The Political Economy of Livestock in Early States

Abstract

Animals were central elements in many early state political economies. Yet the roles of livestock in building and financing the state generally remain under-theorized, particularly in comparison with other major elements such as crop intensification and bureaucratic technologies. We compare the political economies of two highly centralized and expansive states—the Inca in the central Andes and Ur III in southern Mesopotamia—through a deliberately animal-focused perspective that draws attention to the unique social and economic roles of the livestock that underpinned both imperial financing and household resilience. Despite important differences in the trajectories of the two case studies, attention to the roles played by animals in early states highlights several underlying dynamics of broader interest including the translation between modes of production and accumulation, the interplay between animal-based mobilities and territorial integration, and the functions of livestock in state regimes of value and political subjectivity.

Full text

The Political Economy of Livestock in Early States
Noa Corcoran-Tadd , Max Price & Ari Caramanica
Animals were central elements in many early state political economies. Yet the roles of
livestock in building and financing the state generally remain under-theorized,
particularly in comparison with other major elements such as crop intensification and
bureaucratic technologies. We compare the political economies of two highly centralized
and expansive states—the Inca in the central Andes and Ur III in southern
Mesopotamia—through a deliberately animal-focused perspective that draws attention
to the unique social and economic roles of the livestock that underpinned both imperial
financing and household resilience. Despite important differences in the trajectories of
the two case studies, attention to the roles played by animals in early states highlights
several underlying dynamics of broader interest including the translation between
modes of production and accumulation, the interplay between animal-based mobilities
and territorial integration, and the functions of livestock in state regimes of value and
political subjectivity.
Animals—particularly livestock—form key yet still
significantly undertheorized components of early
state political economies. Across the long history of
thinking about the origins of the state and the work-
ings of state finance in preindustrial contexts, scho-
lars have highlighted the formative roles played by
technologies like crop cultivation, storage, irrigation
networks and recording systems (D’Altroy & Earle
1985; Hirth 2020; Wittfogel 1957; Wright & Johnson
1975). And while many have articulated the import-
ant roles of livestock and pastoralism in early states
(e.g. deFrance 2009; Zeder 1994), these approaches
have tended to view animals as interchangeable
with other agricultural products. That is, animals
are depicted simply as a source of calories, protein,
or fibre. While important, the relegation of the
value of livestock to the realm of subsistence has
tended to flatten the particular qualities of livestock
—including their mobility, their nature as animate
beings, and their relationships of interdependency
with human caretakers—which frequently made
them subject to intense political attention. In this art-
icle, we argue that livestock represented a special cat-
egory of wealth in early states that merits further
analysis. Examining the politics and economics of
the early state through the lens of the animal not
only restores an important element to our analyses
of state societies, but also allows us to trace vital con-
nections across multiple dimensions of state power
and its limits. We demonstrate this approach in
two case studies: the Inca in the central Andes and
Ur III in southern Mesopotamia.
Political economy, livestock and approaches to the
early state
In placing animals centre-stage in the analysis of
early states, we follow the lead of other ‘social
zooarchaeologists’—as well as the wider ‘animal
turn’across the humanities (Boyd 2017)—who have
begun to examine the place of animals within socio-
political structures (Arbuckle & McCarty 2014;
deFrance 2009; Grossman & Paulette 2020; Russell
2011). While much previous work has focused pri-
marily on the consumption of animals (particularly
through the ever-popular lens of feasting), we
argue that animals acted as a complex ‘glue’that
held together multiple domains of the body politic.
Cambridge Archaeological Journal 33:1, 119–136 © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the McDonald Institute
for Archaeological Research. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
doi:10.1017/S095977432200021X Received 23 Sep 2021; Accepted 24 Jun 2022; Revised 30 May 2022
https://doi.org/10.1017/S095977432200021X Published online by Cambridge University Press

As stores of value, objects of taxation and tribute,
means of production, pack animals, and key military
elements, domesticated livestock in particular were
crucial to state finance and territorial integration.
As animate beings that were owned and controlled,
they supplied both walking metaphors of political
subjectivity (Arbuckle & McCarty 2014) and the
media for sacrificial and divinatory spectacle
(McAnany & Wells 2008). At the same time, animals
allowed some households and other social groups
various levels of autonomy from the dominance of
the early state (e.g. Salzman 2004; although see
Honeychurch 2014). Documenting these dimensions,
and the tensions between them, are vital components
to an integrative approach to the political economies
of early states.
With our examination of livestock in early states
through the lens of ‘political economy’, we situate
our intervention within a broad tradition of historical
materialist analysis that foregrounds the relation-
ships between state making and the realms of mater-
ial production and reproduction (Earle 2002; Smith
2004). The term ‘political economy’refers to the
ways in which the production, distribution and con-
sumption of human labour and its products deter-
mine pattern the access to and reproduction of
power within a society (Roseberry 1989, 44; Earle
2002, 1). In line with this approach, we begin with
the premise that, among other core functions, states
are built around institutions concerned with the
hegemonic appropriation, management and circula-
tion of resources including land, water, human
labour and livestock (D’Altroy & Earle 1985;
Rosenswig & Cunningham 2017).
Yet the mobilization of multiple forms of wealth
—including livestock—in projects of state finance
also articulates with other sources of social power.
Mann’s(1986) analytical framework usefully distin-
guished ideological, economic, military and political
sources of power. While we differ from Mann in giv-
ing greater primacy to the economic, his broadly
integrative approach encourages us to consider the
multiple sources of social power and to think cre-
atively across divergent perspectives on the state.
Building on this framework, we can systematically
explore how livestock played key roles not only in
expanding the economic sources of power of early
states, but also facilitated the exercise of violence, the
integration of new territorial forms, and projects of sub-
ject formation.
As scholars from Max Weber to Charles Tilly
have argued, the exercise and control of violence
forms a key basis for the reproduction of state
power. The development of both military ‘war
machines’and ‘ritual economies’predicated upon
the violent destruction of humans and animals not
only reproduced the military and ideological sources
of power, but, in necessitating the mobilization of
resources, had significant implications for strategies
of institutional finance. As the case studies suggest
below, finance in early states often focused on sup-
plying animals—as sacrificial victims, means of
transporting materiel, and, indeed, active participa-
tion in combat—for the purpose of state-sanctioned
violence.
