States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives.

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

How did the world’s first large-scale collectives come into being? For much of our discipline’s history, the answer was the state: a centralized, hierarchical, political organization with a ruler who directed a command-and-control economy and held a monopoly on force. Scholars identified regions of pristine state formation and then tried to fit their case studies into a unified evolutionary model of culture change. This vision of the early state began to erode near the end of the twentieth century, as archaeological fieldwork revealed a diversity of political organizations that could not be easily shoehorned into the field’s narrow expectations. The last three decades has seen a recalibration in studies of early large scale-collectives, both of those long deemed to qualify as states and others that did not. This session brings together perspectives from around the world on the constellation of practices, institutions, and ideologies that allowed for shared identities and coordinated actions across broad collectives. Their work demonstrates that violence and hierarchies often played pivotal roles, but so did gender complementarity, markets, kinship, and egalitarianism. A better understanding of how large groups come together enables a richer understanding of our past and governance alternatives for a better future.

Other Keywords
Social and Political Organization • Bronze Age • Ethnohistory/History • Political economy • Historical Archaeology • Historic • Mississippian • Monumentality • Survey • Theory

Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) • Asia (Continent) • United States of America (Country) • Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Country) • State of Israel (Country) • Lebanese Republic (Country) • Syrian Arab Republic (Country) • West Bank (Country) • Republic of Cyprus (Country) • Gaza Strip (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-15 of 15)

  • Documents (15)
Documents
  • Beyond the Knossian State: Urban Economy and Society at the East Cretan Site of Palaikastro (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Carl Knappett.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In scholarship on the Bronze Age Aegean, there is a robust conjunction of palace, town, and state. If we take the case of Knossos, then the presumed central authority represented by its palatial complex, and its surrounding town covering 100 ha, are generally thought to imply an associated territory under...

  • A Commons Approach to Violence and Inequity: Public goods, Enchaining, and the Reconstitution of the Shang Kingdom under Wu Ding (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Rod Campbell.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Chinese archaeology the question of how large-scale political collectives came into being is usually understood under the rubric of “state formation.” In addition to the issue of the potential reification of an anachronism in the state concept, early complex polities are generally imagined in terms of...

  • A Comparative Consideration of the Institutions of Governance of the Native American Polities of Florida (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Victor Thompson.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Florida once encompassed a vast landscape of Native American polities prior to and after the arrival of European colonizers. More northern groups in the region relied upon fishing, hunting, and gathering, but also practiced maize agriculture to varying degrees. Further to the south, the vast majority of...

  • Early Mesopotamian Urban Societies Were Not States (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Ur.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The “early states” of ancient Mesopotamia are factoids and straw men. Mesopotamia appears in textbooks as the prime example of the world’s earliest pristine states, and the flourishing of recent scholarship on the variability of other centralized large polities has often been via the juxtaposition of that...

  • The Emergence of a Large Community at Aguada Fénix, Tabasco, Mexico, and Its Legacy (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Takeshi Inomata.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Aguada Fénix features an artificial plateau, which measures 1,400 × 400 m horizontally and 10–15 m vertically. Nine causeways and corridors radiate from the plateau. These monumental constructions were built between 1050 and 750 BC. This building, discovered in 2017, turned out to be the largest...

  • Institutional Dimensions of Northern Iroquoian Confederacies and Implications for Contact Period Geopolitics (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Birch.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Confederacies have been under-theorized in the social sciences in comparison to discourses focused on state development as per socio-evolutionary paradigms. Confederacies do not serve to govern so much as to coordinate. This paper explores the practices, institutions, and ideologies utilized by late...

  • Islands of Ideology: Exploring Group Formation in Hawaiʻi and Sāmoa (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Quintus.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social consent was essential to promote cooperation and group identity. Because of disciplinary attention to top-down processes of power accumulation and political classification, how social notions of social consent in middle-range societies were modified and diversified is poorly understood. The societies...

  • Networks of Power in the Chaco World: Practices, Institutions, and Ideologies of Collective Action (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Mills. Kelsey Hanson.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2006, Lynne Sebastian synthesized political models used for Chaco society and argued that past interpretations were too heavily reliant on outdated models that stressed hierarchy and neo-evolutionary typologies. She especially drew on Susan McIntosh’s (1999) book “Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity...

  • The Oyo Empire, ca. 1570–1840: The Art of Being a Compositional State (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Akin Ogundiran.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Yoruba sovereign states matured about the eleventh century in ideology, symbols of authority, and organizational structure. Governed by a system of monarchy comprising the divine king/palace officials and non-royal lords, theirs was a political arrangement that placed the king as first among equals with the...

  • Place-Making, Fire, and the Praxis of Becoming Angkor (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Miriam Stark. Mitch Hendrickson. Piphal Heng. Alison Carter.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ninth- to fifteenth-century Angkorian state was premodern Southeast Asia’s earliest large-scale collective, and its roots extend back to an early first-century CE polity described as Funan, and then to a confederation of successor states called Chenla. Place-making was intrinsic to Angkorian rulership:...

  • Reimagining and Reengineering Political Complexity in Early Vietnam. (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Nam Kim.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists continue to be interested in the development of political complexity and early forms of “states.” There is compelling evidence that leadership strategies and political centralization in such polities involved modification and reengineering of both social and landscape topographies, making...

  • States of Mobilities: Nomadic Institutions as the Foundations of Large-Scale Polities (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Miller.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Theories surrounding the rise of complex polities have long hinged upon large urban centers, fixed infrastructure, and the centrality of agricultural economies, leaving any societies without these as incapable of creating stable large-scales collectives that one could call a state. Taking the case of the...

  • Urbanism without Cities in Ancient Amazonia (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Eduardo Neves.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Horizon was a time of political centralization in the Andes. During the same period one sees in the Amazon clear evidence of population growth, settlement nucleation and landscape transformation, as it is attested by the increase in site size, the production of anthropic soils, construction of...

  • Visible and Invisible workings of Cahokia (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan M. Alt.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cahokia has long been subjected to terminological contention, failing to fit categorical configurations such as state or chiefdom but has now become commonly referred to as an urbanism — effectively dodging the chiefdom/state terminological quandary. What if much of the categorical problem lies in looking...

  • Who Makes the Rules in Egalitarian Cities? A View from Bronze Age South Asia (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Green.

    This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By 2600 BC, the first cities had emerged in South Asia. Expansive and dynamic, the Indus civilization prompted the growth of massive settlements like Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan and Rakhigarhi in India. Both cities were part of a prosperous agropastoral economy that supported the invention of writing,...