CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FINAL THOUGHTS

Mitchell S Rothman and Linda R. Manzanilla

 

 

Reiteration of the Problem

Our argument at the beginning of this volume was that storage is a variable that can add to our ability to answer the core questions of early investigators and modern researchers:

(1) What is the distinctive nature of societies and cultural systems that defines their similarities and differences?

(2) How are/were societies organized, and how does the understanding of their organization help us understand how they functioned?

(3) What caused fundamental changes in their nature and functioning, the evolution of new cultural systems and societal forms?

We proposed that there were patterns that repeated across many cases, although there were not general laws that could be applied in all cases, as the original New Archaeologists had proposed. There was also not a single evolutionary path, but as Steward (1955) suggested, multiple paths that societies took as they evolved.

Practice theorists might argue that therefore the task of the archaeologist should be the particular history of different cultures and societies, where the practices themselves are the source of change (see Rothman, Chapter 1, this volume). In a sense that would mean that every society is completely unique. We believe that there are repeated patterns, which reveal processes of formation and change. We further believe that comparison is at the heart of discovering patterns and common processes of behavior and of change in societies and cultures. Those patterns are not so particular that that there are an infinite number of evolutionary pathways.

The problem with comparison is the need somehow to compare like with like. Blanton et al. (1996: 2) argue that “some persons in any society will strive to influence the governing institutions of society as they pursue, variously, wealth, status, or power. Political action is inherently conflictive; actors may have diverse political aims and varying views of the ideal form of the governing institutions and may contest for positions of power” However, a Big Man will not become a king, even if he knew what a king was. Wealth, status, and power are not attributes that are recognized by individuals in every culture. We therefore proposed that there were some kinds of relationships that characterized different societies. These categories made it possible to compare them across space and time. In Chapter 1 we termed them horizontal egalitarian, vertical egalitarian, ranked coordinated, and stratified regulated (or in other words, administered). These are different than the classic step typology of Service (1962). Service’s model created a static set of types that invited the question whether society X was a tribe, a chiefdom, or a state. These usually assumed that certain, for example, means of food production always were from one or the other societal types. As the example of salmon hunters in the northwestern United States showed (Chapter 1, this volume), however, a hunter-gatherer society can be ranked and coordinated, or its relationships can be those of a horizontal egalitarian society.

Table 14.1 Chronology of Areas Discussed in This Volume

The emphasis among the chapters in this volume, especially the Mesoamerican and Andean cases, is on the stratified, regulated type of societal organization. The lack of general laws or easy fit into Service’s model is apparent among these, because, although the examples from the two regions discuss basically state societies, those of, for example, Teotihuacan and the Inka have fundamental differences in organization, administration, strategies, and practices, as do Mesopotamian societies of the fourth to the second millennia BC (the earliest known state societies).

To be clear, the societies described here, even within one region, differ temporally, even if they are stratified and regulated. They cover a very long period of development in each area (see Table 14.1). Almost a millennium separates the Teotihuacan case described by Manzanilla (Chapter 9) from the Aztecs (De Rojas, Chapter 13), and three millennia separate the Casma Valley state described by Pozorski and Pozorski (Chapter 5) from the Inka (Covey, Quave, and Covey, Chapter 7). Close to three and a half millennia separate the earliest Mesopotamian cases described by Rothman and Fiandra (Chapter 2) and the later cases described by Paulette (Chapter 4). In one sense we are therefore comparing trajectories of change.

Still in comparing them across space and time we can see patterns in relation to their storage practices that will address the questions enumerated above.

Forms of Storage and What Is Stored

The chapters in this volume speak of a wide variety of storage units. Understanding the actual storage practice is an important first step to finding broader patterns of societal organization and culture. Storage vehicles and placement tend to vary somewhat region to region.

In Mesopotamia, the earlier phases (Rothman and Fiandra, Chapter 2) are typified by basket, sack, and relatively small jar storage (Rothman 2002; Frangipane 2007). In other words, the most typical storage containers are ones in which goods were transported. Door sealings indicate that in addition storage rooms had restricted access. Temples and administrative buildings had large rooms, some containing remains of grain (see Rothman and Fiandra, Chapter 2) and ration bowls. A similar system existed at Arslantepe and possibly at Uruk-Warka. The dig team at Arslantepe interpreted three large rooms off the main hallway of the temple/palace structure as major storerooms (Figure 2.8). One contained very large pithoi, and the other appear to have been filled with foodstuffs. At Uruk-Warka the Riemchengebäude within the same Eanna Precinct as palaces and temples is thought to be a storehouse (Paulette, Chapter 4). Archaeologists recovered obsidian blades and possibly remains of grain. However, the German team excavated only a tiny percentage of the fourth millennium BC’s site’s more than two hundred hectares, so we really know little about the city as a whole. In the third millennium northern Mesopotamia and the Levant, large stone and clay-lined pits accommodated the major grain stores of administrative units (Figures 3.3, 3.4, and 5.4). Unlike the earlier storage practices, these represent centrally controlled storage, and a change in the types of organization doing the storing (see below).