The state as the political ordering of territoria-
lized space forms a related perspective that runs
through much of the seminal literature on state for-
mation, both ancient and modern (Anderson 1979;
Smith 2015). This approach foregrounds the state as
a particular spatial scale, with fundamental implica-
tions for economic connectivity, military coercion
and claims of political sovereignty. While not a
necessary condition for large-scale projects of inte-
gration, animals, in their ability to transport humans,
things and themselves across broad swaths of terri-
tory, were repeatedly mobilized for these ends across
the history of preindustrial states, particularly when
we look over the long term at the emergence of
expansive imperial polities.
The state as project of subject formation has coa-
lesced more recently as a focus for inquiry, with the
varied projects of both homogenizing and differenti-
ating subjects forming a vital basis for rule. Drawing
particularly on the work of Gramsci and Foucault,
scholars have sought to understand how the experi-
ences of labour, techniques of government and state-
produced media combine to shape both the making
of individuals into subjects and the development of
state-oriented subjectivities (Alonso 1994; Kosiba
2012). Animals have often played key roles in these
dynamics, both as objects of institutionalized labour
processes and as the sources of powerful naturalizing
metaphors.
Finally, we recognize that states were (and are)
incomplete projects (Graeber 2004; Scott 2009).
Particularly in ancient states, the claims of kings,
governors and other institutional actors should be
read not as reflections of political reality but as part
of ‘a cohering discourse of desire’(Richardson 2012,
4). In seeking to understand what early states could
and could not do (Covey 2015; Yoffee 2005), it can
be insightful to critically examine the effective limits
of state control and influence. As we show, even in
the highly centralized cases of Ur III and the Inca,
important (and often animalized) informal and
autonomous economies lay partly or fully beyond
the reach of the state.
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Case studies
The two case studies—theUrIIIstate(c. 2112–2004 BCE)
in southern Mesopotamia and the Inca state (CE 1400–
1532) in the central Andes—serve to illuminate our
arguments in two important respects.
First, both are particularly well documented in
comparison with many other early states.
Unusually detailed insights into the Ur III political
economy are possible thanks to the approximately
100,000 published cuneiform tablets (Englund 2012,
431; Sharlach 2004,1–3). Early colonial texts by
Spanish and indigenous authors have also provided
fundamental insights into the Inca political economy
(D’Altroy 2015; Murra 1975), albeit with significant
biases towards a top-down and often idealized vision
of the workings of state administration. These textual
insights are increasingly complemented by archaeo-
logical research, particularly in the Inca case, where
the past century of archaeological research on the
Inca has been substantial (Alconini & Covey 2018),
with empirical results including a growing number
of published zooarchaeological assemblages. By con-
trast, there are few published zooarchaeological data
for the Ur III period, exceptions being the small
assemblages from Nippur (Boessneck & Kokabi
1993) and Uruk (Boessneck 1993).
Second, with their histories of rapid political
expansion, highly centralized economies and exten-
sive bureaucratic record-keeping, the Ur III and
Inca empires stand as useful ‘limit cases’. Given
that the production, circulation and consumption of
livestock appear to have played particularly key
roles in these two particular political projects (in con-
trast with, for instance, the Mexica in late pre-
conquest Mesoamerica), the case studies outline the
outer bounds of the potential impacts of animals on
early state projects.
There are also important differences that separ-
ate the two cases. The alluvial plains and waterways
at the core of the Ur III polity contrast with the Inca
montane heartland. The Inca Empire was also much
larger than the Ur III territory (1.96 million versus
256,000 sq. km, following maps in D’Altroy (2015)
and Steinkeller (2020)). The suite of domesticated
mammals forms a third contrast. In the Andes,
there were two large animals (llamas and alpacas
[the domesticated camelids]), in addition to dogs
and guinea pigs; a more complex package defined
third-millennium Mesopotamia, including sheep,
goats, pig, cattle, donkeys, dogs and horses.
Animals in the Ur III Period
Ur III was the last major native Sumerian state in
Mesopotamia. The dynasty began in 2112 BCE,
when Ur-Nammu, the governor of Ur, set out to con-
quer the other Sumerian cities (Table 1; Stepien2009,
10–15). The exact nature of the Ur III state is much
debated; here, we largely follow the interpretations
of Steinkeller (1987;2020), Stepien(2009) and
Sharlach (2004).
A pivotal moment for the Ur III state coincided
with the 48-year reign of Ur-Nammu’s son Shulgi,
who introduced several major reforms. These
reforms restructured Sumerian society into a stream-
lined imperial system. Some were ideological, includ-
ing the formal deification of the king. Structural
changes included the creation of a standing army
and the standardization of bookkeeping, weights
and measures and the calendar. The Ur III polity
was also reorganized into three regions (Fig. 1),
Table 1. Chronology of Mesopotamia during the third millennium BCE.
Period and rulers Dates BCE Political history
Early Dynastic Period c. 2900–2350 Competing city-states
Occasional pre-eminence of one ruler/dynasty
Akkadian Empire c. 2350–2150 Empire uniting much of Mesopotamia
Ur III
Ur-Nammu 2112–2095
Founding of dynasty at Ur
Conquest of Sumer and Akkad
Wars against Gutians and Elamites
Shulgi 2094–2047 Massive reform of state institutions
Amar-Su’en 2046–2038
Shu-Sin 2037–2029 Beginning of financial troubles
Ibbi-Sin 2028–2004 Foreign invasions and famine
Ur sacked by Elamites in 2004 BCE
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each with a unique relationship to state power and its
fiscal regimes. The outer zone consisted of tribute-
paying vassal states and allies. In the second zone,
the peripheral provinces, the state settled soldiers,
who paid taxes annually in animals to the state.
Royal collection centres, especially Puzriš-Dagan,
were set up to facilitate these transactions.
Within core provinces of Sumer and Akkad, the
Ur III state placed a military commander (šagina),
usually a non-local elite who reported to the crown
via the sukkal-mah [state chancellor], in charge of
royal estates. The crown also maintained royal
‘industrial’complexes for the production of key com-
modities like woollen textiles. These royal domains
existed in parallel to the traditional temple estates
of each core province, which were placed under the
administrative control of governors (ensi), usually a
member of the local elite. Together, these institutional
sectors existed side-by-side with more informal ones,
including ‘private’family-based production and
exchange, mercantile activity and lending (Garfinkle
2004; Steinkeller 2002). Another potentially important
economic sector was agricultural land collectively
owned by kinship groups (Diakonoff 1974). To extract
resources from the temple domains, the Ur III state
instituted a taxation system (especially the bala)
which required extensive mobilization of corvée
labour from the free population (Klein 1995,844–6;
Steinkeller 1987,16–17; Stepien2009,16–28).
