From Stewards to Bureaucrats: Architecture and Information Flow at Chan Chan, Peru
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Archaeologists working with complex societies are concerned with the administration of political economies. Beginning with the premise that there are differing forms of administration and that bureaucracy, in the classic formulation of Max Weber, is one of these, I develop a heuristic dichotomy between two types of administrators: stewards (who closely supervise goods and people) and bureaucrats (who process and control information). Bureaucracy is often linked to written records, but in the Central Andes alternative methods of record keeping were developed, such as the quipu or knotted string record. I argue that one alternative record-keeping device was an architectural form, the U-shaped structure. U-shaped structures are closely identified with the administrative architecture of the Chimu kingdom (ca. A.D. 850–1470) on the north coast of Peru. Four independent lines of argument demonstrate the development of bureaucracy from stewardship at Chan Chan, the capital of the Chimu kingdom. Brief comparisons are made between the Chimu administrative pattern and commodity and information flow in the earlier Huari and Tiwanku civilizations, and with the later Inka pattern. These comparisons show how record-keeping technology affects political economy and the strategy of expansion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".