Abstract
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.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the members of the project, “Urban Service Access in Premodern Cities” (Timothy Dennehy, Benjamin Stanley, Barbara Stark, and Abigail York) for help in a variety of ways. We thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper for suggestions that helped us improve the argument.
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Funding for the project “Urban Service Access in Premodern Cities” came from National Science Foundation SBS Grant # 1449139.
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This research began with Norwood’s Senior Honors Thesis; Smith scored the additional Mesoamerican cities for governance and contributed to the writing of the final paper.
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Norwood, A.L., Smith, M.E. Urban Open Space and Governance in Ancient Mesoamerica. J Archaeol Method Theory 29, 939–961 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-021-09544-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-021-09544-4