sciences (e.g., Mayr 1982; Savage 2021), one that aims to define probabilities and processes rather than categorical stages and universal sequences.

Departamento Académico de Humanidades, Sección Arqueología, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Avenida Universitaria 1801, San Miguel 15088, Lima, Perú ([email protected]). 4 I 24

The article “Early Monumentality, Ritual, and Political Complexity: Formative Peru and Copper Age Iberia” by Stanish, Earle, García Sanjuán, Tantaleán, and Barrientos discusses the role of ritual during early political formations by comparing the Andean societies of the Casma Valley and the Iberian developments of the Guadalquivir Valley. The article proposes to use these case studies to answer a classic Marxist question: how people in egalitarian societies embraced hierarchy in the service of the community while unintentionally creating the social and material conditions for their exploitation. For the authors, the answer lies in ritual. They propose that these early societies were unstable and oscillated in scale and structure, yet ritual was the pivoting element that allowed for the emergence of incipient hierarchies that capitalized their social power through monuments and ritualized ceremonies.

The idea that ritual provides the venue to control the means of production is not new, yet the authors propose to explore this process by aligning two classically opposed models of social interpretation: collective action and political economy, as “two sides of the same coin,” with the aim to create a “unified economic, anthropological approach.” Their view is that early political formations started as collectives with unstable leaderships and no settled hierarchies yet, as with investment in ritual paraphernalia, monumentality in the Casma Valley, or a wealth economy in the Guadalquivir Valley; then leaderships turned into elite groups that harnessed political power through ritual.

The comparative nature of the article, the “necessity” of developing anthropological models, the use of social complexity theory, and its proposal to create a unified economic, anthropological approach present very openly the theoretical stance of the authors: the use of anthropological models based on deductive reasoning, albeit using a relatively nuanced approach that merges two classic, opposing views. Personally, I gravitate toward an inductive approach that allows contextualized evidence to lead interpretations and views the use of generalizing anthropological models as problematic since they tend to homogenize past social processes into general comparative categories that obscure the heterogeneity and wide variety of past social formations and processes, as well as human experience and agency.

While we have opposing theoretical stances, I think that there are interesting elements in the authors’ proposal. Their argument stresses that early regional formations were characterized by instability and oscillations in structure and size and that elite groups were in a constant struggle to maintain their position. Within this context, ritual becomes key in the dialectic between cooperation and social differentiation. I coincide with the authors in their view of change within these societies as small and accumulative, which resulted in structural transformations at certain inflection points. While this argument shows the authors’ view as flexible and bottom-up, at points the article turns to more rigid anthropological categories. For instance, while the article acknowledges that monuments could have originated from cooperative action, they equate the maintenance of ritual monumentality or a wealth economy with the presence of a ruling elite and the formation of a hierarchical social structure. While I agree that leaderships, possibly with a strong religious emphasis, must have developed, the existence of governing elites, even if in oscillation, is not mandatory to maintain ritual monumental structures. An alternative scenario shows evidence for interacting groups within a close network that maintains and sustains monumental centers, forgoing the idea of one controlling elite group. For instance, my research in a monumental settlement in the Andean south-central coast shows the coexistence of monumentality, ritual, and communal social organization (Fernandini Parodi and Varillas 2023). In these contexts, we have identified what the authors describe as a complex society, yet their social organization revolves around social differentiation, rather than social hierarchies. Recent contextual (Fernandini Parodi and Varillas 2023), dietary (González Gómez de Agüero 2022), and bioarchaeological (Sanchez Lozada 2023) research shows that the inhabitants of the settlement of Cerro de Oro lived within a highly planned settlement, developed an elaborated irrigation system in the surrounding lands, and systematically organized the procurement, distribution, and storage of resources, yet they did so with no apparent social hierarchies or elite groups co-opting people’s labor and surpluses. Rather, we find that this society presented a communal organization where social differences were centered on cultural and possibly ethnic practices, rather than on social hierarchies. Following this line, equating the creation and maintenance of monumentality or even the notion of social complexity with hierarchy or the presence of elites is not always the case, as is exemplified by the above reference, as well as by other Andean case studies.