Most of the nondomestic storage places in Mesopotamia and the Levant were built for foodstuffs, most often grain. At Tepe Gawra level VIIIA administrators also built what Rothman (2002) interprets as corrals for animals near the central storeroom. At the same time, residents of Tepe Gawra (Rothman and Fiandra, Chapter 2, this volume; Rothman 2002; Rothman and Blackman 2003) were involved surprisingly early (fifth millennium BC) in long-distance exchange of fine pottery wares and stored tools. Later at 3600 BC level VIII locals manufactured and stored obsidian blades. These obsidian blades were bound for southern Mesopotamia. Researchers know this because it is possible to trace an exchange network, the Uruk expansion (Algaze 1993). The obsidian at Gawra and that in the Riemchengebäude both came from the same Nemrut Dagh area of eastern Turkey (Paulette, Chapter 4, this volume; Wright 1969). Uruk-Warka seals have images on them of women with pigtails, who were manufacturing in bulk the fine cloth that southern Mesopotamia was thought to use for exchange (Algaze 1993). More images on seals portray domed storehouses into which workers were pouring something, presumably grain. This formal system of trade offered would-be rulers a vehicle, in addition to their agricultural estates (see below) to develop a network strategy (Blanton et al. 1996) to promote their status and culturally establish new hierarchical roles.

Mesoamerica (see Table 14.1) saw a great variety of storage units: “foodstuffs and medicinal plants for household consumption may be either solids, such as cereals, leguminous plants, cheno-ams, oily seeds, breads, and so on, or liquids, such as water and other beverages (pulque), stored in pithoi and amphorae, as well as in cuexcomates and trojes (outdoor granaries), storehouses, and tronco-conical pits. Storage for future agricultural cycles involved the seeds needed for such tasks, and had to be kept in outdoor storage facilities, such as cuexcomates (wattle-and-daub globular-shaped facilities) and trojes (outdoor wooden constructions), as well as sacks in indoor spaces” (Manzanilla, Chapter 9, this volume; Manzanilla 1988). Before the Classic period locals stored their foodstuffs in small subterranean tronco-conical outdoor pits (Flannery 1976; Manzanilla 1985). How central the stores were can speak to the society’s organization, as can where the goods were produced and who controlled their storage.

Teotihuacan, a huge multiethnic metropolis of the Classic period in Mesoamerica, had modest domestic and neighborhood storage facilities primarily for maize, but may have had large-scale storage of sumptuary goods. Like early Mesopotamia, Teotihuacan had significant trading relationships, especially in a corridor toward the coast at Veracruz (Manzanilla 2015). A variety of products, particularly those of the coast, reached the city in their local pottery vessels and sacks.

In addition to the tribute storerooms of neighborhood nobles and in the Maya and later post-Classic Mesoamerican societies the palace’s centralized storerooms, another institutional storage practice is plausible. That would involve a marketplace. One is proposed for Tenochtitlan (de Rojas, Chapter 13, this volume) and for Tikal, although none has been located in the latter case (Smyth, Chapter 11). Such a market at Teotihuacan, during the Classic period, would have been an open place attached to each neighborhood center for producers to exchange goods (Manzanilla, Chapter 9, this volume).

The Maya area, because of its tropical character, had other problems with storage because of its climate. “In the lowland tropics, the storage environment of stone-walled, stone-roofed rooms are not favorable to food storage even if staples, such as maize and beans, were thoroughly dried. The fluctuating high temperature and high humidity levels in palace rooms, especially during the tropical rainy season, produce a poor storage environment. Successful maize storage is constrained by several variables, including moisture content, temperature, humidity, storage time, and the level of fungus present” (Smyth, Chapter 11, this volume). Large food storage units like Mesopotamia and the Levant were not a workable solution, and therefore food storage units were not easy for archaeologists to find. Although control of maize stores, dried, covered with lime, and placed in constructions of large logs over a stone floor, was a key to the tributary economy of the Maya, as exemplified at Tikal, the actual units were probably not together physically as they were at Amaziya in the northern Negev (Milevski et al., Chapter 3, this volume). However, durable goods like cloth, imported stone, fine vessels, honey, and wax were stored in stone-built palace rooms. Vidal-Lorenzo et al. (Chapter 12, this volume) cite texts that refer to these as chultuns. What of food storage? The site of Joya de Cerén in El Salvador gives a unique picture of domestic storage, because the site was buried by volcanic ash. Every domestic compound had separate structures for living, for cooking, and for storage. In the storage building “an adobe clay platform supported a small perishable structure, the walls and roof of which were formed entirely of branches, twigs, and clay in a wattle-and-daub construction system known locally as bajareque. These same materials were also used to make the single shelf or tapanaco generally found in these small cellars that were used to hold some of the storeroom items, with the remainder being kept in large baskets, pots, and other containers” (Vidal-Lorenzo et al., Chapter 12, this volume). A rarely mentioned good that was also controlled and stored in the Maya area was water, often in underground cisterns.

