Analyzing the nature of governance of early states and cities is a major challenge for archaeology today. Blanton and Fargher’s (Blanton and Fargher, 2008) influential model of early state governance has proven difficult to operationalize using archaeological data. In this paper, we explore a possible material correlate of collective and autocratic governance: the amount of formal open space in a capital city. We use a sample of premodern Mesoamerican cities to evaluate whether or not these spaces functioned as public goods provided by collective governments. Our assumption is that a positive relationship between the amount of public space and the size of cities indicates that plazas functioned as public goods. In our sample of Mesoamerican cities, we find that the plaza-city size relationship does indeed imply that plazas were public goods. This finding is inconsistent with prior analysis of an expanded cross-cultural sample where no such relationship existed, suggesting that the relationship between the formal public space and the form of governance may be culturally specific to Mesoamerica. These results reflect the complexity of the dynamics of early cities and their governance and suggest that the classification of public goods must be attentive to cross-cultural variation.

分析早期国家和城市的治理性质是当今考古学的一项重大挑战。Blanton 和 Fargher（Blanton 和 Fargher，2008 年）具有影响力的早期国家治理模型已证明难以使用考古数据实施。在本文中，我们探讨了集体和专制治理可能存在的物质关联：首都正式开放空间的数量。我们使用前现代中美洲城市的样本来评估这些空间是否作为集体政府提供的公共产品发挥作用。我们的假设是，公共空间的数量与城市规模之间的正相关关系表明广场起到了公共物品的作用。在我们的中美洲城市样本中，我们发现广场-城市规模关系确实意味着广场是公共产品。这一发现与之前对不存在这种关系的扩展跨文化样本的分析不一致，这表明正式公共空间和治理形式之间的关系可能是中美洲特有的文化。这些结果反映了早期城市动态及其治理的复杂性，并表明公共物品的分类必须关注跨文化差异。