The authors also argue that since there are no direct ethnographic analogies for “intermediate” societies centered on ritual monumentality, then “we are left only with archaeological evidence and the necessity to develop models based on theoretical inferences.” This argument implies that archaeological evidence must be understood within the framework of theoretical models in the absence of direct ethnohistoric or ethnographic analogies; nevertheless, there is ample evidence from ethnographic and ethnohistoric cases that informs us regarding key ontological elements from both Andean and Iberian societies that persist throughout time, even if they do not represent direct analogies. This notion of an ontological longue durée has been presented by one of the authors in a recent volume on Andean ontologies (Lozada and Tantaleán 2019). Specifically, this publication argues for the necessity of exploring ontological issues when analyzing prehispanic contexts from the deep past, emphasizing how certain notions such as the importance of a sacred geography, myths, pilgrimage, oracles, the absence of land rights and property, ritual, and exchange need to be included in our interpretation of Andean contexts from the past.

Finally, I go back to the authors’ initial claim: that ritual allowed people in egalitarian societies to embrace hierarchy in the service of the community while unintentionally creating the social and material conditions for their exploitation. I coincide with the authors that this is highly possible and even likely, yet what the authors have not shown through their article is that the monuments in the Casma Valley or the wealth economy of the Guadalquivir region was necessarily immersed within a hierarchical society with elites controlling the means of production. Instead, examples like Cerro de Oro show the possibility of societies building and maintaining monumental ritual structures and a complex economic system within a context of social differentiation, rather than within hierarchies. I believe that these contexts are much more common that we think, especially in the Andes, yet the excessive reliance on anthropological models places a homogenizing blanket over evidence, rendering invisible the heterogeneity of social formations from the past.

Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 607 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA ([email protected]). 26 XII 23

In this important work, Stanish, Earle, García Sanjuán, Tantaleán, and Barrientos show the undoubtable fact that sociopolitical interactions are diverse and complex. The authors focus on the fluidity of different types of engagement, in this case collective action (CA; “bottom-up group problem-solving”) and political economy (PE; “top-down control”). These two models of the evolution of political complexity intersect in that not all CA systems transform into PE ones and all PE systems are not possible without CA. And I agree with their claim that there are dynamic and oscillating cycles between decentralization and centralization. But how does this process occur? They “propose that monumentality attracted a regional population and provided elites with opportunities to develop institutional structures of power (essentially property rights) associated with ritual places in broader landscapes.” Political elites organize constructions and rituals in PE systems, while elites distinguished by their wealth and status organize them in CA ones.

I do not completely agree, however, with their statement that “ritual was not the only pathway to complexity, but it consistently correlates with early complexity around the world.” Ritual is not a means to acquire power over others per se, but rather a physical, interactive process necessary for any political machinations, no matter what their emerging power is based on (agricultural surplus, control over water, regulating trade and markets, etc.; Bloch 1987; Hocart 1970 [1936]; Kertzer 1988). Central monumental places are indeed vital, but even more vital are the associated integrative rituals that take place in their environs. Ritual is crucial in any political process because it promotes solidarity and conveys information through traditional or familiar rituals writ large that integrate people (Lucero 2003, 2006). And while “permanent monumental landscapes … appear to have formed with institutionalized regional societies,” they served as settings for integrative events—that is, rituals. In fact, in many ways ritual stages (e.g., open spaces or plazas) are more important for political purposes than buildings. In fact, “the plaza … may be seen as a socially and ritually charged field about which buildings were built” (Ringle and Bey 2001:278–279; emphasis in original).

Monumentality implies “capacities to organize and mobilize workforces,” but in the chronological scheme of things, building monumental constructions is a relatively fleeting moment (even with rebuilding or expanding) when compared with the numerous ritual events that take place within or outside in open spaces to build and maintain long-term relations with clients (CA) or subjects (PE). Building religious and ceremonial constructions together promotes solidarity during the actual construction; ritual does the same but in the longer term because of the consistency and frequency of diverse ceremonies and messages (promoting fertility, prosperity, political messages, etc.). In other words, while mobilizing workforces takes organization, effort, and planning, the more enduring impacts of ceremonies in honor of ancestors, gods, celestial events, seasonality, and political life events (e.g., marriage, alliances, etc.), as well as their purpose as settings for markets, performances, games, and so on, have greater political significance.

