Доклад Стивена Ковалевски "Advances in City-State Research, with an Example from Mesoamerica"

ABSTRACT

The last twenty years have seen advances in the understanding of city-states, which are territorially small states typically headed by a single urban center, each city-state being part of a much wider city-state culture. These advances were made possible by an approach that has discarded typology and instead uses variation as an analytical and explanatory instrument. For ancient Greece, with its rich textual sources, new theories about institutions and the ancient economy have transcended the older debate between primitivists and modernists. Archaeological research can also make significant contributions with its systematic studies of settlement patterns, urban and rural development, political and ritual activities, and other materializations of institutionalized behavior. Such archaeological data can be comparable across multiple city-states and are usually impossible to compile from contemporary texts. I assembled a new corpus of 74 city-states from Oaxaca, Mexico, that are known from both historical and archaeologicasl information. I show that these city-states differ from one another in patterned ways. I argue that this variation is due to both internal factors, especially the social mode of production, and external factors including place in regional and interregional exchange. My conclusions could be seen as broadening and complementary to the recent empirical and theoretical work on ancient Greece.

Заседание семинара состоится по адресу ул. Старая Басманная, д. 21/4, стр. 3 («корпус Л»), ауд. Л-413.

Студентам, преподавателям и сотрудникам вход свободный. Для заказа разовых пропусков просьба обращаться к менеджеру Международного центра антропологии А.О. Видничук по адресу avidnichuk@hse.ru.