Shulgi’s three successors ruled the Ur III state
for another 43 years (Stepien2009,28–50). Their
reigns were characterized by increasing anxiety
over foreign invaders, in particular the Amorites
(Steinkeller 2020, 67). The later years of Ibbi-Sin’s
reign saw famine and military disaster, with the
defection of the governor of Isin and the Elamite
sack of Ur in 2004 BCE delivering the final blows to
the Ur III state (Stepien2009,46–7).
Finance
Whether appropriated through taxation or raised dir-
ectly within the royal domain, animals were a crucial
means of finance. Here, we focus on the mobilization
of domestic mammals—sheep, goats, cattle, and
Figure 1. Map of the Ur III polity. (After Roaf 1990, 102.)
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equids—although we recognize that fish (especially
‘carp’suhur
ku6
or eštub
ku6
) and fowl were also har-
vested, raised by specialists and collected by institu-
tions in large numbers. Many temple administrations
featured overseers of fowlers (ugula mušen-dù) and
fishermen (ugula šu-ku
6
) (Borelli 2020). Regarding
the mammalian livestock, the c. 12,000 texts from
Puzriš-Dagan indicate that these species served mul-
tiple functions: the storage of value, provisioning for
soldiers and other state dependents, sacrifices to
gods (including the deified king) and gifts to elites
(see e.g. Grossman & Paulette 2020; Sallaberger
2004; Zeder 1994, 180). In addition, caprines, cattle
and equids were important means of production in
both the core and the peripheral provinces: cattle
and donkeys provided traction for cereal production,
while sheep and goats produced fibre for textile
production.
Animals functioned prominently in taxation,
which took several forms in the Ur III state. The best-
known of these is the bala (‘rotation’), obligatory pay-
ments in kind collected by the crown from the temple
sectors of each of the two dozen core provinces
(Sharlach 2004). There is some debate about the flow
of animals in the bala system (Adams 2006;Englund
2012,457;Sharlach2004,134–42; Steinkeller 1987,
24). Specifically, it is unclear whether the crown col-
lected animals from the temple sector via the bala or
merely distributed animals (especially cattle and
sheep) back into temple domains. But in any event,
animals took on a crucial role in mediating the rela-
tionships of indebtedness between ensi and king,
province and empire via the bala system.
The crown extracted animal wealth in three
ways. First, there were the masdaria obligations, paid
by the ensi and other temple officials to the crown in
livestock and silver (Sharlach 2004, 162). Through
this and other taxes, the crown collected large quan-
tities of animal wealth. For example, the province of
Lagash owed 10 per cent of sheep, goat and cattle off-
spring, as well as the same portion of the wool and
dairy production each year (Englund 2012, 457).
Second, there was the gun
2
-ma-da [tax of the pro-
vinces], paid annually to the crown by soldiers settled
in the peripheral provinces, drawing on the significant
animal wealth of the piedmont and montane regions.
Soldiers sent live animals—sheep, goats, cattle and
sometimes gazelle or other wild animals—to Puzriš-
Dagan (Adams 2006; Michalowski 1978; Sharlach
2004,162–3; Steinkeller 1987). Finally, raiding was a
significant source of income and of animal wealth in
particular (Garfinkle 2014, 357).
While extracting animal wealth, the Ur III state
also produced its own on its extensive royal
domains. In addition to the royal domains operated
by a šagina, in some case, the royal family directly
controlled the temple economies of certain provinces,
as appears to be the case at Ur and Uruk (Sharlach
2004, 6). We know little about affairs of the royal
domains, but the assumption is that they operated
in the same way as the better-known institutional
economies of the temples, where cattle, equids and
especially caprines were amassed in large numbers.
One text from Girsu (TUT 27:10’-r.8) indicates
74,533 sheep and goats in the temple’s herds
(Sallaberger 2014a, 106). The herd managed by the
royal province of Ur is estimated to have included
320,000 sheep (Sallaberger 2014a, 106). Meat produc-
tion, provisioning the armies and workers and the
supplying of temples with sacrificial animals were
major goals of institutional animal management
(see Sallaberger 2004). Adams (2006, 144) speculates
that the ‘centrifugal’movement of animals from
royal administrative centres to temples and provin-
cial elite ‘may have been the real glue holding the
empire together’. Secondary products also formed a
vital aspect of institutional wealth accumulation.
Cattle and, to a lesser extent, donkeys ploughed
and prepared fields for cultivation (Borrelli 2020,
46; Van Lerberghe 1996, 114), facilitating the produc-
tion of surplus grain, while sheep and goats pro-
duced wool/hair. Both of these commodities were
essential for institutional finance, mobilized to sup-
ply dependent workers and consigned to merchants
for exchange (Sallaberger 2014a, 97).
Political subjectivity
Within the imperial core, Sumerian society consisted
of several status groups, each experiencing distinct
political subjectivities mediated through labour
appropriation (Englund 2012; Steinkeller 2013;
Wright 1998). Most Sumerians were erin
2
[free citi-
zens], a multi-class social category comprising small-
holders, the ensi and everyone in between (Steinkeller
2013). Adult male erin
2
owed 15 days per month to
the temple institutions, for which they were compen-
sated in barley, wool, and other commodities and, for
higher-ranker erin
2
, usufruct rights to plots of land
(Englund 2012; Wright 1998, 64).
Below the erin
2
were semi-free ‘menials’
(Steinkeller 2013, 365) or ‘corporate slaves’
(Englund 2012, 432) who belonged to institutions.
They included UN-íl [male porters], guru
š
[male
workers], and geme
2
[female workers]. These indivi-
duals possessed few rights, but could not be bought
and sold. Working full-time, they were provided
with monthly rations of barley (30 l for women, 60 l
for men) (Englund 2012; Wright 1998). Finally,
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though playing a minimal role in the institutional
economies, sag (chattel slaves) were bought and
sold with silver. They worked full time for similar
minimum monthly rations of barley apportioned
according to their gender (Wright 1998).
Animals and their products played a significant
role in the making of these subjectivities. First, the
traction provided by cattle and donkeys acted as
labour multipliers in surplus grain production,
which was dispensed by institutions as rations to
workers. Second, the increased scale of institutional
livestock production relied on dependent and con-
tracted pastoralist labour. Finally, wool production
played a singularly important role in political subject-
ivity and (gendered) labour appropriation. Plucking,
sorting, combing, dyeing, spinning and weaving all
required massive labour investments (Breniquet
2014; Firth & Nosch 2012, 72). For instance, 15,000
women worked in the institutional workshops of
Lagash. Echoing textile labour practices in other
time periods (from Inca workshops to the factories
of the Industrial Revolution), the Ur III state followed
long-standing Mesopotamian traditions in appropriat-
ing primarily female labour as textile production was
scaled-up from the domestic to the institutional
domain (McCorriston 1997; Zagarell 1986).
