Comments: Rethinking Complex Early Societies in Asia

Elite claims of power and authority may take material expression in both the archaeological and historical records. Such claims may be expressed through the renovation, rebuilding, realignment, or construction of monumental architecture; the appropriation of symbols of power and authoriry; or may be made outright in verbal and written media. The South Indian empire of Vijayanagara (c. A.D. 1300-1600) laid claim to a vast portion of the Indian subcontinent, but scholars agree neither on the nature nor the extent of power exercised by the imperial center. In this paper, we examine the ideological claims of the Vijayanagara political elite, as they are materially expressed. Specifically, we differentiate the forms and spatial extent of centralized power and centralized authoriry in the imperial "core" versus several "peripheral" regions through the distribution and form of fortifications and temples and through a quantitative spatial analysis of inscriptions. Such claims can be related to material conditions only in the "core" region; relationships between ideological claims and archaeological patterns in that area suggest avenues for future archaeological research in complex societies. KEYWORDS: Monumentaliry, South Asia, power, archaeological inference, Vijayanagara.

So-called control mechanisms as a basis of social power shall be compared in four societies in Europe and Asia which were in coexistence during the middle and later 3rd millennium BC. While in some cases (southern Mesopotamia) we have good indications for social power operating largely from above, such notions cannot easily be adduced from the archaeological record in other regions (Indus Valley, Aegean), in which there were possibly many different levels on which social power was exercised on an everyday basis. Finally, in the fourth region (Bell Beaker Central Europe) it is hard to recognise not only clear signs of social power, but also any possible basis for distinctions in social power. It will be argued that the establishment of control mechanisms was fundamental to achieve institutionalized and long-term inequality in the societies discussed in this article. The adoption of such control mechanisms enabled a group of people (the elite) to regulate and hence dominate resources. Some of the best archaeological indications are writing, the practice of sealing and the invention and standardisation of metrological systems. The open question is how many members of the given society were able to participate in the regulation of power. The archaeological indications often do not imply a strongly hierarchical society, or a society where a single person (king or chief) and/or his clique could dominate. Instead the archaeological record points to flexible and fluctuating power relations. Therefore, it is argued that some early complex societies of the second half of the 3rd millennium BC (like Greece or the Indus Valley) can be better described as heterarchical than hierarchical. For prehistoric Europe it is argued that social power was highly fluid and that no long-term systematization of power relations is traceable before the Iron Age (and even then it is often debatable). Therefore, any claim for the existence of simple or complex chiefdoms in prehistoric Europe (outside the Aegean) during the Copper and Bronze Age seems to be misleading.

2002

2020

This course examines archaeological approaches to understanding ancient complex societies: i.e.; those societies in which there was institutionalized inequality, specialization, and interdependence among social groups. The discussion begins with the conceptual framework of social evolution, its critique, and the subsequent search for new theories and methods in the study of ancient states and their historical trajectories. While some of these more recent trends represent a continuation of the evolutionary paradigm, the seminar highlights the methodological and theoretical shift to “archaeology of the political”, alternative ontologies, and network analysis. The case of ancient Maya polities is used to illustrate the interplay of broader paradigmatic changes vs. new field data.

