Reconstructing Sovereignty on Ancient Mesoamerica's Southern Pacific Coast

The internal control and external sovereignty that define nation‐states today has a long (pre)history. Many archaeologists undertheorize sovereignty by only implicitly inferring the sovereign status of the polities they study. Sovereignty also remains insufficiently operationalized in terms of its material remains, especially for those ancient societies without written accounts. During the final centuries before the Common Era, a network of kingdoms existed along the Pacific coast of Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Large earthen mounds that formed plazas lined with stelae, elaborately carved in a shared art style, defined each kingdom's capital city. Izapa was the largest of these kingdoms, and recent lidar (light detection and ranging) and pedestrian surveys document the entire territory encompassing dozens of political centers. These data reveal an integrated three‐tiered political hierarchy within the kingdom with the largest centers arranged defensively around the perimeter of Izapa's territory. Further, the “30 km rule” is defined as a cross‐cultural pattern for the spacing of sovereign polities and confirmed based on the location of Izapa and neighboring Pacific coast kingdoms. The record of millennia of hierarchically organized human pluralities generates a more complete, comparative understanding of how sovereignty was established and how it functions. [ sovereignty, territoriality, political organization, Mesoamerica ]