58
Trigger, Bruce. (2008). “Early cities: craft workers, kings and controlling the supernatural”
(pp 58 - 66). In: Joyce Marcus and Jeremy Sabloff (eds), The Ancient City: new
perspectives on urbanism in the old and new world. New Mexico: A School for Advanced
Research.
Symbolic Approaches
Although addressed earlier by Paul Wheatley (1971), by the 1980s a growing interest in
cultural studies had resulted in increasing attention being paid to the conceptual, as well as
the functional, criteria that influenced the layout of cities and the nature and locations of
different types of monumental buildings within them. Each early civilization has long been
recognized as having developed its own distinctive monumental architectural style. Yet the
limited cross-cultural variation in the uses to Which buildings were put has attracted less
attention. Temples, palaces, and upper-class tombs all tended to evolve from earlier houses.
In many early civilizations, these structures were literally called gods´ houses, kings´ houses,
and houses of the City walls, fortresses, and frontier defenses were derived from the
fortifications of earlier times. Almost no buildings served specialized public functions in
early civilizations, as did the libraries, stadia, arenas, theaters, and baths that first appeared
in classical Western civilizations. Mesoamericans built elaborate stone ballcourts, but these
were religious structures and invariably part of temple complexes. From a functional point
of view, the monumental architecture of early civilizations was the domestic and defensive
structures of earlier eras writ large.
Yet the development of monumental architecture in all the early civilizations seems contrary
to what many cultural anthropologists and post-processual archaeologists might have
predicted. Radical relativism would suggest that the creation or noncreation of structures that
exceed in size and elaboration what was needed for practical purposes ought to reflect
idiosyncratically variable cultural traditions. To account for the universality of monumental
architecture in early civilizations, archaeologists have assumed that these buildings served a
variety of vital symbolic functions. They are believed to have affirmed the social importance
of those who ordered their construction—their size and splendor correlating with the power
and wealth of those individuals. The centrality, imposing size, and distinctive style of such
structures are also believed to have promoted social cohesion among the inhabitants of a state
by enhancing their sense of belonging to a well-defined polity. At the same time, the upper
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classes controlled who had access to such buildings, what went on inside them, and how
visible such activities were to ordinary people.
Very often, however, the largest single structures were erected at the time when the power of
early rulers was being consolidated (Rathje 1975), a period that also witnessed lavish
expenditures on rituals sponsored by the ruling class (Childe 1945). Monumental architecture
also expressed dynastic ambitions and achievements, helped to legitimate and empower
rulers who had usurped power or inherited office in an irregular manner, and served as a
strategy for disguising political weakness and coping with disasters (Marcus 2003b). The
Maya city of Tikal celebrated its defeat in AD 695 of the ruler of Calakmul by initiating an
elaborate building program that was both innovative and expressive of Tikal's renewed power
(Harrison 1999:125—146). Conversely, the Ur Ill rulers of southern Iraq expressed their
hegemonic control over neighboring city-states by erecting a series of ziggurats, or temples
built on solid brick platforms, of unprecedented size to honor the gods of these polities
(Crawford 1991:57—81). The Late Classic rulers of the Maya state of Palenque compensated
for their seemingly limited revenues and the small size of the buildings they were able to
erect with the exceptional beauty and harmonious proportions that their architects gave to
these structures (Freidel and Schele 1988:64—67). Although all the states belonging to a
single city-state system shared the same general architectural canons, each member state
tended to create a stylistic variant that visually expressed its own identity within the system.
