X. Building the Walls Higher: From Raiding to Warfare

“The accumulation of population by war and slave-raiding is often seen as the origin of the social hierarchy and centralization typical of the earliest states.” [165]

We have already looked at the process of militarization as a motor of state-formation, but I think it is also necessary to underscore that the role of warfare can be overstated. Randolph Bourne was not exaggerating when he said “war is the health of the state.” [166] Nonetheless, warfare does not necessitate state formation and states do not need to favor military over nonmilitary expansion.

The conquest state model that has cropped up so frequently in this study is, let’s not forget, a model of secondary state formation and not primary state formation. The militaristic Indo-European warrior brotherhoods—whose legacy can be seen in multiple Aryan, Mediterranean, and Germanic states—may have been a consequence of the resistance of stateless societies to the slave-raiding and territorial conquests of the early states of Mesopotamia, as Fredy Perlman argues. [167] In the royal court and holy father states, warfare can play an accessory role as a catalyst in a process that is decidedly non-militaristic. In the sacred commerce states of Mesopotamia, which will be discussed in the next chapter, warfare made its decisive appearance not at the beginning but at an intermediate stage of politogenesis.

It might be fair to claim that a statist worldview traditionally privileges essentialism and the symbolic stability that accompanies it. States often tend towards conservatism and seek stability, but they are driven to develop and progress by the adversity they provoke.

Within a stateless system of sedentary settlements, where a hierarchical, patriarchal, and bellicose culture predominates, raiding and eventually warfare can provide a pathway for politogenesis: the raider state. In a mutually reinforcing cycle of militarization, neighboring communities raid one another to steal resources, capture slaves, and force weaker villages to pay tribute and pledge obedience. Over time, elites impose more efficient means of economic exploitation in order to improve their town’s defenses, to sustain a larger warrior class, and to subsidize war-oriented technologies. To repeat an important point, state organization does not inherently give a society a military advantage; in fact decentralized societies tend to be the most effective at resisting invasion and conquest. But where an autochthonous elite already holds power, they will use situations of warfare to enact “security programs” that enhance their own power first and foremost, whether they are a stone-tool-using society in the Yucatan in 1000 CE or a nuclear society in North America in the twenty-first century.

Instead of protecting them, such security programs tend to put the population in even more danger, but as long as they believe the hype and don’t notice that it’s the fox who is guarding the henhouse, the policy will be successful. Just look at the anti-terrorism wars of Bush and Blair beginning in 2001: they exposed the populations of Europe and the United States to a huge increase in terrorist attacks, but rather than simply killing their leaders and being done with the whole circus, as reasonable people have done countless times throughout history, they were convinced to accept even more security measures and more supposedly defensive wars. States have been using the same trick for at least four thousand years.

Among stateless societies, constant raiding does not necessarily create greater levels of hierarchy. The indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon basin—a complex range of sedentary and nomadic societies of multiple ethno-linguistic groups, some living in tiny bands and others in huge villages, and nearly all of them resolutely stateless—were noted for their near-constant warfare. However, their practice of warfare, which was also complemented by a less visible practice of intermarriage and friendly trade, helped preserve the independence of individual communities and prevented state formation. Once again, the specific cultural values reproduced by a society—the intentions and the projectuality of its political actors—can cause the same situation to manifest in processes of state formation or state resistance.

The Aryan settlements of northern India might have given us an example of the raider state; certainly dynamics of a bellicose feedback loop established stronger hierarchies in a then-stateless society, but the Brahmans’ ambitious use of the emergent caste system caused politogenesis in India to take a different path. A process of mutual hostility clearly transformed and accelerated the process of state formation in Mesopotamia, fitting Spencer and Redmond’s “Rival Polity Model” in which conflict between neighboring societies spurs politogenesis; however, the intensification of warfare came after the emergence of multiple city-states following a religious pathway of development. Instead, we can turn to the early Zapotec state for our example.

The Zapotec state, with its capital at Monte Albán in the Oaxaca Valley, Mexico, was organized around 300 BCE. The capital city appeared as a regional center two hundred years earlier, in 500 BCE. The intervening years were times of raiding that gradually developed into territorial warfare, as Monte Albán subjugated its neighbors, constructed palaces and temples, and consolidated a four-tier settlement hierarchy of regional organization that spanned the Oaxaca Valley and beyond. [168]

The Monte Albán elite placed great symbolic importance on their military exploits. In the period from 500–300 BCE, when the city was hierarchically organized—though perhaps not enough to qualify as a state—the elite commissioned the engraving of hundreds of slabs and monumental stones with depictions of what seem to be slain and mutilated enemies, some of them leaders of neighboring settlements and others simple warriors or captives. Probably to remind their own people of their power (as a threat or a source of pride, or more likely both, given that patriotism in the present day can be seen to serve both functions), the city elite had the stones placed in the central plaza. In the second period (300–100 BCE), there appeared dozens of “conquest slabs” that “refer not to raiding but to a more complex form of warfare: the taking and holding of territory.” [169]

Curiously, some of the earliest conquests of the Zapotec occurred relatively far away from their capital, such as their 300 BCE takeover of the canyon Cañada de Cuicatlán, eighty kilometers to the north. Previously “the Cañada was occupied by 12 Perdido phase (750–300 [BCE]) villages,” which were burned to the ground, replaced by new sites dedicated exclusively to intensive agriculture and lacking the rich ceremonial life of the earlier society, and by a heavily fortified complex of seven sites that controlled the northern entrance of the Cañada. [170] It was only several hundred years later that the Zapotec state conquered and incorporated the much closer Ocotlán, Zimatlán, and Tlacolula localities within the Oaxaca Valley. Charles Spencer and Elsa Redmond argue that the settlements neighboring Monte Albán were conquered later because they resisted more effectively, evolving simultaneously and thus deploying defensive military technologies from the start.