To appreciate the scale of such public integrative events, monumental volumes are essential. However, when discussing how many people elites and emerging leaders reached and integrated in the process of, for example, transforming long-term patron-client relationships into PE ones (i.e., tribute), the authors should also consider the public spaces where congregants gathered, participated, and were noncoercively persuaded to support CA and PE systems. For these systems to endure, continual negotiation via more public rituals is required, which is why it is critical to understand the building of “stages,” how the stages were used (and how frequently), and how many people or potential subjects leaders could integrate at any given time. For example, using the plaza capacities proposed by Inomata (2006), we can estimate the number of possible participants in any given area or space, which goes a long way toward appreciating the scale of sociopolitical systems—the larger the audience, the more people elites can reach. For example, of the two sites for which the authors provided the dimensions of open spaces (in this case, plazas), there is a noticeable difference in capacity (see table 4).

Finally, to address the issue of equifinality between CA and PE monumentality and ritual, a consistent discussion of the density and proximity of people would be useful. How far are the residential settlements from monumental and public spaces? Are they dispersed or dense? Were they semipermanent (seasonal) or permanent? I am thinking here of Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triaden’s recent work in the Olmec-Maya Gulf Coast area of Mexico, where they and their team found massive preurban integrative monumental constructions. For instance, Aguada Fénix in Tabasco, Mexico, built from ca. 1000 to 800 BCE, is a massive “artificial platform” (1,400 m in length, 10–15 m tall) with nine associated causeways where Inomata et al. (2020) suggest that dispersed Maya farmers came together to work, celebrate, share knowledge, exchange goods, meet potential mates, worship, and so on. And the presence of different kinds of construction soils suggests that people from several communities helped to build Aguada Fénix—that is, there was a regional, organized, communal effort bringing them together when agriculture was less demanding. Political leaders were unnecessary to carry out this major achievement, as hypothesized at Stonehenge, Göbekli Tepe, Poverty Point, and other comparable places. To conclude, monumental settings are stages around which people perform and participate, with political consequences.

In the Garden of Anomalous Giants

Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, 301 Alumni Building, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3115, USA ([email protected]). 3 I 24

There is something in the water or the air—likely the latter, and no doubt influenced by the current political atmosphere, which tilts toward authoritarianism. Regardless of the origin of the impulse, a major transformation in the way that archaeologists theorize and model societal change is upon us. This change deals with how and why people come together to form large-group aggregations—often to build ritual structures on a monumental scale. Many archaeologists are stepping back to pose a question: To what extent is or was the inherently political process of “gathering” driven by collective action, authoritarian ambition, or some combination of the two?

In independent fashion, archaeologists are coming to this critical juncture from different standpoints. Some have realized that archaeological evidence does not fit current neo-evolutionary scenarios (i.e., evidence of coming together is not always matched by indicators of political centralization). Others point to tired and ineffective classificatory schemes that simply will not die. Yet others propose new theoretical framings that elbow into oblivion the older ontological ladder of societal change that inevitably placed the West above the rest.

Stanish et al. point to the undertheorization of what Roland Fletcher has called “anomalous giants”—archaeological sites that are much larger and earlier than current classification permits. What should they be called? How were they formed? Why did some endure for millennia, while others were more ephemeral? In a 2023 issue of the Journal of Urban Archaeology, archaeologists journey to this edge of archaeological understanding to consider cases from West and East Africa, China, Vietnam, Ukraine, Europe, the Andes, and the United States (for more discussion, see Kim and McAnany [2023], “Experimenting with Large Group Aggregation”).

Coevally, Justin Jennings (2016) has pointed out the lingering problems with the concept of civilization, which arguably was reified in archaeological thinking after Lewis Henry Morgan’s formulation of Ancient Society—first published in 1877 and subtitled Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization. Nearly 150 years later, the idea of civilization (also called the state) as the pinnacle of human social complexity continues to influence archaeological research and undeniably looms large in popular culture. Jennings (2016:3) argues persuasively that this malingering influence affects adversely our ability to understand the process of aggregating into and splitting from urban formations.

