Participation, Choice, and Institutional Change across the Eurasian Bronze Age

Summary

This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Theories of “complex social organization” have long linked institutional formations to increased concentrations of power, centralization, and inequality. However, for more than a decade, novel models of “non-uniform complexity”—wherein economic, social, ritual, and practical institutions reflect divergent geographic networks from those underpinning political power—have been useful for explaining the rapid and regionally expansive connectivity and innovation that linked urban communities and mobile pastoralists of Inner Asia throughout the Bronze Age. This paper reexamines this model in light of *The Dawn of Everything*, ultimately situating non-uniform complexity within a wider theoretical movement that promotes alternative views of complexity and an archaeological contribution beyond “habitus” and “practice” to link human choices and institutional participation to the formation of complex and extensive connectivity among pre-state populations of Eurasia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39202.0