This volume began with a chance meeting between Liz Brumfiel and John Fox at the World Archaeological Congress, Southampton, in 1986. We recognized our mutual interest in the internal dynamics of political development and our complementary specialties in the prehispanic Aztec and Maya. We also recognized our mutual interest in visiting Amsterdam, the site of the 46th International Congress of Americanists in 1988.

The two of us organized the symposium “Factional Competition and Political Development in the New World” for the 46th International Congress of Americanists. Participants included the two co-editors of this volume, David Anderson, Bruce Byland, Pedro Carrasco, Mary Helms, Stephen Kowalewski, John Pohl, and Rudolf van Zantwijk. Encouraged by the quality of the symposium papers, we decided to edit a volume devoted to exploring factional competition as a force of social transformation in prehispanic New World societies. To increase the breadth of coverage, we solicited additional papers from John Clark and Mike Blake, Terry D'Altroy, Fred Hicks, Mary Pohl, Helen Perlstein Pollard, Elsa Redmond and Chuck Spencer. To our regret, Pedro Carrasco had to drop out of the project; his contribution is sorely missed. Glenn Perusek, a specialist in historical materialist approaches to interest group politics and rational choice theory, generously offered to write an overview of the volume from his perspective in political science. We gratefully accepted his offer.

With the support of the editorial staff at the Cambridge University Press, we completed editing this volume in May 1992.

In aboriginal American societies, factions competed for power, prestige, authority, and material benefits. A counterpositioning of structurally similar corporate groups, often in pairs, generated factional competition. This collection provides case studies on factional competition in a variety of environmental settings and on the methods for discerning factionalism across a gamut of social fields.

Theoretical approaches to conflict and change

A steady theoretical stream has attempted to explain exogenous cause and culture effect (adaptation) in the evolution of simple to more complex societies. In the positivist tradition, with Newton drawing analogy to the clock, a principal machine of his day, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social theoreticians sought the forces that set the three-fold (savagery, barbarism, civilization) “evolutionary clock” in motion (e.g. climate for Montesquieu). During the 1920s to 1950s, a “dynamist approach” focused on the basic “tensions inherent in any society” (Balandier 1970:17–18), but conflict was said to improve social functioning. Newton's smoothly running clock was transposed synchronically; groups strove teleologically to maintain the well-oiled social machine for the greater social good.

For cultural ecologists, environmental stress was the catalyst to evolution. In essence, Newton's smoothly functioning system was recast as trophic exchanges and competition. But “systems models cannot explain chronic problems generated by the very operation of the system as constituted, such as civil wars, succession disputes or tax evasion” (Gailey and Patterson 1987:5) other than as Malthusian competition for material resources – i.e., biological reductionism. Darwinian-like competition removed the dysfunctional social parts while the evolutionary clock ticked uniformly upward in the spiral of cultural evolution.