When archaeologists discovered Elinor Ostrom’s (1990) Nobel Prize–winning work on collective action theory, it provided one pathway out of this epistemological bind (see Blanton and Fargher 2008 for an early example). Ostrom’s cases exist in the contemporary world, which is carved into nation-states, and demonstrate how horizontal forms of economic cooperation and governance can exist alongside hierarchy. Countering the “tragedy of the commons” mantra, Ostrom showed that organization need not be vertically structured to be effective, and in fact more cooperative forms of action were often more sustainable. In reference to archaeology, it is clear that searching for the earliest kings as indicators of complexity is not always relevant to the processes of aggregation that played out in the past. In sporting, iconoclastic style, David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021) attacked the same shibboleth. Drawing on historical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence, they argue that humans have not marched in lockstep toward authoritarian forms of rulership, a premise that lurks behind neo-evolutionary theory.

Now, Stanish et al. tackle the presence of early monumentality—and how it can precede evidence of social hierarchy and wealth differentiation—in coastal Peru and Iberia. Comparing two vastly separated regions, their study combines traditional evolutionary approaches with collective action theory to interesting effect. In accordance with the “plateau” or punctuated equilibrium model of change, periods of transformation are characterized as “unstable” and, therefore, less desirable. Seated within the logic of this study is the Marxist notion that communities (read “workers”) unintentionally create the social and material conditions of their exploitation, in this case by agreeing to collective action projects that culminate in monumental architecture. These massive structures provided a stage for the ritual practice that undergirds community identity, meaning making, and solidarity while also providing opportunities to consolidate authority amid a newly differentiated landscape.

The so-called intermediate-scale societies invoked in this study experience novel landscapes in different ways at varying points in time. Appearing to oscillate between horizontal structures of collective action and more vertical mechanisms of political economy, societies are transformed over time. In a veiled reference to game theory, Stanish et al. suggest that such transformation occurred in a random fashion analogous to a coin toss. In the Casma Valley of Peru, Late Archaic monumentality (with no evidence of burial or wealth differentiation) gave way to Early Formative polities featuring a hierarchy of central places that lasted about 700 years. In Late Neolithic Iberia, participation in the megalithic tradition meant cooperative labor to transport massive stones (the weight of one stone exceeded 170 tons). Despite (or perhaps because of) the coordinated effort required to quarry and move such stones, wealth differentiation is not detectable in mortuary offerings. The following Copper Age, however, is a different story. Emergent trade networks delivered wealth items that were unevenly distributed across the burial population.

Significantly, conflict is not detectable amid the anomalous giants of Archaic Peru or Neolithic Iberia. But architectural, iconographic, and artifactual evidence of martial conflict is reported for later periods in both regions, suggesting that life revolving around collective action may have been a casualty of social conflict generated by expansive polities. As Guy Middleton (2012) has written, nothing lasts forever. To be more precise, no political formation endures ad infinitum. “Reformulation”—the term used by Stanish et al. to reference periods of political dynamism—became a leitmotif of subsequent gathering together to build or maintain colossal structures in these two regions. Critical periods of societal remodeling are more challenging for archaeologists to detect and decipher, although arguably, they are key to deeper comprehension. This comparative study, with its intricate detailing and eclectic theoretical framing, shows why use of the simplistic and totalizing term “collapse” is insufficient for advancing our understanding of impactful and long-term oscillations among human cooperation, authoritarian impulses, and martial conflict.

Exceptions Do Not Prove the Rule

Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, Tampa, Florida 33620-8100, USA ([email protected]). 29 XII 23

Stanish et al. argue that “intermediate-scale societies (chiefdoms)” are “inherently unstable,” owing to oscillations between bottom-up collective action and political economy organizations (the former limiting the actions of leaders, the latter enabling leaders to exercise control); ritual, especially as it is exercised in monumental architecture, is conceived as the “evolutionary ratchet” responsible for the “scalar jump in size and complexity” that separates chiefdoms such as these from the “hunter-forager or small village societies” that preceded them. To the authors’ credit, their article forced me to consider and reconsider some of my core understandings; at the same time, however, I found myself disagreeing with many of the key premises, from basic definitions to broader concepts.

