War and early state formation in Oaxaca, Mexico

The origin of the state is one of the leading research problems in anthropology (1–4). Archaeologists have been especially concerned with the state; the earliest cases of state formation occurred long before detailed written records were kept and must be studied archaeologically. Although various theories of state origins have been proposed, researchers have increasingly turned their attention to the role played by warfare in state development (1, 5–12). In this issue of PNAS, Flannery and Marcus (13) discuss the archaeological evidence of changing warfare practices in Oaxaca, Mexico, from a pattern of raiding among early sedentary villages after 1500 before Christ (B.C.), through the emergence of the region's first conquest state ≈300–100 B.C. This commentary will highlight the close correspondence in time between the earliest evidence of territorial conquest and the earliest evidence of state organization in Oaxaca, a co-occurrence that lends empirical support to a theoretical model positing a causal link between conquest warfare and the rise of the state (11).

Of special importance for theories of state origins is primary state formation, i.e., when a first-generation state evolves in a context of nonstate societies, without contact with other preexisting states (11, 14). There have been few examples of true primary state formation worldwide (2). Within Mesoamerica, the earliest case of state formation, according to current evidence, was the Zapotec state of Oaxaca (9, 15, 16).

In an influential paper, Wright (3) characterized the state as a society with a centralized and also internally specialized administrative organization. He drew a contrast between the state and the chiefdom, the latter considered to be a society with a centralized but not internally specialized administration. Not all chiefdoms evolve into states, but it has been argued that all first-generation states evolved from …