In 1990 1 proposed that in all early civilizations the construction by the state and the upper
classes of buildings that were larger and more elaborate than functionally necessary suggests
that conspicuous consumption, as originally define by the economist Thorstein Veblen
(1899), was universally viewed as an expression of wealth and political power in these
societies (Trigger, 1990). For ordinary people who possessed provided the key to all forms
of ecological adaptation (Zipf 1949). The ability of to great surpluses and expend them on
projects that required vast amounts of human labor must have considerably enhanced the
prestige of these rulers among their subjects. If commoners also believed that these structures
increased the power of rulers by winning them the favor of the gods, it was so much the better
for rulers. Yet, if conspicuous consumption on monumental architecture constituted a way of
reinforcing political power in all early civilizations (a point that many CUItura11y
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relativistic, post-processual archaeologists ought to be reluctant to accept), this effort
grounded, not simply on the rationalist ecological and adaptive considerations that constitute
the focus of processual archaeology, but also on a highly specific metaphoriCal inversion of
the principle of least effort that seems to have been no less widely understood (Lakoff 1987;
Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Tilley 1999). This leads us into realm of cross-cultural
uniformities in human cognition of a sort long ignored by processual and post-processual
archaeologists but which nineteenth-century archaeologists attributed to "psychic unity," a
concept that we can now understand as desig nating a problem for study rather than an
explanation of what happened.
More specific cross-cultural uniformities characterized urban centers associated with either
city-states or territorial states, while differentiating these two types from one another. Cities
associated with city-states were relatively compact, and their centers were marked by large
buildings or complexes of buildings. In the Valley of Mexico, in Iraq, and among the Maya,
these were temples, many erected on high platforms and hence visible from afar. Palaces,
which functioned both as royal courts and as administrative centers, were located either
adjacent to the central temple complex or elsewhere in the city. Generally, palaces were only
one or two stories high. The centers of Yoruba cities were marked by the palace (afin), which
contained major shrines and meeting places for hereditary government officials, as well as
the royal residential complex.
Thus, the central symbolism of the city focused on religious or other corporate themes rather
than solely on the king. Temples or meeting places appear to have symbolized the unity of
at least some of these communities prior to the development of kingship• In early times in
Iraq, temple construction may have been the responsibility of individual temple corporations.
Yet, in historical times, all monumental buildings were constructed and maintained in the
name of the king. Nevertheless, temple complexes continued to dominate the urban landscape
of Iraq in Neo-Babylonian times no less than they had done in the third millennium BC.
Temples were also the most visible architectural symbols of Tenochtitlan and other cities in
the Valley of Mexico in the Late Aztec period no less than they had been at Teotihuacån
centuries earlier. Among the Classic Maya, where kings constructed major temples for their
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mortuary cults, the communal nature of such buildings was maintained by associating dead
kings major cosmic deities. It appears that, however powerful kings later became, symbols
of urban unity established at an early stage of urban development in city-states were able to
persist in these societies (Trigger 2003:123-131).
In territorial states, the layout of major urban centers tended to be dispersed rather than
nucleated. Rulers, members of the nobility, and high-ranking officials sought to live apart
from the rest of the urban population in residences separated from the settlements of elite
specialists and retainers. Temples, palaces, and administrative buildings often were located
within their own enclosure walls, which both protected and further isolated them from the
rest of society. The most impressive structures associated with the Egyptian Old Kingdom
administrative center at Mennefer (Memphis) were the royal pyramids and tombs of the upper
classes constructed just beyond the western edge of the Nile Valley. The main administrative
center consisted of an official palace and the temple of the local creator-god, surrounded by
the residences of civil servants, soldiers, priests, artisans, and retainers. Royal residential
palaces were located some distance away, near the pyramid of the reigning king (Trigger
2003:134—136).
At the center of the Inka capital of Cuzco, a zone between two small rivers was filled with
stone palaces belonging to the reigning and former kings, temples, cloisters for celibate
priestesses, and two large, contiguous squares where state rituals were performed. Adjacent
to this central area was Saqsawaman, which served as both a fortress and a ritual center.
Temples and palaces were not architecturally distinguished from each other; both consisted
of single-room buildings constructed around the insides of a number of enclosed courtyards.
Beyond the cultivated fields that surrounded the central core was a ring of settlements that
housed nobles who were not related to the Inka kings, soldiers, craftworkers, and retainers.
Still farther from the center were more farming communities and the elaborate rural
residences of Inka rulers and high-ranking members of the royal family. The mummified
bodies of dead kings and queens continued to reside in their palaces and rural residences,
attended by descendants who had not become kings. The older royal palaces in central Cuzco
also came to be used as centers for various cults of cosmic deities (Hyslop 1990).
