Loopholes in the law and source criticism

This response will, out of necessity, take the form of a few separate thoughts on issues that came up while reading Yoffee’s book. While I did enjoy the book a great deal, and appreciate his move away from a linear, staged sense of social development, a few things popped out at me that I would like to address here. First, is Yoffee’s law, which relates to some of the response papers I have already posted this semester. In full, Yoffee’s law states that,

“If you can argue whether a society is a state or isn’t, then it isn’t” (Yoffee 2005, 41).

This quote/law can be coupled with Yoffee’s assessment of the discipline as having moved away from descriptions of what a state is towards understanding how they work, a sentiment shared in much of the reading we have done so far. But there are two points I would like to make regarding the study only of the “how” and not the “what”. First, describing the inner workings of something, yet not really knowing what that something is, except for giving it a label (i.e. “state”), seems strange. A more acceptable form of this would be to disregard the label “state” entirely, and only focus on the context specific understanding of how societies or aggregated communities functioned. I argue this because, second, to say that a debate about whether something constitutes a state automatically relegates it to non-stateness, smacks of an uncritical acceptance of the state as a concept, feeding directly into a discourse before assessing its validity. We should not be in the practice of always accepting what other people say. Furthermore, according to my reading of Routledge, it is possible to argue against the stateliness of EVERY state. I assume Yoffee would prefer that we don’t eliminate the category altogether, so some defense of the concept is necessary.

I would also have liked to see more of an assessment about the state of the archaeological data in informing his thesis. The book contained several discussions on the relationship between urban centers and their peripheries, for example, that also addressed the character of the countryside (such as a brief discussion of Teotihuacan on page 48 and of the Mesopotamian countryside beginning on page 54). While I certainly wouldn’t argue with the conclusions Yoffee draws for each region, some acknowledgement of the type of research done to arrive at these conclusions would be helpful, particularly given the differences between survey archaeology practices in different parts of the world, and the affects this can have on our understanding of regional settlement.

In the Mediterranean, survey projects tend to be more intensive than in Mesoamerica, and Mediterranean projects tend to employ statistical sampling, while Mesoamerican projects often cover larger areas of land (though with less density; see Blanton 2001 and Cherry 1983 for examples of different coverage strategies and their effects). The result is a different emphasis in the archaeological data. Greater detail is recovered in the Mediterranean with respect to smaller farmsteads and rural sites, looking at the specifics of regional development, while Mesoamerican surveys will often treat broader social and political organization, such as the location of centers of activity and the like. Cases can be made (and are made) for the validity of both strategies (which, I should say, are not universally applicable to each part of the world, but come up as a focus in comparative literature) of archaeological investigation, but they do present some differences in how we understand the different regions.