Warfare and the Origins of Political Control

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The relationship between warfare and the development of institutions of political control has been a fundamental issue in the humanities and social sciences since the inception of the disciplines. Since Confucius, Sun Tzu, and Plato, scholars have pondered how societies make wars and how wars make states. Over the last 75 years, historians, ethnographers, political scientists, sociologists, archaeologists, and bioarchaeologists have developed detailed histories of warfare and sociopolitical change in a wide range of time periods in nearly every region around the globe. The time is now ripe to develop a global understanding of sociopolitical change and human violence. This session will explore from diverse perspectives on the role that prehistoric and historic armed conflict played in the establishment, maintenance, and demise of political institutions in transegalitarian, status-based societies, and premodern states. We examine the material and nonmaterial causes of warfare, the organization of combatants, conflict and ideological signaling, and how leaders and followers created institutions of control in the context of escalating violence. To expand the multidisciplinary breadth, global scope, and theoretical depth of these issues, the session gathers together archaeologists, sociocultural anthropologists, and ethnohistorians working in Europe, Middle East, Asia, Oceania, and North, Central, and South America.