| The idea of the “state,” in Bronze Age Aegean terms, the “palaces,” has tended to encourage an evolutionary perspective and ultimately reductive chronological and functional definition of state-level integration—a complex political economy involving the centralization of prestige goods and human and agropastoral resources; the recognition of roles and acceptance of institutions that coordinate activities and maintain control by the projection of a dominant ideology through adapted or adopted symbolic systems. This notional definition of palatial economy has created not only a monumental concept of “palatial” as an ordered, stable, and unchanging integrated structure, but also a marked contrast to “pre-state” or “non-state” conditions. Intensive archaeological survey has helped to shape—actually reaffirm—this normative model equating complexity usually with settlement dispersal and visible indicators of site-size hierarchies which are related uncritically to the idea of a centralized political economy—the co-dependence of center and hinterland. This paper reexamines the notions of “pre-state” and “palatial” complexity by application of dual-processual theory and Marcus’s dynamic model, arguing for a discontinuous pattern in which the various palace states can be seen as fundamentally different phenomena, short-lived and largely unstable anomalies of cultural development. |