Theories of urbanization and early state formation have a long tradition in archaeology, geography, and history, and, being heavily vested in the social sciences, often prominently feature social, political, religious, and economic causality. Such studies have rightly been critiqued as decontextualizing (often unwittingly) early polities from their cultural and natural environments. Falconer and Redman challenge the contributors to Polities and Power, whose research ranges across the New World, the Near East, eastern Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, to think outside those traditional boxes and to recontextualize early polities through the medium of landscapes, a concept that the editors conceive of as an "analytically formative context" (3) for seeking meaning. The contributors seek to integrate the interplay, dynamism, and recursive nature of the cultural and natural landscapes into the analyses of early polities. How successful these efforts are is the focus of this review. After a brief introduction reprising the academic usages of landscape, the editors organize 12 chapters into sections, each containing a primary contribution or two followed by a commentary. These commentaries range from eulogy to critique, expanding on the contributions, placing them in a broader regional perspective, or elaborating on a particular theoretical stance. The volume's use of autocritique is unique in my experience, and it adds to the work's overall interest. Conceptually, the volume's thematic focus—landscape—has a checkered past, one ranging from environmental determinism to postmodernism. The nature-culture duality, of course, has a long history in western thought. Until recently, the physicality of the landscape has dominated through the environmental archaeologies of the mid 20th century and the strident New Archaeology that neatly eliminated humans from the equation by subsuming them into the broader ecosystem. Recent postmodern contributions have counterbalanced this drift toward environmentalism by theorizing landscape in the lens of cultural perception. Despite claims to the contrary, I have yet to see the emergence of a viable centrist position capable of theoretically reintegrating the physical and cultural conceptual landscape. The contributions in this volume confirm that view. The tension within landscape studies is nowhere better captured than in Joyce's critique of Fisher's "human ecodynamics" approach to Tarascan (Mesoamerican) land use through time—an approach specifically formulated as a response to social-process studies. Rather than forming an integrative landscape approach, Fisher's analysis clings to the nature-culture dichotomy and is in the tradition of earlier adaptationist studies. While Fisher perceptively documents changing land use through time, he does not succeed in reintegrating the Tarascans with their land. Aspects of historical ecology and the longue durée are embodied in Sinopoli, Johansen, and Morrison's discussion of Vijayanagara's historical and ecological place in the Tungahadra Valley of southern India. Tracking cultural landscape manipulations from ritual Neolithic dung heaps to the 14th-century transformation of this forbidding locale into a 30 km 2 urban core closely links landscape to social and political infrastructure.

Current Anthropology, 2009

The past 10 years have seen a reorientation of archaeological political theory from a focus on neoevolutionary classification and "state origins" to a focus on the operation of ancient polities. This trend, while promising, nonetheless frequently retains problematic habits of earlier approaches, including the tendency to slip into reductionist classificatory exercises. Furthermore, I argue that the naturalized experience of nation-states and the legacy of modernist political theory form an unexamined yet pernicious influence. In ancient contexts, the reified anachronism of "the state" is better understood in terms of a nexus of networks of power and authority and the imagined political communities with which they articulate. I suggest that both polity networks and polity ideas should then be analyzed in terms of their discursive, practical, and material aspects and the relationships between them. Relatively understudied and still undeservingly peripheral to the generation of ancient political models in archaeology, Shang China will form the basis of a case study in the application of the networks and boundaries approach proposed here. Drawing on archaeological, epigraphic, and transmitted textual sources, I will sketch an outline of Shang political geography, discursive structures, practices of power/authority, networks of capital, and boundaries of political identity.

J. Müller, W. Kierleis, N. Taylor, eds. Perspectives on Socio-environmental Transformations in Ancient Europe, 2024

Politics is the negotiation of shared or conflicting interests and values between people and groups in collective decision-making processes. Although such negotiations, today as in the past, are manifold and dependent on specific historical settings, they are also influenced by a number of social patterns and structures which can be archaeologically determined in order to investigate the politics of prehistoric societies. […], the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe in it.

Theories such as those offered to explain the supposed Uruk Expansion or Southern Uruk colonial system in the North and East of Greater Mesopotamia have emphasized the roles of state development and urbanism in the supposed core area of the South, and the role of trade between that resource-poor, highly developed zone and its less developed, resource-rich periphery as the raison d'être for the expansion. Although even the proponents of the World Systems construct now acknowledge the complexity of Northern societies before the period of most intense contact, our understanding of the interaction is still based on a number of questionable assumptions concerning the impetus for regional exchange, the preeminence of states and centers of large size in initiating and directing exchange, and the functioning of centers and polities of various size in the exchange network. In this paper we will present some new perspectives on the analysis of social development and network interaction coming from Mesoamericanists, some of which we accept, some of which we question. Those perspectives challenge us to look at variability in motives and means used by leaders within each polity, and the probability of non-elite roles in structuring society. We will use, in our opinion, the most useful of those perspectives to analyze the evolution of a small center in Northern Mesopotamia, and to show how that evolution reflected its behavior in relation to the larger region. In doing so, we will emphasize four aspects of the sile : 1 - its particular geographical, geological, and ecological situation, 2 - strategies of various actors at the site and in its immediate area to affect the political and economic structure of the polity, 3 - measures of the construction of social identities by some of the players, and 4 - the probable role of Gawra in larger exchange networks.

