8 8 Neo evolutionist conceptions (like the model developed by Marshall D. Sahlins and Elman R. Service) postulate a four-stage system for human societies: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states (1960). One of the reasons of its success, according to archaeologist Gavin Lucas, is that it offers a universal view of history in a unilinear, unidirectional sequence (2005, 13). In it, humankind seems to follow a single pattern of “progress” that goes from the simplest to the most complex forms of organization.
9 9 Major expert on early states, Norman Yoffee states that he, in his long career, has not been able to find a single case, either in the archaeological record or in the ethnohistorical one, where a chiefdom became a state – which is the kind of transformation expected by evolutionary narratives. On the contrary, in his research he has found that chiefdoms are invariably part of trajectories that are alternative to that of the state (2005, 31).
10 10 Even authors who, like Mann, are aware of the risks that the use of notions such as complexity entail, decide to use it anyway, albeit in a restricted sense (2005, 342). Maybe that explains his use of the expression “advanced” when he compares the degree of complexity or “civilization” achieved by different societies–say, the Maya and contemporary European societies (2005, 19).
11 11 For a detailed discussion of the place of indigeneity in Uruguay in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty first century, see Verdesio (2014, 2020a).
12 12 For a study on the new-age tourism attracted by Indigenous archaeological sites, see the classic ethnographic film by Jeffrey Himpele and Quetzil Castaneda (1997).
13 13 For a more detailed discussion of monumentality and some of the most influential studies on the subject produced by several disciplines, see Verdesio (2020b).
14 14 For an overview of the wide array of Andean cultures, see the books by Lumbreras (1989) and Moseley (2001). For research on Chavin de Huantar, see Burger (1995).
15 15 For a description of the difficult environmental conditions that peoples from the Puna, the Altiplano, the Coast, and the Amazon basin had to deal with, see Moseley (2001).
16 16 For an overview of the different stages (that is, arbitrary divisions proposed by archaeologists) in the history of human occupation of Mexico, see Coe (1994).
17 17 See the books by Emerson (1997) and by Pauketat and Emerson (1997), where the hypothesis that presents Cahokia as a paramount chiefdom is the point of departure of most of the analyses contained in those two volumes.
18 18 See also his ideas about this subject in a more recent book (2007).
19 19 This idea that America, before the arrival of Europeans, was a land whose nature was left undisturbed by human hands is shared by a significant number of modern-day scholars (Lentz 2000, 1).
20 20 There are estimates that establish the number of mounds and forest islands at 10,000 in the Bolivian Amazon (Erickson 2006, 257).
21 21 Erickson says: “The nature/culture dichotomy … and the anthropological concept of human adaptation have limited our understanding of the Amazonian environment” (2006, 265).
22 22 In the field of anthropology, a few hyphened ethnographies have emerged: collaborative, militant, engaged, and others (see Rodríguez 2019), while in the field of archaeology, there is a significant number of attempts at collaboration with Indigenous peoples (for a recent reflection on those cases, see Verdesio forthcoming 2021).
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