Beginning with basic definitions, the authors’ use of “intermediate societies” as a synonym for “chiefdoms” is problematic. Earle (1987) wrote that “chiefdoms are intermediate societies, providing an evolutionary bridge between acephalous societies and bureaucratic states” (279). But this is a long bridge, and the fact that the converse does not hold is clear in both the original formulations of the term “intermediate societies” by ethnologists (e.g., Casagrande 1959) and its later applications by archaeologists (see contributions to Arnold 1996; McIntosh 1999). This imprecision seems unimportant until it serves to underwrite the generalization of a large swath of human societies as “inherently unstable.” Relatedly, in terms of mobilization of labor, the case studies Stanish et al. describe as chiefdoms seem to represent the upper limits to which this term has historically been applied. Why not call them states? Presumably because of a lack of elite burials or residences and the presence of regional political organizations, but few today would argue that these are prerequisites for states (Green 2021; Kowalewski 2013; Thompson and Birch 2018). Selective emphasis on a few of the defining characteristics of evolutionary types merely highlights the arbitrary nature of these categories.

Conceptually, I do not doubt the oscillations Stanish et al. describe or dispute the basis of these in the tension between collective and exclusionary institutions. Many authors have described these tensions before, as reviewed and further elaborated by DeMarrais and Earle (2017:193–195). But the authors’ characterization of these tensions as “dialectical” (i.e., as contradictory forces to be overcome) strikes me as oversimplified. As Blanton et al. (2021) illustrate, they are embedded in institutions that may be opposed but are often overlapping—arguably more dialogic than dialectic.

I see such tensions as long-standing and not necessarily resulting in either instability or a ratcheting up of “improvements” to greater social complexity. Here, I point to research by other colleagues and me on another “monumentalized landscape”: the Gulf Coast of the Southeast United States across the first millennium CE. In the past, archaeologists described these Woodland period societies as chiefdoms or even states (Sears 1956), owing mainly to an investment in public architecture. This included platform mounds of mainly modest (<4 m tall) size, but in several cases much larger (Pluckhahn, Jackson, and Rogers 2022; Pluckhahn and Thompson 2018; Wallis, McFadden, and Singleton 2015), and in one case more than 17 m tall and encompassing an estimated 50,000 m³ of fill (Pluckhahn 2003:193)—exceeding many of the later Mississippian period mounds in the region, as well as many of the mounds at the second-order centers described by Stanish et al. These civic-ceremonial centers also included plazas, some capable of holding many times the resident population. They also invariably included one or two burial mounds, often containing symbolically charged objects made of extralocal materials. Finally, provenance studies indicate that these early villages were linked together in translocal communities stretching hundreds of kilometers (Wallis and Pluckhahn 2023).

The investment in public ritual was substantial and must have incorporated many of the same tensions described by Stanish et al. (Pluckhahn 2010). Yet our research indicates that these intermediate societies were not “inherently unstable” but instead endured across three or four centuries, a longevity that we have suggested was abetted by the use of public ritual to mediate conflict and reinforce social norms of cooperation (Pluckhahn and Thompson 2018). These societies also did not ratchet up to higher levels of sociopolitical complexity “with relatively little loss or backward slippage”; when civic-ceremonial centers across the region eventually waned around 700 or 800 CE, there was a gap of several centuries before monumentalism reemerged in the Mississippian period (Pluckhahn, Wallis, and Thompson 2020).

What accounts for these differences from their case studies? Presumably, the authors would say that emergent elites here and in other areas they cite as exceptions (Poverty Point, Göbekli Tepe, etc.) were unable to establish “property rights” over ritual spaces. But with so many exceptions, and with a mechanism so seemingly reliant on human agency, why are we to believe that this was an evolutionary—rather than historical—process? Models of social evolution that proceed in hindsight from the vantage of later states tend to see inevitability where there is always contingency. The variability in monumental landscapes that Stanish et al. offer in conclusion may be the rule rather than the exception.

