Why Are We Thinking “Beyond Barbarians”? Interrogating Dimensions of Military Organization in Non-State Societies

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

There are good reasons to problematize and theorize dimensions of military organization. Despite the wellspring of research on the archaeology of warfare over the last 30 years, conceptual gaps remain. Warfare among small-scale societies remains typified as total war, while the study of state-sponsored warfare typically focuses on the role of military specialists in achieving elite political and economic agendas. And yet, many of the societies that have traditionally been regarded as “warlike” in the archaeological imagination fall into an ill-defined middle range that lies between these two extremes. Iroquois war parties, Viking Age raiders, Mongol khanates, and Visigothic hordes do not fit neatly into social evolutionary boxes and as such elude analyses devoted to questions of complexity. Understanding the organizational structure of militarized groups is especially important when we consider that they comprised hundreds to thousands of individuals who achieved strategic objectives despite operating away from home for extended periods of time and the absence of rigid hierarchy. In this introductory paper, we outline the prospective benefits of developing a body of comparative scholarship that will permit inferences about relationships between political and military organization in societies that operated beyond the boundaries of premodern states.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35648.0