sey075

The book, Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States, by Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher, is the most important work published on ancient and premodern political dynamics for several decades. I just realized that I have yet to write a post on the book. I have mentioned it often in this blog since its publication in 2008, but now it is time to focus on it more directly. I will give just two reasons why all archaeologists concerned with states need to read the book and take its findings into account; there are lots of subsidiary reasons (such as, it is full of great historical details on 30 premodern states). 1. Blanton and Fargher have come up with a new and rigorous analysis of key dynamics of ancient state governments. They start with a branch of collective action theory associated with political scientist Margaret Levi that she has labeled the "predatory theory of rule" (Levi 1981, 1988). Levi argues that state revenues (a crucial part of state dynamics that ...

Q: Was this an urban settlement? I've just finished correcting proofs for an article ("Neighborhood formation in semi-urban settlements") in the Journal of Urbanism (Routledge journals). Most of my "corrections" were fixes of errors introduced in the editing process. This is always frustrating, but the manuscript was fill of these errors. It looks to me like many of the errors were produced by algorithms, not human beings. Perhaps the publisher is trying to save money by using automated bad editing instead of human editing. Here are a few examples. This paper described a joint research project, and it has eight authors. Every place where we used the term "our" was replaced, typically by "the" and occasionally by something else. Thus "Our research indicates...." became "The research indicates...." Increasing the occurrence of passive voice is a great editing trick, if the goal is to confuse the reader about the meaning of s...