Among the most complex and the latest societies described here for Mesoamerica are the sites of Xochicalco in Morelos, Mexico, in the Epiclassic and Tenochtitlan of the Aztecs in the post-Classic period (see Table 14.1). The state centered at Xochicalco had large grain storage units associated with its palace. “The graneros were built in a later architectural stage after the original [palace] building plan […] The architects erected three transverse walls supported by the wall that originally enclosed the room to the north. To the south, they built another wall to ceiling height, leaving only an entrance at the eastern part of the granero. Access was found 1.5 meters above the room’s floor, suggesting that they would have needed to use a ladder of a perishable material to reach it. On the other hand, being the only entrance to the four graneros, the cross walls that divide them have a cavity between them and the south wall, creating a kind of interior elevated passageway or crawlway to go from one granero to another” (Garza et al.: Figure 10.5, this volume). The source of the food was likely tribute from more distant subjugated sites, as the carrying capacity of the immediate hinterland of the city was insufficient to produce the quantities estimated to be stored in the palace. Like Teotihuacan neighborhoods, the palace engaged in sumptuary trade, as well. Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs, was the largest and most complex of the societies of prehispanic Mesoamerica. Like the Inka of the Andes, the land of the Azteca was an empire ruled by governors and calpixqui or persons in charge of collecting tribute for the state (de Rojas, Chapter 13, this volume). Storage for maize as in the Maya area was in wooden troxes and granaries. Although archaeologists have found no direct archaeological evidence of major central stores in the capital, Spanish chroniclers speak of massive stores of food that came in and went out of the palace.

For the Andean region the chapters in this volume discuss the Initial Period from 1800 to 1400 BC (Chapter 5), the late Chimu and Inka Empires (Chapters 6 and 7), and Salomon’s ethnographic case (Chapter 8). T. and S. Pozorski (Chapter 5) focus on the Casma Valley, which included coastal and highland areas. Based on site size hierarchies, a regular architectural plan that lasted for many generations, and monumental public constructions, they propose that the region was hierarchically organized, centralized, and socially stratified. Food was produced on land and from the sea. In this settlement and political system, they propose that Huaca A served as a storehouse settlement (see Figure 5.4) like Raqa’i in northern Mesopotamia (Chapter 4). Access to a very typical celled building was limited. Pollen remains indicate that comptrollers stored beans and potatoes among other foodstuffs there. Other buildings with a similar plan at other sites were more administrative than storage in nature. Administrators who supervised food production and storage of food worked there. In fact, this architectural plan exists in smaller size at all the larger or more critically placed sites in the highland and the coast associated with the Casma Valley state.

The Inka Empire, which spread over much of the Andean region in the Late Horizon, roughly three millennia after the Casma Valley state, presents some similarities and differences with the earlier state. The size of the Inka Empire dwarfs that of the Casma Valley state. Whereas the Casma Valley state appears to be a well-integrated society of similar groups, the Inka Empire was a pastiche of colonized peoples. At Chan Chan (the capital of the Chimu) before the fully developed Inka appeared, a system of food storage in square storerooms already existed (Topic, Chapter 6, this volume). The Inka used storage to remake many decentralized societies it conquered and remake society to provide for the Inka heartland and to continue its expansion. “Storehouse construction supported the collection, movement, and redistribution of state surpluses. An improved road network expanded the regional scope of staple economies […] and centrally organized camelid herding intensified high elevation grazing, providing beasts of burden and fine fiber for craft production. Staple surpluses funded local administration, whereas the means of producing wealth goods shifted to the capital region, where they supported personal connections between the Inka ruler and the nobles and officials who staffed the imperial political hierarchy” (Covey, Quave, and Covey, Chapter 7, this volume). Each local official built qollqa storehouses in order to have food for traveling traders, officials, and soldiers along the system of roads that was the string that tied together the empire. Different storehouse types marked the different ranks in Inka society. Households built small raised wooden platforms, probably like those in the Maya area, for storing food. The roadside storage buildings were relatively small and round or square. A set of them would be used, the number depending on demand. The central storage system at Cuzco had two types of storerooms. Type 1 storehouses were basically the qollqa’s (Figure 7.4). Type 2 were narrow rooms, but from ten to thirty-eight meters long (Figure 7.5). Interestingly, the Type 2 storehouses were typical of incipient Inka society, whereas the qollqa originated at the height of Inka expansion. The Type 2 storehouses are found in the broader area in and around Cuzco on apparently noble estates and on state lands. Paleobotanists recovered remains of maize, quinoa/kiwicha seeds, and tubers there (Covey, Quave, and Covey, Chapter 7, this volume; Table 7.2).

This section illustrated the great variety of storage places and kinds of goods that were stored. All were part of an evolution of societies over time in each of the regions described. We discuss their importance for understanding societal organization and the commonalities and differences in their underlying processes of development and storage as a reflection of the organization of societies in the next section.

Societal Organization and Storage

At the core of the patterns we are seeking are those that we classified as societal (organizational) and cultural (generally ideology: symbolism, religion, values, beliefs, and so on). Organization describes types, as mentioned above, but the types, as Harris (1968) said back in the days of Louis Binford, are simply our intellectual models. Underlying the types are practices and relationships and human intentionality (agency). The task of the scholar is to see the details of human activity as individuals (where possible), but more likely in the groups and associations in which humans participate willingly or unwillingly.