Against Typological Tyranny in Archaeology. Ed. by C. Langbaeck and C. Gnecco, Springer, 2014

Models of social evolution, which rely on typologies for characterizing the degree and structure of inequality and social complexity of past societies, together with its corresponding trait lists of typical features and archaeological signatures, have been largely used in South America to both describe and explain the emergence and decadence of a variety of past social formations, ranging from the Inca empire, to smaller polities which have been classified as tribes, chiefdoms, and states.

As has been already mentioned in the introductory editorial comment that opens this issue, the discussion has demonstrated a profound interest in its subject, and we would like to express our gratitude to Carneiro and all the discussants. This discussion presents a very wide spectrum of opinions on a rather wide range of important topics. One can also find a wide spectrum of opinions, a sort of unique snapshot of the current state of Political Anthropology as regards the study of the emergence of chiefdoms and states, as well as the driving forces of sociopolitical evolution. The discussion has demonstrated that none of the proposed approaches can be characterized as being absolutely right. In certain respects the presented critique of some points of Carneiro's theory looks convincing, but in some other cases Carneiro's reasoning appears more persuasive. Below we shall try to make as more an objective assessment of the present discussion as possible.

Social Complexity in Prehistoric Eurasia: Monuments, Metals, and Mobility, 2009

pp 55-67 in Hossein Azizi, Morteza Khanipoor and Reza Naseri (eds.) Proceedings of the 4th Iranian Archaeologists Conference. Tehran, Tehran University.

2006

Институт Африки

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2019

Moving political economy forward: braiding perspectives on power in prehistory Archaeology's increasingly refined methods, sustained investigations, and long-term perspective produce a rich corpus of knowledge on social change and stability. These data can form an empirical foundation for robust political economy approaches. To mobilize archaeological data, however, our theoretical tools need to be as sophisticated as our methodologies. So far, most archaeologists following a political economy approach have emphasized the actions of leaders (or those aspiring to rule), focusing on their abilities to control and dominate communities through coercion or persuasion, manipulation and bribery, and control of resources. The term 'top-down' refers to this one-sided analysis, positioning agency within dominating groups, while largely denying it to others. Such a focus has limited our conceptions of how societies operate as a dialectical process. Integrating a bottom-up approach is, therefore, primarily a project of relocating agency across broader social groupings , as well as recognizing self-organization into collectives and alliances that may counter elite domination. Non-elite agency can shape political systems by enabling, restricting, contributing to, or evading centralizing power. Over the last two decades, non-elite perspectives have emerged from many strands of archaeological research. Reflecting a turn to post-modernism in the social sciences, inspired in part by Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci, archaeologists began looking at agency by the 'subaltern,' those thought to be excluded from power based on class, race, and gender (see Shanks and Tilley 1991). Brumfiel (1992) importantly advocated inclusion of broader social interests and factions to provide a more nuanced picture of how power and agency worked in past societies. More recent bottom-up approaches have investigated the complexity of agency inherent in households as well as peasant communities (Erickson 2006; Heckbert 2013). For example, archaeological studies focusing on the household unit have documented that most 6 activities within families and their communities occurred independently of chiefly involvement (Blanton 1994; Robin 2013). To account for the nature of political systems fully, both top-down and bottom-up political agency should be situated in a dialectical relationship, as interdependent while at the same time potentially antagonistic. To braid their threads in pursuit of a synthesis, we draw on parallel trends in recent studies of anarchism, heterarchy, and collective action theory as applied to traditional states and non-state societies and review each briefly below. Anarchism provides an explicit bottom-up approach to economic and political organization, focusing on the capability, even propensity, of individual actors to self-govern, self-organize, and cooperate in diverse groups and coalitions (Angelbeck and Grier 2012). In the tradition of anarchist thinkers like Bakunin (1950 (1872)) and Kropotkin (1972) and anthropologists like