In addition to facilitating certain forms of labour
and labour appropriation by institutions, we also sug-
gest (pace Grossman & Paulette 2020)thatanimals
provided important metaphors of subjectivity in the
Ur III state. Others have noted that Mesopotamian
administrators treated humans and animals analo-
gously (Algaze 2001; Tani 2017). Bookkeepers punc-
tiliously tracked the age, sex and health status in a
schema that rendered both human labour and animal
holdings as abstracted (and seemingly fungible) units
of management. Additionally, royal texts mobilized
pastoral imagery as a metaphor for political subjectiv-
ity, with the king referring to himself as a ‘shepherd of
the people’(e.g. Klein 1995, 848). This literary trope,
taken up and expanded upon by later
Mesopotamian dynasties, conveyed that the king pro-
tected his flock and provided it with abundance,
while naturalizing kingly authority (Winter 1987).
Violence
While animals were regularly sacrificed in large
numbers as part of temple ritual activities, there is lit-
tle evidence of the spectacles of mass animal slaugh-
ter seen in the Inca case. Nevertheless, animal
imagery helped naturalize violence. As in other
Mesopotamian dynasties, Ur III kingship was asso-
ciated with lions, the archetypal enemy of livestock.
Seals of Mesopotamian kings frequently depict the
king wrestling lions and, by extension, protecting
the herd. Yet, in a case of symbolic inversion, the
king also was the lion. The paradox is clear in the
praise poem ‘Shulgi, King of the Road’. Prior to
claiming to be a shepherd of the people, Shulgi
declares ‘Iamafierce-faced lion’(Klein 1995, 848).
The king as both shepherd and lion captures the con-
tradictions at the heart of Mesopotamian statecraft,
with its dual provision of security and violence.
The state also mobilized animals in military
endeavours, especially donkeys or equid hybrids.
Direct evidence for their use in the Ur III period is
surprisingly limited. Nevertheless, the Standard of
Ur, dating to the tweny-sixth century BCE, suggests
equids pulled four-wheeled battle carts (Ławecka
2017) as well as transporting baggage and equip-
ment. Tsouparopoulou and Recht (2021) also argue
that dogs were used in warfare, with possible active
roles in combat or scouting for the Ur III army.
Territorial integration
While much of the transportation in Sumer relied on
waterways (Algaze 2001), animals played an import-
ant role in integrating territory under Ur III hegem-
ony. First, equids facilitated overland trade,
particularly with northern Mesopotamia and the
Zagros. Indeed, donkeys figure prominently in texts
and artwork in third-millennium northern
Mesopotamian cities such Nagar (Tell Brak), Ebla
and Mari (Sallaberger 2014b). Donkey-riding
‘mounted messengers’(ragaba) were so common—
and the flow of information that they enabled across
the territory of the state so important—that their
records comprise an entire genre of Ur III texts (e.g.
D’Agostino & Pomponio 2002). Similar to Inca tam-
bos, special rest houses (e
2
-kas
4
) were set up at regular
intervals to provide food and rest for equids and
their riders (Veldhuis 2001).
Second, through their periodic movement, ani-
mals served to connect productive pastoralist land-
scapes directly to the imperial core. This was
perhaps most conspicuous in the collection of the
gun
2
-ma-da, which created an annual stream of tens
of thousands of animals flowing from the peripheral
provinces to the royal collection centre at
Puzriš-Dagan. In parallel with the mobilization and
movement of soldiers across the empire, the state-
driven flow of animals into the inner provinces
would have made visible to all the hierarchical inte-
gration of Ur III territory.
Animals outside the state
The limited amount of zooarchaeological data makes
our approach to animals outside the Ur III state
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indirect, since most texts document the administra-
tive activities of the institutional economies. A few
private (or semi-private) records exist (e.g. Nippur
and Garšana), but exclusively from elite households;
the Garšana texts, for example, document a royal
family member’s estate (Owen & Mayr 2007). These
texts can hardly be taken as representative of every-
day economics across the household and informal
sectors, but they do offer some insights.
One striking contrast between the private
household texts and those of institutions from
Puzriš-Dagan, Umma, Girsu and Ur is the mention
of pigs. The Garšana documents, for example, men-
tion the construction of piggeries (é-šah) (Owen
2006). This situation contrasts with extremely few
references to pigs in the institutional corpus. Pigs
were important features of the household and infor-
mal sectors of the Sumerian economy, perhaps even
the dominant source of meat in some households.
Indeed, among the published Ur III faunal assem-
blages, pigs are the most common taxon (45 per
cent NISP) at Nippur (Boessneck & Kokabi 1993)
and represent 32 per cent of the fauna from Uruk
(Boessneck 1993). The relative lack of textual attesta-
tions of pigs does not indicate that pork was unim-
portant in the Sumerian diet, but rather suggests
that Ur III state institutions almost completely
ignored this major feature of the agropastoral
economy.
In addition to pigs, much sheep and goat herd-
ing must have taken place beyond the gaze of the
state—or, indeed, in opposition to it or its goals.
While the steppe-sown dichotomy has been critiqued
(e.g. Arbuckle & Hammer 2019; Makarewicz 2013),
mobility afforded by caprine herding could have
offered an escape route from the state (Salzman
1999, 38). On a more mundane level, the nature of
institutional sheep and goat herding probably pro-
vided opportunities for graft. Ur III texts record con-
tracts between herders and officials, deliveries of
animals, biannual corralling of sheep for plucking
and accounting of dead stock. They do not, however,
document animal management itself, which took
place beyond the direct gaze of the state (Adams
2006). In fact, Adams (2006) argues that shepherds
(sipa) in the Ur III texts often acted more as liaison
between administrators and on-the-ground animal
caretakers. Herders may have had a significant
amount of liberty in deciding where and how
sheep and goats were managed and the possibility
for skimming may have been tempting—and per-
haps even necessary given the high risks and low
rewards faced by herders in Ur III contracts
(Adams 2006, 149). Tani (2017, 125–50) suspects
skimming from institutional herds occurred fre-
quently based on expected and reported birth rates
and herd losses in ancient Mesopotamian texts.