Starting before 1000 BCE, in the locality where Monte Albán was later founded, there was a large agricultural settlement that would eventually grow to a population of around one thousand people. In the subsequent period, 700–500 BCE, changes in settlement patterns suggest increased warfare; raiding and the burning of settlements became common between the different localities of the Oaxaca Valley, and an uninhabited buffer zone appeared at their center. [171] Monte Albán may have been founded by survivors who either abandoned or fled the destruction of some of these earlier settlements, which for centuries dominated the region and later disappeared from the archaeological record. [172]

From 500–300 BCE, Monte Albán’s main rival in the Oaxaca Valley also took several steps towards state formation, possibly in response to increased raiding and hostilities. These included “population growth and nucleation, a more centralized community organization with a sizable public plaza, a three-level settlement-size hierarchy in the Ocotlán Zimatlán subregion, and restricted interaction” as seen by minimal trade with Monte Albán. [173]

The main settlement of that rival polity, El Mogote (also a rival of the abandoned settlement whose survivors possibly founded Monte Albán, suggesting a long-lasting hostility), seems to have been raided and torched around 330 BCE. Subsequently, the inhabitants rebuilt their central plaza thirty meters upslope in a more defensive location, with a protective stone wall. Despite the setback, the settlement grew by over one-third in the period between 300–100 BCE, when Monte Albán had already organized a state and begun its territorial expansion. Architectural and ceramic styles suggest that the rebuilt El Mogote (El Palenque) maintained its independence from Monte Albán and continued to develop in the direction of a state, as seen in the construction of a multi-room temple and a palatial dwelling for the leader or leaders. Hostility with Monte Albán seems to have been continuous, including a trade embargo; obsidian from central Mexico regularly made it as far as Monte Albán, but not to El Palenque, neither do Monte Albán’s fine ceramics appear in the archaeological record at El Palenque. There are also signs of increased warfare in this period, with the rebuilt settlement being completely burned and abandoned around 30 BCE. [174] Before its demise, the polity with its capital at El Palenque also developed the four-level settlement hierarchy that archaeologists consider definitive for qualification as a state.

The same process of politogenesis as the mutually hostile militarization of rival polities might also have occurred in the Yegüih polity in Tlacolula, to the east.

To summarize this chronology, several hundred years after the founding of sedentary agricultural communities, an increase in raiding led to changes in settlement patterns. Caught in a sort of feedback loop, the raiding became more violent. Reflecting the very bellicose culture that probably initiated the raiding and grew in response to it, communities imbued military actions with a central symbolic importance, as seen in the monumental engravings depicting vanquished foes, and in the burning of other settlements, an economically wasteful activity that goes beyond raiding for slaves or resources. There was a differentiation, at this time, between elite and non-elite members of the society, as seen in differences of material wealth and housing size. Nonetheless, neither trade and economic expansion nor religion seem to have been the motors of politogenesis. Less hierarchical societies in the region also experienced trade and growth. The construction of larger temples accompanied state formation, probably as a means for the new rulers to legitimate and augment their rule, but it was the plazas adorned with monuments to raiding and conquest—possible mustering grounds for the warriors—and not the temples that comprised the physical and symbolic center of the settlements.

Early on in this process, a mildly hierarchical society could win social consensus for a policy of constant warfare—despite the high social cost in casualties and the burning of settlements—by encouraging values of bravery and demonizing nonparticipation as cowardice. The competitive spirit that appeals to warriors even in stateless societies could intensify, given a tolerance for hierarchy. Elders who distinguished themselves in raiding would come to inhabit a privileged position, which they could use to encourage patriarchal and militaristic values. Non-warrior dependents (women, captives, nonparticipating men) could then be subjected to higher levels of exploitation and prevented from encouraging peaceful activities or reciprocal values. Priests or high-status families, together with elder warriors, could spur the young men into ever more violent and domineering forms of warfare, enabling economic accumulation, conquest, and the institutionalization of hierarchy, even though only a small minority would benefit from such developments. The cultural, psychological wage of constant opportunities for glory in battle was enough to harness an intermediate stratum—the warriors—to break social solidarity and avail the new elite with coercive powers.

An external or supra-local process accompanied the changes occurring at the community level. Smaller settlements quickly subordinated themselves to powerful neighbors, paying tribute and presumably participating in the military activities. This led to the emergence of regional powerhouses like Monte Albán and El Mogote, which reorganized the subordinate settlements in order to increase population, submit them to a hierarchical administration and economic exploitation, and increase their own defensive advantages. Parallel and interlinked processes of state formation in at least two subregions of the Oaxaca Valley acted as barriers to the expansionist desires of each polity, but these barriers were in fact a catalyst that spurred each polity to seek competitive advantages. The winner was the Monte Albán state, which militarized most rapidly, developing the administrative complexity that allowed it to conquer and occupy a weaker society a full eighty kilometers away, subsequently reorganizing its victim to support the exploitive and militaristic processes of state formation.

Within this model, growth is neither gradual nor geometrical, but a result of the political policies and military campaigns organized by the elite. Population growth is not the inevitable result of technological progress but an intentional strategy to foster defensive advantages. Intensified agriculture with irrigation, as at Cañada, was not an innovation by locals looking to improve their efficiency, but an imposition by the conquerors looking to increase output and steal all the surplus. In fact, we can imagine that the locals enjoyed a more leisurely existence when they practiced the supposedly more primitive agricultural method of alluvial flooding, and for them, the technological progress to fixed irrigation was accompanied by a dramatic increase in their labor requirements and a decrease in their quality of living.