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The most imposing structures erected in northern China during the Shang Dynasty were huge
enclosures with massive stamped-earth walls that appear to have served as elite-residence
compounds and administrative centers. Within these compounds, stamped-earth platforms
supported palaces and other elite buildings. Ancestor temples were located inside palaces.
Around these enclosures were dispersed villages occupied by elite craftsmen, cemeteries for
different classes of people, and at a greater distance, farm villages. The late Shang capital at
Anyang seems to have been even more dispersed. Near its center was an elaborate palace
complex but no evidence of a walled enclosure (Liu and Chen 2006; Trigger 2003:137—
139).
In Old Kingdom Egypt, government construction appears to have been confined to the royal
capital at Mennefer and to frontier regions. In most provincial centers, administrative offices,
storage facilities, and temples appear to have been built in variable local styles, even if their
construction and operation were paid for from government taxes (Kemp 1989:65—83). The
greatest construction projects were the pyramid complexes of successive kings. Egypt was a
small enough territorial state that most Egyptian males were likely to visit or pass through
the capital as corvée laborers at least once in their lifetime. Hence, Mennefer paralleled the
king as a unique entity symbolizing the unity of Egypt itself.
By contrast, the Inka established regional centers throughout their kingdom, were major
structures were buildings in Inka style. These centers were, like Cuzco, provided with all the
buildings and ceremonial loci that the king needed in order to perform essential rituals when
he was away from the capital waging war or inspecting While these communities did not
closely resemble cuzco visually, they had enough stat] features in common to make them
equivalent in the eyes of Inka ritualists. The Inka covered much more territory than did
ancient Egypt, and settled areas were separated by extensive tracts of uninhabited mountains
and deserts. Because of this, the Inka rulers constructed Inka-style buildings as symbols of
royal power in administrative centers throughout the kingdom (Hyslop 1990:174-176, 304-
306). The contrast between how the Inka and Egyptian states distributed architectural
symbols of royal power can thus be explained as adaptations to different ecological
conditions. Although the Inka created the first large state based in the central highlands of
Peru, they learned much from the successes and failures of many states that had preceded
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them in the Andean region. The even more striking, symbolic features that distinguished
urban centers in territorial states from those in city-states reflect still more important
differences in how class organization, political power, and social coherence were constituted
in these different types of states.
If monumental architecture is a universal form of conspicuous consumption in complex
societies, this constitutes an interesting expression of uniformity in human thinking. As
metaphors go, however, it is a fairly straightforward one. The distinctive architectural
expressions of power in city-states and territorial states carry cognitive parallels beyond the
limits that either processual or post-processual archaeological theory can explain and suggest
a sort of uniformity in human symbolic behavior that requires a different sort of explanation.
Emic Approaches
In recent years, post-processual archaeologists have sought to learn more about the culturally
specific ideas that the inhabitants of particular ancient cities had about them. Long before the
development of post-processual archaeology, this approach was pioneered by Joyce Marcus
(1973, 1976, with her systematic study of what was meant by the Maya concept of "the four
on high" (kan kaanal) when applied to the four Maya capitals (not always the same ones),
each of which presided over a regional hierarchy of settlements. Adam T. Smith
(2()()3:139—144) recently has proposed an alternative and more symbolic interpretation of
these data.
Cultural approaches of this sort generally assume that, In the absence of historical contacts,
there will be a vast amount of idiosyncratic variation in such beliefs from one early
civilization to another. At the level of specific beliefs, this has probably been the case, yet
not so in terms of general patterns of beliefs. Early cities generally appear to have been
regarded as places where the human and divine realms came into especially close contact.
Iraqi temples bore names such as the "House that is the Bond of the Sky and the Earth." The
ancient Egyptians believed that the major shrine in every provincial center marked the
location of the mound of creation, on which the god of that district had created the universe.
This involved his fashioning not only cosmic order, the other gods, the universe, and human
beings, but also cities, temples, and cult images (Meeks and Favard-Meeks 1996: 13—32).
Yoruba myths describe the god Oduduwa descending from the sky world to the site of his
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grove in the ancient city of Ife, where he created the terrestrial realm and the city of Ife itself.
