早期酋长制群体的聚落形态比较研究——以内蒙古东部、安第斯山北部和美洲中部三个地区为例

Comparative Research on Settlement Pattern Of Early Chiefdom Communities: Eastern Inner Mongolia, the Northern Andes and Mesoamerica

对内蒙古东部、安第斯山北部和美洲中部三个地区的早期酋长制群体的聚落形态进 行的比较研究表明,尽管这三个地区的发展过程大致相当,但在这三个地区中,大体类似的转变 却以不同的方式发生,从而导致了三个各具特色的等级社会的出现。最初的、大规模的、以等级 制度原则组织起来的酋长制群体出现后,其发展轨道的早期阶段明显地为后来的、较大的、更复 杂的政治实体即国家的出现创造了条件。通过地域性聚落分析,可以发现这三个地区在不同规模 层次上的人口和社会组织的异同,其中在赤峰和奥哈卡(Oaxaca)地区都存在的小型群体却不见 于马格达雷那高地(AltoMagdalena)的现象,需要进行更深入的研究,才能进一步揭示出在马 格达雷那高地是什么样的社会交流把这些家庭联合成更大的社会团体。

No early chiefdom society was exactly like that of another region, but all represented the initial development of permanent hierarchical social relations in their respective regions. In these societies, those who would be chiefs were successful enough at forging unequal social relationships with other members of their own communities that the fundamental organizing principles of those communities were transformed. The communities involved in this transformation existed at varying social and spatial scales: we commonly think of small local communities composed of those in face to face interaction on a daily basis nested within higher order communities, which were sometimes nested within yet larger communities. From this perspective, the emergence of chiefdoms is marked by the emergence of larger, more tightly integrated communities than had existed previously. Settlement pattern research on a regional scale provides an opportunity to delineate and compare these communities, based on the assumption that they are reflected in the way human settlement is distributed across the landscape at a given time. Comparison of the settlement pattern records for the Chifeng, the Alto Magdalena (Colombia) and the Valley of Oaxaca (Mexico) shows that chiefdom communities emerged under conditions of especially low population density in Chifeng and Oaxaca, and their development was especially rapid in Oaxaca and the Alto Magdalena. It appears that interaction patterns were structured much more strongly around small local communities in Chifeng and Oaxaca than in the Alto Magdalena. It was also in Chifeng and Oaxaca that chiefdoms were succeeded eventually by large integrated state level organization, whereas this did not occur in the Alto Magdalena sequence.