The patterns reflect the conscious goals of individuals and groups and the methods (the cultural) they use to make the system work, as Blanton et al. (1996) suggest. This is where agency comes into the picture (see Rothman, Chapter 1, this volume). The problem with the agency concept is that even practice theorists agree that decisions are made within a social structure. They would emphasize a more cultural one than many positivists who favor the political and economic systems, but they, too, acknowledge that agency in a horizontal egalitarian society is not going to be the same as that in a stratified, regulated one. These patterns for us emphasize potentially different players’ control of that which is produced and that which is stored. Control in the egalitarian societies is spread equally across the society, or perhaps handled by individual households, mostly with an eye to subsistence. In the ranked and stratified societies control is distributed unequally in the hands of fewer individuals or groups who consciously plot to promote their own benefit, except in cases where their goals are seen as promoting their whole society’s best interests—Blanton et al.’s (1996) corporate strategy. Administration in the case of stratified, regulated societies is the formalization or systemization of those controls. Hence, Wallace (1971) contrasts communal or kinship with administrative forms of social organization. Power in that sense is the ability of individuals or groups to impose their control and their decision making on others in an inherently stratified, unequal society, as Wright and Johnson (1975) recognized long ago.

Who had control and what their goals and strategies were becomes evident in storage practices (see above), as are the various kinds of groups that are active players in that society. The inherent heterogeneity of stratified societies is evident in this variety of groupings; for example, the ethnic mix at Teotihuacan (Manzanilla, Chapter 9, this volume). The metropolis had three distinct rings: an outer ring occupied by “foreign” ethnics, a secondary ring made up of self-governing neighborhoods of locals, possibly of a kind of middle rank, and the inner circle where the rulers of the city and polity lived and worked. The Teotihuacan state, however, lacked a truly centralized control center, and despite its size maybe even a ruler’s palace (Manzanilla, Chapter 9, this volume). Rather, nobles in each neighborhood controlled local storage places. For the Maya, “while there were indeed very powerful and dominating ruling centers, the ruling classes did not hold a total control over production and, as such, it is not possible to speak of just one Mayan economic system at state level, but rather of regional and, in some cases, interregional economic systems” (Vidal-Lorenzo et al., Chapter 12, this volume). This then means that, with the exception of certain relevant cases, the control exercised by the leaders of the different political bodies over production and trade would have been restricted only to certain products. However, the systems of the Chimu and Inka, evident in their network of central and regional storage systems, were very much centralized (Topic, Chapter 6, and Covey, Quave, and Covey, Chapter 7, this volume).

At Xochicalco, Morelos, Mexico (Garza-Tarazona et al., Chapter 10, this volume), a similar pattern is evident. Households have associated food storage units, but the palace had a large centralized storage system. In the Acropolis area of the palace, a series of large graneros likely held huge surplus stores of maize. Rulers of the city created a centralized, redistribution system through military violence against surrounding settlements, and a tributary system that the palace center controlled, so that many families who were not primarily farmers in the city would be fed and dependent on the palace. The third millennium BC societies of the Levant (Milevski et al., Chapter 3, this volume) and of Mesopotamia (Rothman and Fiandra, Chapter 2, and Paulette, Chapter 4, this volume) show a centralizing tendency in storage and societal organization, as well.

At the same time, heterogeneity is a part of all the more complex societal systems studied here. The attempts of Mesopotamians to create an empire based on a model of expanding city-states are evident in northern Mesopotamia (Paulette, Chapter 4), and the need to integrate various ethnic and occupational groups is indicated already at Tepe Gawra (the pastoral and trader groups from the highlands [Rothman and Fiandra, Chapter 2]), as well as in the fourth and early third millennia BC at Arslantepe (Rothman and Fiandra, Chapter 2; Frangipane 2014). This leads Manzanilla (Chapter 9) to conclude that the emphasis on auditing (see below) tortilla rations in the Teotihuacan neighborhoods favors labor over goods, although at the same time, the use of stored sumptuary goods is part of the cultural means nobles use to symbolize and re-inforce their status and positions of authority (see below).

The agency discussed above occurs at various levels of society, whether the least complex one discussed in this volume, societies of the Halaf Period (Rothman and Fiandra, Chapter 2), to the most complex, the Inka of the Andes (Covey, Quave, and Covey, Chapter 7). What the earliest examples show is that at the base of all these societies are a household economy, and as the model in Table 1.1 predicts, household storage. In these horizontal egalitarian societies, mostly the storage is of the same type. As control systems begin to develop in the fourth millennium in northern Mesopotamia, again the basic units of organization were extended households with what Fiske calls equality sharing (see Rothman, Chapter 1). As relations outside the site were forged through long-distance exchange and perhaps marriage patterns, however, it became important to integrate these households. Such shared activities, as mentioned in Chapter 1, were already evident at the beginning of the Neolithic in the Middle East when goods were collected and stored for common feasting. At Tepe Gawra the transformation into a vertical egalitarian society is evident in a common grain and craft good storage. The auditing system of control for storage, seals, and sealings (see below), however, seems to indicate a common access to stored goods and most likely a shared benefit from the exchange of goods outside the site. Contrary to Blanton et al. (1996), in earlier pre-state societies a network strategy does not have to imply a system of exclusionary (stratified) control and ultimately power. By the LC3 (3600 BC) at Tepe Gawra (see Table 14.1) evidence of a kind of direct control by a now more centralized authority is clear. This development is even clearer at Arslantepe and at Uruk-Warka, the latter the world’s oldest true city and urban settlement system (Nissen 2001).

