Space as coercion: The transition to the state in the social formations of La Campiña, upper Guadalquivir Valley, Spain, ca. 1900-1600 B.C.

Abstract The institutionalized use of class coercion, which implies the existence of the state, cannot be understood spatially in terms of the adaptive advantages of man's relationship with the environment. Such an approach is based upon the acceptance of a functionalist view of culture, which, in turn, is one of the bases of integration theory. One example of this erroneous approach has been the development of the chiefdom model and its application to archaeology. The territory acquired by a society is never a reflection of that society: rather it should be viewed as the basis of that society and a consequence of its existence. For this reason, in order to analyze the process of the transition to a class society, archaeological evaluations of territoriality must consider the processes by which coercion and inequality develop in space. This alternative approach is applied to the social formations in the region of La Campina in the Upper Guadalquivir basin, centralsouthern Spain, between the 19th and the 17th centuries B.C.