Animals in the Inca Empire
The Inca Empire was the largest and most trans-
formative state project in the preconquest Americas
(Fig. 2). Beginning around CE 1400, it expanded
from a regional polity in the Cuzco valleys to an
empire integrating hundreds of political communi-
ties from the intensive agriculturalists of the Chimú
Empire on the Peruvian north coast to the fisher-
foragers and hunter-horticulturalists of central Chile
and Argentina (Table 2; Alconini & Covey 2018;
D’Altroy 2015). While there were important eco-
logical differences across this vast area, the preceding
millennia of mobility and exchange had also ensured
that a broad suite of animals were already exploited
across much of western South America: domesticated
camelids (llama and alpaca), dogs, guinea pigs and
ducks, as well as wild camelids (guanaco and
vicuña), deer, vizcachas, fish, shellfish and birds
(Capriles & Tripcevich 2016; Stahl 2008).
The upper levels of imperial administration
were organized territorially, with over 80 provincial
governorships grouped into the four sectors that con-
stituted the Inca empire of Tawantinsuyu. Beneath
these levels, Inca subjects were ideally organized
decimally with nested units up to 10,000 members,
although such a fundamental reorganization of
socio-political hierarchies seems to have been
attempted only in the core provinces closer to
Cuzco (D’Altroy 2015, 354–6). This administrative
structure oversaw a political economy that can
broadly be described as tributary, with goods and
services due to the state and temple systems via
corvée obligations (Kolata 2013, 144–5; Murra
1968). In addition to mobilizing corvée labour for
state projects of production and infrastructural
expansion, the Inca state relocated entire communi-
ties of labourers. These activities were coordinated
by the administrative hierarchy’s accountants via
the quipu record-keeping system (Lechtman 1993).
In parallel with the Ur III state, comparative
analyses have tended to see the Inca as a particularly
centralized form of early absolutist state, with strong
top-down interventions that sought (often success-
fully) to reorganize Andean political economies sub-
stantially (e.g. Kolata 2013). Others have complicated
this picture, arguing for the agency of intermediate
(non-Inca) elites (Malpass & Alconini 2010) and spa-
tially heterogeneous patterns of selectively intense
rule (Williams & D’Altroy 1998).
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Finance
Andean economies under Inca hegemony can be pro-
visionally understood as comprising four main divi-
sions: the administrative state, the shrine system
(including the temple of the Sun), the royal estates
and subject communities (with resources held at
the household and supra-household levels)
(D’Altroy 2015; although see Moore 1958). The
agricultural sector was central in shaping pro-
vincial strategies across the empire: through the
appropriation of land, the reorganization of the
labour force through mit’acorvée obligations, and
investment in terracing and storage facilities, the
state was able to generate and manage an unprece-
dented surplus of maize and tubers (D’Altroy 2015;
Kolata 2013; Kosiba 2018).
Pastoralism formed a second important sector
of the Inca economy. Colonial textual sources have
provided major insights into the institutions of live-
stock management in the Inca political economy
Figure 2. Map of the Inca Empire.
(After D’Altroy 2015,figure 1.1.)
Noa Corcoran‐Tadd et al.
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(Flores Ochoa 1970;Murra1966;1975). According to
these texts, livestock and pastures were appropriated
from conquered communities and recategorized (in
parallel with agricultural lands) along the tripartite
divisions of state, temple and community properties
(Cobo 1990, 211–16). In addition, all wild camelids
were claimed as property of the temple of the Sun.
The bureaucratic state and religious institutions
raised camelids in domain herds, with colonial
sources suggesting that these herds were sometimes
substantially larger than those belonging to house-
holds and communities (Murra 1966). In addition,
there were ‘private’estate herds that appear to
have existed as part of royal domains alongside the
bureaucratic state (Quave 2018). The positions of spe-
cialized herders (llamacamayocs) and hunters were
also redefined and their efforts to maximize produc-
tion through new forms of herd management were
supervised by the state’squipu-based bureaucracy
(Flannery et al. 1989, 107–13).
Despite these textual accounts, the limited visi-
bility of pastoralist landscapes has tended to diminish
the salience of the sector in modern archaeological
syntheses (although see Nielsen 2009). How did pas-
toralism fit into the broader Inca political economic
order? D’Altroy and Earle’s(1985)influential model
of staple versus wealth finance in Inca and other
‘archaic states’leaves livestock in a liminal position.
Livestock formed a clear element of staple finance in
the original model: as ‘subsistence goods’produced
by agropastoralist households, they could be mobi-
lized to provision state personnel (D’Altroy & Earle
1985,188).
But camelids were also the source of both pri-
mary and secondary products in ways that remained
unaccounted for and point towards their much more
central role in translations between staple and wealth
spheres. Both as live animals with low rates of repro-
duction and through a range of primary and second-
ary products (notably meat, fibre and long-distance
transportation), camelids served as a major mode of
value accumulation and storage. Camelids (domesti-
cated and wild) provided much of the raw materials
to fashion fine cloth, the Inca wealth good par excel-
lence (Lechtman 1993). D’Altroy and Earle (1985,
195–6) included textile production in their model,
seeing it as a point of articulation between staple
and wealth finance as mediated by the labour of
attached craft specialists. However, camelids not
only supplied the means of production for the cre-
ation of wealth; they also represented wealth in
themselves. Recognizing this allows us to consider
the multiple roles played by camelids in staple–
wealth conversion —both directly via foddering
and indirectly via the costs of camelid specialists.
In some cases, state and shrine herds were
tended via labour tribute from commoners
(D’Altroy 2015; Kolata 2013). In other cases, particu-
larly on large state farms and royal estates, llamaca-
mayoc labour was provided by yanacona [personal
retainer] and mitmacona [resettled community] herd-
ing specialists (Gyarmati & Varga 1999; Quave
2018). Zooarchaeological evidence suggests that the
Inca state used this labour to intensify specialized
forms of animal husbandry, with camelid age pro-
files in both the central and southern Andes suggest-
ing broad shifts towards a greater emphasis on fibre
and transport as secondary products (e.g. Madero
1994; Sandefur 2001). In some areas, centralized cor-
rals provide additional evidence for pastoralist
intensification and centralized herd management
(e.g. Makowski et al. 2005).
Political subjectivity
The accumulation and distribution of animal wealth
intersected with the making of new political categor-
ies that sought to redefine the place of human and
non-human subjects. Through their roles in state
finance, animals were important in the making of
imperial subjectivities (cf. Kolata 2013; Kosiba 2018)
as communities and individuals were incorporated
into new relationships with the Inca state and its
Table 2. Chronology of the central Andes.