Stored Surplus and Evolution

At the heart of this change toward a ranked and then stratified (state) form of societal organization is the concept of surplus inherent in the system or created by leaders consciously to further their goals. Surplus implies storage. As Smyth (Chapter 11, this volume) writes: “If the fundamental material power base of Maya elites rested upon the control of land, labor, and the material by-products thereof, then the storage of surplus goods generated and the political-economic strategies employed to support the state should be closely related ” (emphasis his). In other words, storage strategies should reflect the political power structures. The earlier concept in anthropology was that these were all redistributive systems (Service 1962, 144; Fried 1967). That is, goods were collected and then returned to members of the society. The necessity of coordinating this redistributive system created an avenue for individuals or more likely kin-related groups to promote themselves to positions of higher rank through their task as controllers. Whereas such systems no doubt existed and exist ethnographically in various vertical egalitarian types of societies like those at Tepe Gawra XII (see above), more and more scholars questioned whether these redistribution systems were not designed to benefit the coordinators over the general populace (Earle 1977). Paulette (Chapter 4, this volume) paints a picture of third to second millennium states where “in Mesopotamia, [stored] grain was king, or, to put it more accurately, grain made kings” A system of massive store-towns like Raqa’i existed, which speaks not only to the centrality of storage but to its scale and its relation to the evolution of states.

What was the source of these stored surpluses and what was their role in the strategies of various groups? As Wright (2000) argues, there is a clear relation between tributary systems and the evolution and elaboration of hierarchically organized systems. That surplus, according to Wright, involves not only extracting food from the local populace, but intensifying production. In Mesopotamia, the state extracted tax or tribute, but its primary means of supporting its activities was its own agricultural estates. Labor was recruited from villages, but also a semipermanent dependent labor force supported by the palace and temple institutions’ stores of grain. Whereas the private households practiced a strategy to guarantee their subsistence (minimax), the state pushed for maximal returns (Baysian) to support military expansion, constructing public architecture, and network relations with other kings (Rothman 1994a). This policy was continued even when it led to large-scale salinization of the soil and with that the collapse of dynasties or their military expansion into new territories with potential for more surpluses.

Manzanilla (Chapter 9, this volume) points to the importance of stored maize in neighborhood centers headed by the intermediate elite, made into tortillas as rations for labor in craft workshops (Manzanilla 2011). The evolution from the early states to the first empires was literally paid for by stored grain (Paulette, Chapter 4, this volume). Wright (2000: 11) distinguishes between labor and goods tribute, which makes sense in terms of the goals of leadership in particular cases: “where land is available and transport difficult, labor tribute might be more effective, but where land is scarce and transport easy, goods tribute might be more effective.” He notes that most state leaders use both approaches. We would argue that they are systematically related. One cannot have one without the other. Grain is not stored for a long period merely as accumulated wealth. It is stored to distribute in payment for some return to the controllers of the storehouses.

The empire or colonial model of state functioning and state leaders’ goals intensifies this need for tribute and changes in storage practice. In the Levant throughout much of the fifth into the fourth millennium BC, patterns are evidenced of largely self-sustaining, egalitarian villages (Greenberg 2002). Contact through networks of exchange reached into northern Mesopotamia. At Tel Tsaf, for example, a few pots and a single seal indicate at least contact through down-the-line trade with the ‘Ubaid world in Mesopotamia. There large stone-lined storage pits for grain were built associated with each household (Garfinkel, Ben-Shlomo, and Kuperman 2009). Tell Amaziya in the Northern Negev was occupied in the Early Bronze I and IV (see Table 14.1). These are periods before and after urbanization in the Levant. In the northern Negev, most Early Bronze I sites were small, self-sufficient villages. Amaziya was larger. Milevski et al. (Chapter 3, this volume) describe a whole district of the site in which residents concentrated storage pits like those at Tel Tsaf, presumably for grain. They assert that these silos must have contained much more food than the residents of the site could possibly have used. They further suggest that there are two possible explanations for the concentration of foodstuffs. One is a local tributary system in which wealth is amassed by a ruling group that uses it to redistribute to local people in exchange for labor service or loyalty. However, there are few signs of differential access to goods, larger houses, or other signs of inequality. Perhaps there is a system of developing administration like the one postulated for the Pueblo Indians with controlling groups symbolically hidden beneath the ideology and symbols of kinship organization (Mills 2000); as noted in this volume, there are no physical remains of administrative hardware like in Mesopotamia (Rothman and Fiandra, Chapter 2), Mesoamerica (Manzanilla, Chapter 9; de Rojas, Chapter 13), or the Andes (Pozorski and Pozorski, Chapter 5; Topic, Chapter 6; Salomon, de las Casas, and Falcon-Huayta, Chapter 8). Alternatively, they postulate that an Egyptian colony system had penetrated this part of the Negev and the surplus in fact was going to them. “Tell es-Sakan appears to have been the core, or ‘mother colony’ of an Egyptian colonization effort under royal auspices, and may well have been the gateway for the virtual flood of Egyptian goods that marks a primary zone of activity at specific sites north of Tell es-Sakan along the southern stretch of the Mediterranean Littoral at the end of EB I” (Milevski et al., Chapter 3). The Inka colonial system is the most obvious case where storage and colonial expansion correlate. “As Inka dominion spread, Inka Yupanque (Pachacutic) issued decrees regulating storage and establishing Cuzco’s political economy. The first of these required subject populations to produce surplus staple goods and transport them to Cuzco” (Covey, Quave, and Covey, Chapter 7).

