The stronger a Leviathan becomes, the more evidence it leaves for historians and archaeologists

From War! What Is It Good For? by Ian Morris. Page 67.

On the whole, we know less about the Han and Mauryan Empires than about Rome, and less still about states in the New World. In the Americas, the shortage of evidence is so acute that specialists cannot even agree on where Leviathans first appeared. Some archaeologists see the Olmec culture in Mexico (ca. 1200 B.C.) and Chavín de Huantar in Peru (ca. 1000 B.C.) as the pioneers. Mainstream opinion, however, holds that it was only a thousand years later, in the age of the Moche culture in Peru and the city-states of Monte Albán and Teotihuacán in Mexico, that America’s first functioning governments put in an appearance, imposing their will over thousands of square miles and populations probably running up into a few million. They built great monuments, oversaw elaborate trade networks, and presided over rising standards of living, but remained preliterate.

That is bad news for historians. Even when archaeology reaches the highest standards possible, there are limits to what it can tell us about Leviathan. Perhaps the human sacrifices excavated at Teotihuacán show that this was a more violent society than the Old World’s ancient empires, but since Romans did flock to watch gladiators hack each other to pieces (plenty of their dismembered bodies have been dug up), perhaps not. The sixty bodies found buried in a royal tomb of the Andean kingdom of Wari around A.D. 800—long after Old World empires had given up such practices — might also point to higher levels of violence in the New World than in the Old, but when we get right down to it, the evidence is just not good enough for systematic comparisons. What we really need is a Mesoamerican Tacitus who would tell us what was going on.

Yet the fact that we do not have one, and almost certainly never will, is revealing in itself. There seems to be a general rule that the stronger a Leviathan becomes, the more evidence it leaves for historians and archaeologists, because great governments need to “build a lot of things and write down even more. The absence of writing probably means that New World Leviathans were not governing at the kind of level that made writing indispensable—which probably also means that they never got anywhere near as close to Denmark as the Romans.