We thank our colleagues for their insights and observations. Political economy (PE) and collective action (CA) have been considered as competing frameworks, as Fernandini Parodi rightly notes. To understand change and variability in premodern human societies, our paper is a modest attempt to bridge these analytical mechanisms via ritualized social organizations.

We believe that ritual organization is central to connecting this divide. While we hedge a bit, deep down most of us agree with Lucero, who boldly states that “ritual is … a physical, interactive process necessary for any political machinations, no matter what their emerging power is based on” (emphasis added). Ritual structures social life. This structuring process is particularly strong in demographically smaller-scale societies organized by CA. These structures can be modified and manipulated as societies increase in demographic scale and complexity with emerging competitive interest groups. It is in these contexts that nascent elites could sometimes co-opt ritual activities to their advantage, initiating an oscillating dialectic that, we believe, is reflected in monumental architecture.

Using theory developed by Ostrom, it has been proposed that CA can function up to a threshold of ca. 500 people (Stanish 2023). To address both Bria’s and Pluckhahn’s observations, CA-organized societies are quite stable at or below this population level; however, as McAnany points out, the largest monuments are what White and Fletcher (2023) aptly refer to as “anomalous giants,” well beyond this population threshold. Societies that are significantly larger require formal institutions that can then be exploited by nascent PE organizations. One can imagine a few autonomous groups in the same valley, each under that threshold, interacting at substantial monuments, but it would likely be highly unstable, as the archaeological record shows.

Pluckhahn correctly points out that we fail to clearly differentiate among scales of intermediate societies. He does point out that the case studies used “seem to represent the upper limits to which this term has historically been applied.” This is correct. These case studies would be the anomalous giants in the archaeological record for which we have little or no ethnographic analogies. The vast majority of intermediate societies are far smaller and less complex than we envision for our case studies.

To repeat, most intermediate-level formations were quite low scale and stable, and we believe that this was the “default” social organization of the Early and Middle Holocene, when demographic densities were higher than in most hunter-gatherer contexts but smaller than in these case studies. But scale matters. In general, organizational instability increases as scale increases. The monumental North American sites cited by Pluckhahn are quite impressive, but with the exception of Kolomoki in Georgia, which has more than 50,000 m³ of fill, they are quite modest by Mesoamerican or Andean standards. One quick comparative example is the virtually unknown Paracas site of Santa Rosa in the Chincha Valley of southern Peru, which is estimated to have 1,000,000 m³ in construction volume. Two other more modest Paracas monuments in the valley have 600,000 and 300,000 m³ each, while the relatively small site of Huaca Soto Este has a mere 140,000 m³ (Canziani 2009, 2013:26). Cahokia and Poverty Point in North America are truly anomalous giants, and sites like Moundville come close. Pluckhahn wonders why we do not just call them states. A theorist can define a state any way that they want for analytical purposes. If sites with buildings with more than 100,000 m³ of construction fill define states, then there would be more than 100 states in the Andes before Moche and substantially more in Mesoamerica before Teotihuácan. Although many are concerned with the origin of state societies, we take a different perspective, looking at states and chiefdoms as analytic types along a multistranded continuum of variability. These types are not inherently progressive. What we advocate is to focus on processes and not staged types; thus, analytically, it is useful to consider exceptionally monumentalized social formations as complex chiefdoms, looking at the processes that facilitated increasing organizational scale. Equally, it is possible to look at such extreme examples in terms of simplified state structures. Since our anomalous giants emerged from the political contexts of chiefdoms, we focus on them.

Bria critiques the idea that once elites are observed to have ”flipped the coin” toward PE, CA appears again in the evolutionary sequence only as a force for or evidence of collapse. The term “collapse” has been criticized extensively. Let us clarify. As larger-scale political structures are formed, they embed existing smaller-scale segments that maintain CA organizations. We are not talking about societal collapse. As McAnany and Yoffee (2009b) tell us, societal collapse is more a “human story … of survival and regeneration” (5). We are referencing only the cessation of constructing and maintaining monumental buildings. We feel that when people stop building monuments, abandon them, and allow them to crumble, this indicates the end of the sociocultural mechanisms that created those monuments in the first place. For us, the word “collapse” in reference to large buildings is culturally and value neutral, and quite appropriately so. The degree to which the end of monumental architecture represents meaningful social change is an open question for every area of the world.