These cases all have a degree of complexity that would seem to distinguish them. The particular goals, circumstances, and strategies used by each group from the subsistence-oriented households to the status-oriented, and possibly power-seeking minority are different. However, in each region increasing surplus and increasing storage tend to correlate with increasingly centralized societies. This common pattern of increasingly centralized storage correlating with increasingly complex societies seems to hold regardless of place or absolute time. Its corollary, that in vertical egalitarian and ranked societies central storage is less prominent and where some communal storage exists, its control is manifested in the whole community as equality sharing is suggested by the Mesopotamian cases.

Administrative Mechanisms, Storage, and Organization

If, as we argue, storage is an indicator of control mechanisms that reflect societal organization, then the mechanisms of control—in stratified, regulated societies’ administration—indicate how this organization actually functioned. As Fiandra (Rothman and Fiandra, Chapter 2, this volume), Frangipane (2007), and Rothman (1994b, 2007), have pointed out, auditing is one of the key elements in the administrative process.

Some researchers assume that the presence of seals alone is an automatic sign of an administered system. Akkermans and Verhoeven (1995) have shown that even a Neolithic site in northern Mesopotamia, Sabi Abyad, had both seals and their impression on clay locks (sealings); both the seal and what was sealed have to be present for them to be mechanisms of control. In the Near East this system began not so much as administrative; that is, control by an institution vested with the authority to administer and make decisions that others had to follow (authority), but as the equivalent of individuals’ signatures.

As noted in this volume, as time passed and organization changed from an egalitarian to a ranked to stratified, regulated (administered) types of social relationships, the message-bearing ability of stamp, then cylinder seals, and finally clay tablets with writing (often also sealed now by office holders rather than individuals) increased (Rothman and Fiandra, Chapter 2). The storage practice in each phase along this evolutionary trajectory became more centralized and also increased in scale (Paulette, Chapter 4; Rothman and Fiandra, Chapter 2).

Scale (see Chapter 1, this volume) is a critical factor in this trajectory of changing relationships. The necessary system for control and the mechanisms used depend in large measure on the scale of the society. Scale here is measured a number of ways, from geographical area to population size to degree of heterogeneity to the size of network connections outside the frontiers or in stratified societies’ borders. Nissen (1977) theorizes that the addition of cylinder seals to stamp seals in Mesopotamia occurred because there were fewer face-to-face contacts. People who had to be authorized to break sealings and access the goods stored would be less familiar with individual seal designs (signatures) and needed more information on offices and office holders; the increased information required more space that a cylinder seal provided. It is interesting to note that this sealing technology, although known in the area, was not adopted in the Levant.

Scale is certainly in play in the Andes region. Comparing the Casma Valley state of approximately 1500 BC with that of the Inka Empire three millennia later shows the effect of increased scale and different goals and practices of administrators in their storage and auditing practices. T. and S. Pozorski (Chapter 5, this volume) present evidence of sealing behavior. Both stamp and cylinder seals appeared in administrative contexts at key sites in the Casma Valley area (Figure 5.12). Unlike the Mesopotamian seals they were not applied to clay locks. Their use was not so much about auditing. Manzanilla (2009: fig. 2.6; 2011: fig. 5) also found circular stamp seals in the neighborhood center of Teopancazco in Teotihuacan, which are morphologically different from curved seals for body paint; the stamp seals may be related to the control of crafts in the neighborhood center by the intermediate elite.

The clay lock sealing in Mesopotamia was the physical representation of items that were received and then disbursed. At Arslantepe (Rothman and Fiandra, Chapter 2, this volume) sealings were found in a room used as a trash dump in clumps the shape of a basket. Apparently, an auditor counted the contributions from various sources of tax or tribute as they came into the storeroom. They were thrown into a basket, and at a particular interval, a week or month, they were counted, somehow recorded or communicated to the top level of administration, and then dumped at one time in the trash. The counting then began again. In the Pozorskis’ case, they suggest that the stamps were applied on cloth or perhaps on the skin of people. The suggestion is that these were signatures of ownership. They may have been recorded in some fashion, so-and-so many workers of person X were contributed to the state project of building such and such or growing maize in the state fields. Person X contributed so much cloth to the state treasury, and so on. As in the Levant, the absence of physical remains of auditing does not mean that activities were not administered or audited. Physical artifacts of administration did not exist or did not get preserved.

