Infra-structuration of Imperial Power in Ancient Ankgor and the Andes

Author(s): Edward Swenson; Stephen Berquist

Year: 2015

Summary

A comparison of the agricultural reclamation projects and religious architectural programs of the Chimú, Inka, and Angkorian empires will serve to demonstrate that statecraft was an inherently technological pursuit in ancient societies. Supra-local political regimes were literally built by and through infrastructure that reconfigured different communities of practice. An important objective of the paper is to demonstrate that an analysis of the materials, temporalities, and technologies underlying the production and maintenance of state infrastructures (and counter-state infrastructures) can illuminate cultural variation in the ideological and economic construction of centralized power in archaic complex society.

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Cite this Record

Infra-structuration of Imperial Power in Ancient Ankgor and the Andes. Stephen Berquist, Edward Swenson. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396777)

Keywords

Geographic Keywords
South America

Spatial Coverage

min long: -93.691; min lat: -56.945 ; max long: -31.113; max lat: 18.48 ;