Oduduwa became the first ruler of Ife, and his immediate male descendants became the kings
of the sixteen most prestigious Yoruba city-states (Awolalu 1979: 12—13). In the Aztec myth
of the Fifth Sun, the gods are described as re-creating the world in the ruins of the ancient
city of Teotihuacán (León-Portilla 1963:54—61).
Archaeologists have read much specific cosmic imagery into ancient cities, especially ideas
concerning centrality, directionality, and quadripartition. David O'Connor (1989b) maintains
that, in the New Kingdom, Egyptian royal cities were laid out along a north-south axis
associated with the king and the Nile River and an east-west axis associated with the sun.
Where these two axes intersected, they built the main temple and just north of the approach
to its western entrance constructed the official palace, where the king appeared as the earthly
representative and incarnation of the sun god. At Waset (Thebes) during the flood season,
the king and the cult statues of the local triad of deities were carried south to the temple of
Luxor, where the king's life force was rejuvenated. At the end of the harvest, the god Amun
proceeded westward to visit the royal mortuary temples on the opposite side of the Nile
Valley. In the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the Templo Mayor, located at the heart of the
city, was believed to mark the center of the universe. Here, it was thought, the cosmic energy,
which flowed down from the sky world and rose up from the underworld at the four quarters
of the earth to make terrestrial life possible, returned to its source. Thus, for the Aztecs, the
Templo Mayor was the most spiritually charged and important building in the world (Caso
1958:56—64). This pyramid temple's three tapered tiers, each with four sides, together with
its top platform, represented the thirteen levels of the sky world, its supporting platform the
earth, and its foundations the underworld, making it a cosmogram of the entire universe
(Broda et al. 1987; van Zantwijk 1985).
Today more cross-cultural regularities are being found in the cosmic symbolism of early
civilizations than many cultural anthropologists would have expected. Popular writers such
as Graham Hancock (Hancock and Faiia 1998) interpret these similarities as being
historically derived from a single mother civilization. If all early civilizations venerated a
creator sun-god called Re, archaeologists might be inclined to take such ideas seriously. Yet
many archaeologists follow the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1954), a
65
specialist on Siberian shamanism, in believing that a highly enduring and now worldwide
representation of the cosmos originated in Upper Paleolithic shamanism. This representation
postulated an axis mundi in the form of a centrally located cosmic tree or mountain that
connected the terrestrial world with supernatural realms above and below it; around this axis,
the human world was laid out in for quarters. Eliade´s ideas are often used to read meaning
into archaeological data in the absence of adequate, culturally specific documentation of what
these data meant to their creators creators (Wheatley 1971:417-418), a practice that
unwittingly may be mean exaggerating the extent of seeming cross-cultural uniformity in
cosmic imagery.
Concepts such as that of quadripartition were widespread in early which either civilizations,
of which saw either themselves or the terrestrial world of which divided into four quarters.
On closer inspection of what is known, however, it becomes clear that beliefs about
centrality, verticality, and quadripartition display less specific uniformity from one early
civilization to another than Eliade's followers believe. The desire to create cosmograms also
does not appear to have been as Elide's followers maintain (Trigger 2003:467-470). It is
shamanic beliefs of an idiosyncratic cultural nature could have survived in any recognizable
fashion for so long, in so many cultural traditions, through so many or dramatic economic
and social transformations. It seems at least as likely that such shared beliefs as there are
about cosmology reflect the basic sensory dynamics of how erect primates view the world
around them (front/back, left/right, (Mithen, 1996:235). The close identification in all early
civilizations, and in still earlier societies of what we differentiate as the natural and the
supernatural would have made it relatively easy to use how the world was habitually
perceived as a basis for speculating about its supernaturally determined structure.
