Advances in City-State Research, with an Example from Mesoamerica

The last 20 years have seen advances in the understanding of city-states, especially in ancient Greece, where textual information fuels new theories about institutions and the ancient economy. Archaeological research makes significant contributions with data comparable across multiple city-states on...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of archaeological research 2020-03, Vol.28 (1), p.3-52
Main Author: Kowalewski, Stephen A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ancient civilizations
Anthropology
Archaeology
Rural development
Social Sciences
Urbanization
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Summary:The last 20 years have seen advances in the understanding of city-states, especially in ancient Greece, where textual information fuels new theories about institutions and the ancient economy. Archaeological research makes significant contributions with data comparable across multiple city-states on settlement patterns, urban and rural development, political and ritual activities, and other materializations of institutionalized behavior. Using a new corpus of 74 city-states from Oaxaca, Mexico, I show that city-states differ from one another in patterned ways, and I argue that this variation depends on internal factors such as the social mode of production and external factors including place in regional and interregional exchange.
ISSN:1059-0161
1573-7756
DOI:10.1007/s10814-019-09130-z