Period Dates CE Political history
Middle Horizon 550–1000
400–1000
Wari (polity in central Andean highlands)
Tiwanaku (polity in south-central Andean altiplano)
Late Intermediate Period 1000–1400
Centralized polities on the Pacific coast
Decentralized polities in the highlands
Emergence of a centralized polity in Cuzco
Late Horizon 1400–1532 Expansion of the Inca Empire
Conquest 1532–1572 Spanish defeat of Inca and ‘neo-Inca’forces
Composition of many key textual sources
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intermediaries. Some of these relationships rested
upon social classes that existed prior to the Inca
expansion (e.g. hereditary lords and commoners),
while others entailed the formation of new kinds of
subjects (e.g. retainer classes such as the yanacona
and new elite leaders in contexts of low prior social
hierarchy).
Camelid herds were one of the major resources
that the Inca alienated from subject communities.
While the state fully expropriated community herds
in some cases (e.g. during expansion into the
Titicaca Basin: Murra 1966), it seems this expropri-
ation was often nominal, involving little change to
everyday management. Nevertheless, the Inca used
this strategy to earmark a portion of the camelid
herds and/or their products for the state and temple
domains (Kolata 2013;Moore1958). If, as some mod-
ern ethnographic accounts suggest, camelids were
understood as members of deeply entwined multi-
species kin groups (ayllus: Flannery et al. 1989, 37),
such interventions into community herds had the
potential to reshape local ontological understandings
of relatedness and obligation at an intimate level.
Appropriated livestock also played further roles
in subject formation through their circulation in state
practices of incorporative exchange and consump-
tion. Camelid herds and camelid-fibre cloth were
instruments of coercive gifting to the provincial
elite, forming a central feature of Inca prestational
politics (Kolata 2013). Camelids’mobility and value
(reflecting labour investment in husbandry) were
qualities that made livestock gifts so useful to the
state and potent to their receivers. Archaeologically,
we can see these strategies through state-oriented
camelid feasting (e.g. Knudson et al. 2012; Miyano
2021) and, perhaps, the extension of camelid
pastoralism into new regions during the Inca expan-
sion (e.g. Troncoso 2012).
A second intersection between animals, state
finance and the making of new imperial subjects
lay within Inca bureaucracy. Just as censuses quanti-
fied the empire’s human subjects, so the state and
religious herds were enumerated in counts every
November (D’Altroy 2015, 356–8; Molina [1575]
2011, 65). Indeed, in some regions, human labourers
and camelids were the first and most important
tributary categories to be counted (Murra 1975).
Beyond enumeration, there are additional paral-
lels between the Inca bureaucratization of pastoral-
ism and the appropriation of surplus labour
through new social categories that broke with exist-
ing modes of community-based labour mobilization
(Murra 1968;Rowe1982). The alienation of camelids
from their local communities, their segregation by
sex and colour and the extraction of value from
them have suggestive parallels with, for instance,
the acllacuna [cloistered women dedicated to specia-
lized labour for the state]. As with some of the
state herds, women designated as acllas were relo-
cated from their home communities and housed in
special enclosures where (among other things) they
processed camelid fibre, with some of the women
subsequently selected for high-value sacrifices
(Turner & Hewitt 2018, 267).
Violence
Camelids were central to Cuzco’s ability to project
force across the length of the Andes. In addition to
providing logistical support to the Inca’s armies,
large caravans provided the possibility of meat on
the hoof (D’Altroy 1992,81–93; Murra 1966). This
ability to provide transportation and subsistence
would have been vital in many of the low-
productivity Andean landscapes where living off
the land would have been difficult even for relatively
small armies. Indeed, the capture of the massive
Titicaca Basin herds in the early years of expansion
mayhaveprovidedanimportantstimulustothe
Inca war machine, ultimately enabling the imperial
breakout from the central and south-central highlands.
Animals were also at the centre of the state’s
displays of ritual violence. Along with human sacri-
fice and the burning of large quantities of high-value
cloth, the large-scale killing of animals formed a
central part of the Inca ritual economy (Kaulicke
2021, 113). Such sacrificial offerings functioned as
conspicuous forms of wealth destruction and may
have drawn primarily on domain herds. Cobo
([1653] 1990, 126–50) enumerates the sacrifice of at
least 1500 camelids in Cuzco’s yearly ritual cycle,
while Betanzos ([1557] 1996, 136) suggests that 5000
camelids might be slaughtered upon the death of
the Inca ruler.
However, these rituals should not be reduced to
their financial cost alone. As is clear from descrip-
tions (e.g. Molina [1575] 2011, 41) of choreographed
processions, the infliction of pain, multiple forms of
killing and the post-mortem manipulation and
immolation of flesh and blood, camelids were consti-
tutive elements in violent spectacles. On display was
the state’s ability to intervene in the production of
different forms of value and even personhood.
The figure of the caparisoned sacred llama (raymi
napa:Molina[1575]2011,56–61), substituting for the
person of the Inca sovereign, stood at the other end
of a spectrum and fitted within a broader Andean
pastoralist conjunction of human and livestock as
deeply related categories (Allen 2002;Cagnatoet al.
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2021). This granting of human-like qualities to came-
lids took place within the deeply hierarchical context
of the state’s ability both to produce and destroy
wealth: just as qualities of personhood and status
could be extended to non-humans, so they could be
removed through political acts of subjugation and
the sacrificial destruction of both wealth-in-animals
and wealth-in-people (cf. Wilkinson 2017).
Territorial integration
Animals—through camelid caravanning—also
formed the basis for the long-distance integration of
the fractured Andean landscape into a coherent pol-
itical territory. Just as camelids had played important
roles in previous periods of heightened inter-regional
connectivity during the Early and Middle Horizons
(Tomczyk et al. 2019; Weber 2019), so they helped
shape the spatiality of Inca hegemony.
Andean landscapes of mobility were reshaped
and reclassified to facilitate state movement of
resources and people: the state integrated pre-
existing trail systems into a formalized royal road
network (capac ñan) of highways, bridges and ways-
tations ostensibly restricted to official state use.
While this network has fruitfully been understood
in terms of its roles in military logistics (D’Altroy
1992) and the materialization of imperial ideology
(DeMarrais et al. 1996), it is worth highlighting its
role as the infrastructure for animal-based mobility.
Archaeological evidence for the massive flow of ani-
mals can be found at the waystations (tambos) along
the capac ñan, many of which had significant corral
space dedicated to the sheltering and provisioning
of camelids (Casaverde Rios & López Vargas 2013;
Hyslop 1984, 291).
