Perhaps we are dealing here with attempts to create ‘third-order’ regimes of domination, albeit of a very different kind to modern nation states, in which control over violence and esoteric knowledge became caught up in the spiralling political competition of rival elites. This may also explain why, in both cases – Cahokia and the Maya – the collapse of such totalizing (totalitarian, even) projects, when it happened, was itself sudden, comprehensive and total.
