From City Walls to Country Forts: Changing Landscape Intentions of Social Complexity from the Early Historic to Medieval Eras in the Indian Subcontinent

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Walled cities and rural fortifications both represent investments in place-making for warfare but are differentially conceptualized and used. Urban walls encircle noncombatants with an everyday monumentality that also serves as an economic, social, and ideological perimeter, with constructions often overdesigned relative to strategic or tactical utility. Rural fortifications are created to serve as staging-points for territorial advance or retreat, but often are located in challenging topographies where strategic advantage must be supported by long supply chains. Cities would seem to be better prizes in warfare, and urban walls would seem to be the most efficient form of warfare planning; nonetheless, the fact that no city in the world today has defensive walls suggests that expansive territorial control and military investment have superseded the seizure of compact urban locations of population and resources. When and why did the concept of a fortified landscape become a viable political strategy for territorial consolidation compared to the simple defense or capture of population nodes? In this paper, I evaluate the shift in South Asian political strategies from walled cities in the Early Historic period (ca. third century BCE–fourth century CE) to rural forts in the Medieval period (ninth–sixteenth centuries CE).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Warfare and the Origins of Political Control   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35767.0