While not all scholars have seen a central role
for long-distance caravanning in the Inca period,
instead arguing for the primacy of human porterage
(D’Altroy 1992;D’Altroy & Earle 1985; Murra 1966),
camelid caravans clearly did supply distant commu-
nities with staples such as maize and dried fish
(Aland 2018; Gyarmati & Varga 1999). Such regional
and long-distance connections enabled a broad range
of state projects across the Andes, from the provision-
ing of administrative centres in strategic yet unpro-
ductive highland locations (e.g. Pumpu in central
Peru at 4090 masl) to the support of mining and
ritual sites located in even more hostile locales
(e.g. Abra de Minas in northwestern Argentina at
4240 masl). In this sense, the ‘selectively intense’
patchwork of Inca hegemony that confounds simple
core-periphery models—particularly in the provinces
of Collasuyu located far to the south of Cuzco—was
deeply reliant on long-distance camelid mobility.
Animals outside the state
Textual sources continue to dominate the literature
on animals and the Inca state, often fostering a top-
down, Cuzco-centric perspective. The colonial arch-
ive contains clear statements about an Inca imperial
order radically reshaping the management and dis-
tribution of animals (domestic and wild) and regulat-
ing the movement of humans and animals along
formalized road networks (D’Altroy 2015, 370). Yet
we need to remember that these were political claims
about how the imperial economy ought to work
rather than how it necessarily worked out in practice
(Covey 2015; Garrido & Salazar 2017).
For instance, synthetic accounts of Inca food-
ways often rely on colonial texts to infer a relative
lack of meat (particularly camelid meat) in com-
moner diets (e.g. Jennings & Duke 2018). But did
the state try to regulate everyday foodways in the
provinces? Or did these statements, instead, relate
to specific contexts of state-hosted diacritical feast-
ing? While zooarchaeological evidence for com-
moner diets remains to be synthesized across the
region, some faunal assemblages from the central
Andes suggest a rather less regulated picture, with
camelid meat consumption both higher and more
homogenous across households than a top-down
model of restriction would imply (Quave 2018;
Sandefur 2001).
Other animals were potentially even more diffi-
cult to incorporate within the state’s political eco-
nomic apparatus. Guinea-pig production persisted
outside the reach of the state, providing a
household-level complement to local subsistence
and ritual economies with few infrastructural or
labour costs (Rosenfeld 2008). And despite Inca
claims to the contrary, hunting and fishing would
have been particularly difficult to oversee fully
(Aland 2018), offering communities access to a
range of what might even be thought of as ‘escape
animals’(compare Scott 2009, 199–201).
Discussion
The Ur III and Inca case studies demonstrate the mul-
tiple roles played by livestock as sources of social
power. Building on Mann’s framework, the fore-
going analysis centres on how livestock circulated
and accumulated in the political economy of the
early state, while tracing their articulations with the
exercise of violence, territorial integration and pro-
jects of subject formation. Both cases were character-
ized by particularly high degrees of political and
economic centralization, exceptional levels of labour
mobilization and large royal and temple domains
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holding a significant portion of available land and
livestock resources. Thus, we stress caution in draw-
ing over-generalized conclusions about the roles
played by animals within the diverse economic
forms of the premodern state (Earle 2002; Hirth
2020). Nevertheless, the parallels between our case
studies and other state political economies highlight
important possibilities for further comparative
research.
Certain types of domesticates—large mammals
like camelids, cattle, equids and caprines—repeat-
edly emerged as attractive resources for state finance
projects. Some, like sheep and camelids, facilitated
the conversion of staple surplus or pastureland into
wealth in the form of primary and secondary pro-
ducts. Others, like cattle and equids, served as labour
multipliers in agriculture and transportation.
Animals were also deeply embedded within cultur-
ally specific regimes of value. But we suspect the
real importance of livestock in political economies
was their flexibility: at different moments, animals
could be sources of fibre, on-the-hoof provisions,
sacrifices, or highly valued gifts. In Marxian terms,
animals appear at different moments as subjects of
labour, as instruments of labour and as products of
labour.
This capacity of certain livestock types to be
flexible sources of wealth and thus serve multiple
roles in premodern state finance is particularly vis-
ible in economies that focused upon a limited num-
ber of species. The Inca’s heavy reliance on
camelids finds a clear parallel with the roles of cattle
as sources of dairy staples, meat and hides, as ritual
sacrifices and as pack animals in the southern
African Iron Age. During its nineteenth-century
emergence, for instance, the rapidly expanding
Zulu state made the flow of cattle one of its primary
concerns, taxing vassals in cattle, seeking cattle as
war booty and granting gifts of captured cattle to
loyal soldiers and to establish patron–client relation-
ships (Chanaiwa 1980).
Part of this flexibility offered by animals as
wealth was predicated on their mobility. This mobil-
ity enabled territorially expansive states to rely on
animals as payment of taxes or tribute from distant
regions to the imperial core (recall the Ur III gun
2-
-ma-da tax paid by peripheral provinces). Hirth
(2020, 177–88) has noted the significant costs of trans-
porting tribute and taxes in imperial settings, which
tended to prioritize wealth finance (and in some
cases, commodity and representative monies) above
staple finance strategies over the long term.
Animals provided a unique solution to transporta-
tion costs. Additionally, foraging species offered
particular advantages: caprines, cattle and camelids
could forage as they moved across the arid grass-
lands of Mesopotamia and the Andean highlands.
The mobility of animals as wealth thus made them
ideal assets for large-scale taxation and redistribution
systems (as in the mobilization of pigs across the
Italian peninsula to provision the Late Roman imper-
ial pork dole: Barnish 1987), while often creating new
demands for infrastructural investment.
In parallel to the centripetal movement of ani-
mal finance into early state cores, animal mobility
was also central to the centrifugal projection of mili-
tary and infrastructural power into the provinces.
Particularly in the Inca case, there are indications of
growing reliance on the logistical support offered
by large domesticated mammals. The emergence of
‘animalized’war machines was crucial to the integra-
tion of many other early states, with a key example
provided by the combined rise of horse-mounted
warfare and defensive wall systems during the
Warring States Period which set the stage for the sub-
sequent unification of China under the Qin
(Shelach-Lavi et al. 2021).
Territorial integration within expansionist states
was undergirded in many instances by the construc-
tion of road networks, waystations and animal pens.
Meanwhile, the consequent escalation in political
economic scale led to information management con-
cerns and the deployment of new techniques of bur-
eaucratic quantification (e.g. the booms in quipu and
tablet production in the Inca and Ur III cases), with a
strong emphasis on tracking the production and cir-
culation of animal wealth. The quantification of ani-
mal economies, in turn, fostered novel
understandings of value, hierarchy and the human–
animal relationship.
