Graeber / Wengrow 515: "It does seem to be received wisdom in many quarters, academic and otherwise, that structures of domination are the inevitable result of populations scaling up by orders of magnitude; that is, that a necessary correspondence exists between social and spatial hierarchies"
However, "Carol Crumley, an anthropologist and expert on Iron Age Europe, has been poining this out for years: complex systems don't have to be organized top-down, either in the natural or in the social world"
see Crumley's "Heterarchy," which describes ways in which "power was dispersed or distributed in flexible ways across different elements of society, or at different scales of integration, or indeed across different times of year within the same society"
find her argument in Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 6 (1995)
the hierarchical model does not really square with archaelogical evidence of early cities, "which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritative rule"
522: "What [...] does one even call a 'city lacking top-dwon structures of governance?' At the moment there is no commonly accepted term. Dare one call it a 'democracy?' A 'republic?'"