Critically, such a collapse can be quite positive from the perspective of the bulk of society—a form of regeneration, in McAnany and Yoffee’s terms. It actually represents the end or limitation of the exploitative social relationships inherent in PE organizations and a reemphasis on noncoercive CA organizations. This position is consistent with Bria’s comment that “when elites co-opt a CA institution to establish a PE, they may initiate a process of social erosion that leads to collapse.” This collapse is an integral part of the processes that we describe. It is precisely what we expect in our model as nonelites assert their collective power to change society to their advantage, in opposition to ruling elites.

Pluckhahn wonders why we do not include historical contingency in our model. This is an important point and illustrates one of the central issues in current sociocultural evolutionary theory. We obviously had no time to delve into this theme here, but we can say that when historically contingent factors came together, the kind of evolutionary processes that we describe in premodern Peru and Spain took form. This is a dialectical process in which the interests of commoners and elites interact to create, on rare occasions, these anomalous giants. History creates the contexts for regional interaction (ratchets) that can promote the evolutionary process described here. There is no inevitability. Like the emergence of first-generation states, these are, in fact, quite rare, hence the adjective “anomalous.”

Carballo offers an important observation: “Critically, collective action operates across nested social scales—ranging from a few cooperating households to political confederations between large states.” We agree. What our article highlights is the dominant form of sociopolitical organization in any particular period. Even in modern, Western, market-dominant societies, we find numerous examples of CA among a plethora of social groups. This is consistent with McAnany’s comment that “horizontal forms of economic cooperation and governance can exist alongside hierarchy.” It is also consistent with Fernandini Parodi’s work that describes the coexistence of “monumentality, ritual, and communal social organization.” We furthermore maintain that PE mechanisms in their nascent forms are characteristically created out of CA contexts. An elite group that exists at the behest of the community in CA-dominated societies carries out a variety of activities that benefit the group as a whole. The ethnographic record of stable and smaller chiefly societies is replete with examples of noncoercive chiefs granted authority to ritually organize projects in the collective interest (Stanish 2017: chap. 4). In fact, if nascent PE institutions were not in some collective interest, it is difficult to explain how they could arise, retain legitimacy, and be sustained over the long term. Our model shows how these earlier institutions became co-opted by elites over time, became established for the benefit of the elite, and then ultimately oscillated to another CA organization for the benefit of the nonelite. Buildings may collapse, but a vigorous culture survives and thrives on a different set of organizing principles.

Carballo highlights a topic that we did not have time to discuss. Sechín Alto’s massive plazas and other architecture can be interpreted as containing both open and restricted architectural space. These contrasting spatial arrangements are depicted in our reconstructions (Tantaleán and Stanish 2023). Much more work needs to be completed at the site, but clearly, the massive plazas are open, while the elevated and covered buildings suggest restricted access. In this light, Lucero nicely points out that plaza areas should also be brought into the analysis alongside buildings. We agree with her observation and consider plazas to be part of the building complex, at least in the case studies that we use. Her calculations of the capacity of the plazas in the Peruvian case show how there was more than enough room to fit the entire estimated population of the valley. This was also noted by Pluckhahn.

The case study by Fernandini (2015), of Cerro de Oro, a community that developed between AD 550 and 900, is not one that negates our theoretical propositions. Cerro de Oro coexisted with the Wari state, an expansive polity. It would be an example of a CA-structured society that fits somewhere in our oscillation continuum. The settlement existed in a very complex political landscape that developed well after the first monuments were built. Her data nicely show that there are in fact societies that created large buildings without complex social hierarchies, something that we implicitly recognize in our article. Where this particular example fits within our cycling model is not clear, but we believe that it is quite compatible.