Herd animals, notably camelids in the Andes
and caprines in Sumer, were repeatedly deployed
as powerful new metaphors for human subjectivity.
While the twentieth and twenty-first centuries pro-
vide examples of animals as central elements in dis-
courses of dehumanization, we highlight the much
deeper genealogies of these metaphors in the history
of the state. In his studies of animal domestication
and herding in the ancient Near East, Tani (2017,
110–14) has argued that the relationships of property,
control and domination over herd animals provided
a new hierarchical schema of subordinated life. In
combination with bureaucratic techniques, these
hierarchies opened up new possibilities for states to
categorize, dehumanize (and sometimes specifically
‘animalize’) their subjects, especially labourers.
Particularly in the Ur III case, this logic of the
‘bureaucratized herd’formed a powerful part of the
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ideological apparatus that some early state institu-
tions deployed to articulate and naturalize inequal-
ities. But human–livestock metaphors have a
double nature: as the Inca case demonstrates, the
selective personification of animals could also form
an important arena for state politics.
These deployments of human–animal categories
also naturalized relationships of political supremacy.
The herder–herd relationship, for instance, could be
appropriated to naturalize the power of the ruler.
Indeed, the concept of the sovereign as shepherd
was frequently used throughout Near Eastern and
Mediterranean elite discourses, including in the
Biblical and Homeric texts, declining in usage only
in the late first millennium BCE (Varhaug 2019). In
other cases, there was greater emphasis on the vio-
lent constitution of rulership through identification
of the ruler as hunter (Allsen 2006) or even as preda-
tor (Lau 2021).
The material and the symbolic came together
perhaps most spectacularly in those instances
where early states managed ritual economies
(McAnany & Wells 2008) based on the accumulation
and destruction of animal vitality. The killing of large
numbers of animals is an element of statecraft that
appears repeatedly across early state societies,
whether through feasting (more common in the Ur
III case) or through dramatic immolation (as in
many Inca state rituals). In some cases—as with the
sacrifice of cattle at the late Shang capital of
Anyang (Campbell et al. 2021)—there was a reliance
on the pastoralist sector to finance these state perfor-
mances, while in other cases—for instance, the cap-
ture and sacrifice of wild predators for
Mesoamerican states like Teotihuacan and Copan
(Sugiyama et al. 2018)—such rituals relied upon for-
malized networks of hunting and long-distance
trade. As the ritualized killing of wild animals out-
side the state’s urban centres, hunting formed an
additional mode for mixing political performance
with political economy, particularly through its
enactment of elite claims over particular species
and/or rural spaces (Allsen 2006).
Finally, there are several ways that animal econ-
omies may have acted in opposition to the exercise of
early state power. The spatially extensive nature of
many animal production systems meant that they
were often less amenable to the effective exercise of
state surveillance and accounting than other sectors
(e.g. crop production, mineral extraction and craft-
ing). While we recognize the difficulties in detecting
the frictions in formal livestock economies (from
foot-dragging to the delivery of substandard animals
to the skimming of herd production), these would
have been important contradictions within early
state political economies. In addition, animals also
often formed important parts of informal sectors
that existed largely beyond the gaze of the state
(and, by extension, the textual archive). In our case
studies, the production or exploitation of pigs in
Mesopotamia and guinea pigs, deer, and marine ani-
mals in the Andes all largely fell outside the formal
sectors of the state economy. The methodological
implications here are basic but important: with
some exceptions (e.g. texts documenting elite house-
hold property management (Owen & Mayr 2006)),
texts only document formal sectors, with zooarchaeo-
logical evidence of informal practices forming a neces-
sary complement to text-based studies of early state
economies (Price et al. 2017; Pruß & Sallaberger
2004).
Beyond these ‘everyday forms of resistance’
(Scott 1985), there are also ways that some types of
livestock production could enable people actively to
rebel against or escape from the state. Mobile pastor-
alists’ability to resist the state is an oft-repeated idea
with an intellectual history stretching back to Ibn
Khaldun and Exodus, although one that certainly
needs to be evaluated carefully (Arbuckle &
Hammer 2019; Honeychurch 2014). As the two case
studies suggest, however, pastoralist economies
were often partly incorporated into state institu-
tions—rather than existing in simple subservience
or opposition to these early states, animal economies
provided a paradoxical set of both opportunities for
and limitations upon the effective exercise of state
power.
Although traditional models of premodern
political economies have emphasized labour, land
and water as the fundamental resources accumu-
lated and managed by early state administrations,
livestock formed a unique kind of wealth that mer-
its greater theoretical and empirical attention. The
specific qualities of animals—including their mobil-
ity, animacy and overall flexibility—meant they
often connected across economic sectors and across
spatial scales in unique and powerful ways. As
such, animals could strengthen state institutions
and integrate territories, while also offering ways
for non-state actors to undermine state power at
local and household levels. The recognition of ani-
mals as key resources in early state economies—
through a combination of textual and zooarchaeolo-
gical analyses—offers the possibility of better
understanding early state institutions as heterogen-
ous, both powerful and existing in symbiosis with
the informal activities of subject communities and
households.
The Political Economy of Livestock in Early States
131
https://doi.org/10.1017/S095977432200021X Published online by Cambridge University Press

Noa Corcoran-Tadd
Program in Latin American Studies
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
USA
Email: noac@princeton.edu
Max Price
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139
USA
Email: maxprice@mit.edu
Ari Caramanica
Department of Anthropology
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37235
USA
Email: ari.a.caramanica@vanderbilt.edu
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Author biography
Noa Corcoran-Tadd is a landscape archaeologist whose
research traces the geography of empire, infrastructure and
The Political Economy of Livestock in Early States
135
https://doi.org/10.1017/S095977432200021X Published online by Cambridge University Press

animal mobilities in the south-central Andes. His recent
publications include articles in Latin American Antiquity,
Boletín de Arqueología PUCP and Post-Medieval Archaeology.
Max Price is a zooarchaeologist whose research concen-
trates on animal domestication, the development of com-
plex societies and human–environmental interactions in
the ancient Near East. His recent book Evolution of a
Taboo (Oxford University Press, 2020) explores the place
of pigs in Near Eastern cultures from the Palaeolithic to
the present.
Ari Caramanica is an environmental archaeologist and
explores the long-term human occupation of the Peruvian
coast, with a focus on land use, infrastructure and environ-
mental change. Her research has been published in a wide
range of forums, including PNAS,Journal of Field
Archaeology and Journal of Archaeological Science:Reports.
Noa Corcoran‐Tadd et al.
136
https://doi.org/10.1017/S095977432200021X Published online by Cambridge University Press