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

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.