The Inka Empire was too large, too complex, and lasted too long for it not to have some kind of formal administrative system. As described by Covey, Quave, and Covey (Chapter 7, see above) the Inka system of conquest and then of administration was consciously planned using a network of roads and storehouses to tie it together. The flow of goods was either from the local area into the roadside storehouses or into Cuzco itself, where a whole series of storehouses controlled by nobles and by the highest levels of state administrators of the Inka were located. This flow, according to Covey, Quave, and Covey, fueled craft production in Cuzco, some of which went back out to governors and loyal factions in the empire as sumptuary goods. Topic (Chapter 6) shows how the Chimú administrative system may have worked. One element in this system was the quipu or a set of knotted strings that recorded a mnemonic set of numbers. There were in addition various colors that could signify what was being counted or even permit an administrator to make a new quipu that summarized the information in other quipus. A “correlation of cognitive ranking with the sequential ordering of the strings again emphasizes the structural importance of the place or position, with predefined value, in which numbers are recorded. However, the significance of the positions and qualifiers has to be learned and communicated from one bureaucrat to another; they are not inherent in the sense that an S-spun brown cotton string, in the third position on a larger quipu, will always record information about the same category of thing” (Topic, Chapter 6). Topic points out that quipu’s existed as early as AD 700, but the Inka ones were quite different, reflecting a new organization of administration and new goals and strategies of the leaders. An indication of the planning and complexity of the Inka system is that to make the quipu’s (which were numbers, not words) work, the Inka adopted a system of standardized storage buildings first evidenced at Chan Chan (the Chimu capital) during the Late Intermediate Period, just before the establishment of the Inka Empire in the Late Horizon. The Spanish records called these buildings audiencia. “Audiencia is used here in a generic sense to encompass a set of structures, with varying characteristics, that include types referred to as audiencia variants, arcones, trocaderos, and tablados […]. These types of structures frequently have just three walls and are open on the fourth side, like a block letter U; sometimes, however, their layout is more like a block letter C (Figure 6.4)” (Topic, Chapter 6). He proposes that the information in the quipus was tied to these standardized storage building configurations. Most were for foodstuffs.

Many of the administrative systems here (for the Aztec, see above) are directed toward inputs of tribute or tax into the centers, large or small. They also record disbursements, but it is the inflow and outflow of goods that interests the auditors. At Teotihuacan, centuries before the Inka or Aztec, the use of tokens for labor indicates a different focus (Manzanilla, Chapter 9, this volume). Manzanilla proposes that a series of small round tokens of differing size coded the amount of tortilla rations given to workers, especially to craftspeople. The age was coded (children got a different amount and therefore a different-size token was used). In this way the nobles who supplied the tortillas could keep track of how much maize would be needed to pay for the work of making sumptuary goods, and presumably the amount of maize needed for feeding themselves and their other dependents and providing seed for the next growing season; stamp seals (see Manzanilla 2009: fig. 2.6; 2011: fig. 5) are the only administrative tool that survived, leaving aside the codices of the late post-Classic period.

Not every society described in this volume had administrative tools, at least not ones that survived over the long time they remained in the ground. Where they do exist, our understanding of their purpose and the goals of players in the administrative forms of social organization is enhanced. Here, the administrative mechanisms are tied very closely to storage practice at the nonhousehold—archaeologists find few household auditing tools—administrative level. They paint a similar picture to one described above. Increasing control of larger and more centralized storage systems correlates with the increasing centralization of the societies involved.

Cultural Factors and Administration

Societies have long been the focus of processualist archaeologists, as reflected in much of the discussion above. Economic, political, and social organization has been the key factor for archaeological analysis. Postprocessualists, on the one hand, and art historians, on the other, are right, however, to say that the cultural elements of ideology, symbolism (and art), beliefs, values, and so on, are also critical. The problem has always been how to understand them. Rarely, even with written records, do we know what symbols, and religious practices, actually meant to the ancients. We can see how they were used and theorize about why they might have been used in a particular way, which is important, but perhaps a bit amorphous, which in part is why archaeologists really since World War II have favored the societal to the cultural.

One question is, how do these ancient societies, especially the states, motivated people to embrace or at least go along with this whole system of tribute or taxation and communal or state storage? Salomon et al. (Chapter 8), our one ethnographic contribution, give us a possible way to look at some of relationships among ritual, governance, and storage: “Until the mid-twentieth century, the village of Rapaz (Peru) managed its communal sector (fields, canals, terraces, pastures, and herds) through a ritualadministrative complex seated in a walled precinct. One of the precinct’s two buildings is called Pasa Qulqa (‘Storehouse of Seasons’). The other is a still-used sacred building, the home of a collection of quipu’s, where traditional authorities govern the common sector. It is called Kaha Wayi, ‘Treasury House.’” These institutions have been attributed to integrating the adaptations of different zones within the Inka/Peruvian landscape, but “the range of feelings and questions that arise from behavior in it, and the symbols that express them—contributes to the articulated set of symbols we call Andean culture” (Salomon et al., Chapter 8). These institutions of ritual, governance, and storage are separated from the rest of the village behind a small stone wall. In village rituals, the quipu’s are actually worn by the officiants as part of their traditional garb. The community controls agricultural and pastoral production. No one owns their productive land; it belongs to the community. Agriculture within the community is regulated by a hierarchically constituted agricultural committee, which is part of the community’s larger organization in dealing with the Peruvian state, but which is the sole arbiter of community food production (when the Peruvian state forced the community to partition its fields into private hands, this system faded). At planting and harvest times, the officials take on the role of ritual leaders, singing songs and hosting a feast of meats from animals in the storehouse. The whole system from community ownership (in ancient times, noble ownership?) to production to storage is regulated by a social structure that has economic and political aspects, but ultimately is embraced by the population through its ritual and spiritual practices and beliefs.