We will gain accurate knowledge of how converging similar beliefs about the cosmic order
were accepted in early civilizations and the extent to which cities were viewed as microcosms
or cosmograms only after it has been determined, by means of detailed, case-by-case studies,
what people living in individual early civilizations thought about such matters (Flannery and
Marcus 1993; Kemp 2000 [1983b); M. E. Smith 2003, 2005a). This must be done by studying
texts that record the specific beliefs that people living in each early civilization held about
such symbolism and by comparing these findings with archaeological data. Epigraphers in
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Egyptology, Assyriology, and classical studies are well trained to do this sort of work. Such
investigations also accord with humanist traditions of research on early civilizations and with
the belief of cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz and post- processual
archaeologists that each culture must be understood on its own terms before comparing with
another. Research along these lines is already providing fascinating insights into the various
symbolic worlds of which ancient cities were a part. While much more research along these
lines is necessary before a proper comparative study can be undertaken of what early cities
meant to the people who lived in them, significant cross-cultural regularities are already
emerging that require explanation.
Conclusion
Most archaeologists who are trained in anthropology agree that all human behavior
cognitively, and therefore culturally, mediated; that humans adapt to environments not as
these really are but as they perceive and interpret these; and that a society's understanding
of its environment must be sufficiently realistic to give most societies, their people, and their
ideas a chance of surviving (Trigger 1998). That being so, it is not surprising that the findings
of the adaptationist and functionalist studies of the 1960s and 1970s and of the investigations
of the symbolic manipulation of material culture and its meaning that have flourished since
the 1980s—and that began much earlier—are proving to be generally complementary rather
than antithetical in nature. Although the prolonged confrontation between processual and
post-processual archaeology sharpened an understanding of what each of these positions has
to offer, both are now being seen as contributing in their own way to understanding early
cities and other aspects of ancient cultures. There is also growing agreement that studies of
ecological, social, and symbolic phenomena must be integrated into a holistic perspective. It
is therefore no accident that many archaeologists are advocating replacing theoretical
confrontation with attempts at a critical theoretical synthesis (Hegmon 2003; Marcus 2006;
O'Brien 2005; Pauketat 2003; Schiffer 1996, 2000; Skibo and Feinman 1999; Skibo et al.
1995; Trigger 2003).
There are, however, many aspects of ancient cities and the archaeological record generally
for which neither ecological-functionalist nor purely cultural explanations can account. Many
of these take the form of cross-cultural regularities that nineteen century anthropologists
67
would have discussed as examples of psychic unity. Explanations of this sort have in the past
played only a limited and informally recognized role in archaeology. Roland Fletcher (1977,
1995) has suggested that the hominid mind possesses inherent proxemic interpretive abilities
that produce significant uniformities, including cross-cultural uniformities, in the built
environment. Anthony Forge (1972:374) has argued that in communities with more than 400
members, it becomes cognitively impossible to handle all relations on a face-to-face basis
and that internal political segmentation and, therefore, more formal decision-making
arrangements become necessary. Sander van der Leeuw (1981) has suggested that any time
six or more social units need coordination, a new level of regulation is required. None of
these promising propositions has been adequately studied and tested by archaeologists or
other social scientists. To examine these and many other possible explanations and to account
for many cross-cultural parallels in human behavior and material culture would require
archaeologists and anthropologists to work more closely with psychologists, biologists,
geneticists, and neuroscientists. These are fields in which experts have long been eager to
offer biological explanations for uniformities relating to human behavior and cognition
(Butterworth 1999; Dennett 2003; Donald 1991; Gazzaniga 1992, 1998; Low 2000; Pinker
2002; Wilson 1978). Yet little that is of scientific value, and much that is socially and
politically dangerous, can result from such studies if they are not based on an informed
understanding of the influences that culture exerts on human behavior. Hence, the
involvement of anthropologists and archaeologists, with their broadly comparative
perspective on human behavior, is vital for the success of such investigations. There is,
however, the prospect that such research eventually may yield findings that are as interesting
as is the recent demonstration by linguists and geneticists that the human ability to form
plurals is controlled by a single gene (Gopnik 1997). 1 see this approach as a way of
enhancing our understanding of cross-cultural uniformities shaping the archaeological record
that so far have been ignored because they cannot be accounted for from an ecological-
functional perspective. Many of these uniformities relate to symbolic aspects of cultures.
Success in this endeavor would greatly expand the explanatory power of the cognitive-
processual approach to archaeological interpretation (Renfrew and Zubrow 1994).