Feinman makes relevant points, but, at the outset, we disagree with the characterization that our “perspective reinforces a stepwise view that societal transformations conform to a uniform path.” Central to our theoretical frame is the concept of oscillations and balances between different organizational scales. Oscillations over time are inherently nonlinear, not stepwise, and certainly do not constitute a predetermined, uniform pathway. It is precisely the opposite. Likewise, the entire concept of an evolutionary ratchet is historically context dependent and precipitated by unpredictable initial conditions. To characterize our model as composed of “categorical stages and universal sequences” is puzzling. We chose two case studies that illustrate a process that can explain a narrow but dramatic fraction of world prehistory. Monuments were built in hunter-gatherer societies such as Göbekli Tepe, in states, and in societies at scales in between. Many complex societies did not build large monuments. There is nothing inevitable here with these two variables, either correlative or causal. To imply that ours is a universal stage typology formulation is wrong. Lucero clearly understands this when she comments, “These two models of the evolution of political complexity intersect in that not all CA systems transform into PE ones.” When they do emerge, however, we provide an interpretative framework that may be useful for understanding some empirical patterns around the premodern world.

Sociocultural evolution has developed, we believe, as a robust means to understand the extraordinary, diverse, and fundamentally non-goal-seeking changes and patterns observed in the world’s archaeological record. Our hope is to explain this variability across time and space not as some simplistic, inevitable unfolding of complexity. Sociocultural evolutionary theorists, among whom we include Feinman and others working seriously on CA processes, moved far beyond stage or type-based models decades ago. The straw man fallacies that often characterize modern attacks on sociocultural evolutionary theory seem to consistently miss this critical point. Recently, three of us (Earle, Tantaleán, and Stanish) have explicitly rejected versions of Service and Fried’s 1960s sociocultural evolution. To imply that we endorse this position is simply incorrect. Almost all processualist scholars do not follow these outdated typologies of stage development. An egregious example of the use of this fallacy in a recent popular book is found in The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow 2021). This explicitly anti-science work ignores contemporary theory in its analysis of cultural variation in Early and Middle Holocene societies. It is unfortunate how many people accept this simplistic view of modern theory. Dawn is perhaps best considered as a popular philosophical work that selectively uses archaeological data in a tendentious way, promoting overworn tropes about modern cultural evolutionary theory. It is, unfortunately, all too common.

Modern sociocultural evolutionary theory is vastly more sophisticated than critics acknowledge or seem to even want to understand. The bulk of this new work maintains that sociocultural evolution is nonlinear, is certainly not progressive, and is not even predictable. It is, however, like biological evolution, explainable after the fact by scientific principles. As argued recently by Earle (2021), sociocultural evolution is a historical science, as articulated well by Ernst Mayr (2000) for the Darwinian synthesis of organismic evolution. One of us recently wrote that “elements of agency theory, material culture studies, game theory, neo-Marxism, postcolonialism, gender studies, symbolism, and ritual began to appear in processualist [neo-evolutionary] archaeology that enriched this trend” (Tantaleán 2024:6). Within evolutionary biology, the new framework known as the evolutionary extended synthesis has expanded understanding of biological evolution in new and exciting ways (Laland et al. 2015). A similarly rich conceptual framework is emerging for sociocultural evolution. Two hundred years of archaeological research around the globe teaches us that history is episodic, but it is certainly not random. The archaeological record is clear that patterns exist in prehistory, and these patterns demand explanation. These are not universal; they occur around the globe in varying contexts but represent key processes of some kind of cultural selection among people with agency.

The theoretical task in sociocultural evolutionary theory now is to understand how contingent historical events come together to create contexts for the emergence of similar patterns in geographically and environmentally different regions. We have tried to do precisely this in our article. New and powerful concepts and approaches abound in current sociocultural evolutionary theories; these include path dependency, self-organizing complexity, evolution of cooperation, various forms of collective action, political economy and power, gene-culture coevolution, emergence, phenotypic plasticity principles applied to human society, niche construction theory, cultural transmission, demographic threshold theory, game theory, complexity theory, and evolutionary game theory. Critics who use a fallacious and simplistic straw man logic as a general attack on sociocultural evolution ignore this vast literature. We are in a preparadigmatic era in modern sociocultural evolutionary theory where any and all ideas that are empirically corroborated and analytically effective should be welcome. It is an intellectually exciting time for our field.