At the heart of this whole system of controlled storage in all regions was the belief of people in the rightness of the social order. The establishment and legitimization of rank and authority cannot be seen now or in ancient times as simply a matter of a practical solution to economic problems. It must fit with a larger ideology and set of accepted symbols that summarize the status of individuals in charge, and can change and be elaborated in changing systems. If Paulette (Chapter 4, this volume) is correct, and states are really not so much controlling as integrating in many respects pieces of semiautonomous communities, this ideological/symbolic mode of establishing authority and the current order was essential. It reflected the core role of state leaders. For example, as the Uruk expansion trading network was formed, one of the primary characteristics of the gods became supernatural forces that brought beneficial goods from afar (Jacobsen 1976). The king’s family often provided stand-ins for the goddess Inanna or the god Dumuzi during the spring fertility ritual.

In prehispanic Peru, the Pozorskis see the storage units as symbols of authority. “Based on the recurring presence and consistent form of the square-room unit and its constant use in administrative contexts within the Sechín Alto Polity, we suggest that this modular architectural form also functioned more broadly as a tangible symbol of the power and control exerted by Sechín Alto Polity leaders” (Chapter 5, this volume). Symbols of jaguars and other spiritual symbols appeared on the outside of the cell buildings (see Figure 5.11). The production of sumptuary goods for nobles at Teotihuacan seems to have been a major focus of the productive enterprise. Although exchange of sumptuary goods along the corridor to Veracruz was probably important to maintain trade for other goods, including food, the amount of effort seems too great just for economic exchange (Manzanilla, Chapter 9, this volume; Manzanilla 2015). Although archaeologists found no palace, the monumentality of the Pyramids of the Sun, Moon, and Feathered Serpent speaks to an important ritual life. Participants in the rituals there must have needed elaborate dress, as well as different elites and ethnic groups needed visual ways to display their identity, in this multiethnic environment. Their participation no doubt reinforced their noble status and their authority over their neighborhoods.

In the Maya area “the iconographic representations found on ceramic pots and on the vaults of a number of palaces in Campeche and Yucatan, the god K’awil has been painted together with sacks of this type full of grain and bearing inscriptions referring to abundance and prosperity” (Vidal-Lorenzo et al., Chapter 12, this volume).

Even the locations of administrative, storage, and economic institutions were marked as ideologically special. The walled Eanna Precinct of Uruk-Warka stood at the center of the mound on a raised hill (Nissen 2001). It should have been visible to many satellite sites. Similarly, “the founders of Xochicalco chose a hill 120 meters above the surrounding terrain, making the most of the topography in order to establish hierarchical levels, which reflect the spatial order of the city […] Consequently, the highest part of the hill was restricted to political and administrative activities, rituals, and the residences of high officials” (Garza-Tarazona et al., Chapter 10, this volume). Archaeologists recovered artifacts like censers, animal bone, and masks downhill from the Acropolis that most likely had a ritual function.

These ritual and ideological aspects discussed above only begin to plumb the many elements of cultural ideas and behaviors that relate to the economic and political organization of these various societies, but again they link culture to organization to storage.

Causes of Change

One of the ironies of modern archaeology is somewhat of an inability to agree on and clearly articulate the causes of change. The aspect that archaeologists contribute to anthropology, history, and art history is in fact the ability to speak about long-term change, evolution. The practice theorists, who seem to be gaining in influence on the younger generation of archaeologists, basically put off this “why” question to some future time (see Chapter 1, this volume). To our eyes, they seem to ignore the fact that human agency, goals, and practices are not so independent of circumstances and organizational structures. As we argued above, the possibilities for setting goals are always limited by organizational perspectives. Again, a Big Man will not become a king nor will he aspire to wealth or power; he will not cognize what these concepts are. Vitelli (1999) reminds us to look up, not look back. No one planting the first crops in the ancient world said to themselves, “Let’s do this, so that sometime in the future our heirs can have surpluses that will permit them to gain high rank, whatever that is.” Long-term change is rarely considered by members of any society. Human agency and strategies are always constrained and directed by unplanned, stochastic factors, like floods, hurricanes, conquests, plagues, droughts, historical animosities, needed cooperation, and anticipated and unanticipated competition. They flow out of possibilities given their economic, social, and political circumstances. In Chapter 7 (this volume), Covey, Quave, and Covey argue that risk is a reason for the storage system of the Inka Empire. Adams (1981) similarly argues that urbanism and with it stratified, regulated societies in southern Mesopotamia evolved to solve the dual problem of increasing population size and productive agricultural regimes that nonetheless underperform in three of every five years. That risk and uncertainty (the belief there is risk) are factors in decision making is undoubtedly true. But we, and the practice theorists, would say that is not the whole story.

We spoke about patterns in Chapter 1 and processes. We believe that the contributions here have added new cases and new dynamic models for organization and change in three key regions of the ancient world. We believe we have shown that political and economic centralization correlates with changes in storage behavior in many places and many times. We believe that the heterogeneity of complex societies (states) adds impetus to this process of centralization in order to solve the need for integration.

At the same time, we know that this volume is not the definitive word, but just a kind of next step in the search for why. Neither processualist nor practice theory alone will get us to the answers to why. We leave that intellectual struggle for generations of archaeologists to come. We hope they see the importance of waging it.

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