Warfare and the Polity in Early China

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.

Intercommunity conflict and sociopolitical complexity are both complicated topics, not only because of their large literatures and diverse approaches, but because of the multifaceted nature of the phenomena involved. For my talk I would like to focus on what I see as two key variables relevant to both warfare and political community. These are scale and centralization. Scale both in the sense of absolute scale of conflicts and communities but also the characteristic and relative scale of specific institutions and practices. In other words, I would like to explore a multiscalar approach to both warfare and political community. Centralization, for its part, is to be seen as a spectrum and a feature of institutions at different scales. With this relatively limited scope I will explore received textual, inscriptional, and archaeological evidence from the Central Plains of China over roughly 1,000 years from the Shang period (ca. 1600–1050 BCE) through to the Warring States (ca. 476–221 BCE). During this time both the nature of polities and of warfare changed dramatically.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36121.0