Reimagining and Reengineering Political Complexity in Early Vietnam.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists continue to be interested in the development of political complexity and early forms of “states.” There is compelling evidence that leadership strategies and political centralization in such polities involved modification and reengineering of both social and landscape topographies, making durable modifications that persist in respective regions. In recognizing the theoretical utility of the state concept, this paper reimagines it by focusing on the process of political centralization and how it can foment both societal change as well as physical alterations to surrounding landscapes. Thinking of the state as ongoing action allows us to better understand the role of centralization in the development of highly complex and large-scale collectives in the human past, and of their environmental footprints. Using a case study from early Vietnam, the paper highlights conditions that resulted in the emergence of the area’s earliest complex society, while also illustrating how the polity radically transformed landscapes as large-scale aggregations of people found new ways to perceive and interact with each other and their ecological surroundings. It explores how political mechanisms reengineered social organization, thus effectively marshaling resources and labor to effectuate permanent sociopolitical and environmental changes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives.   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38213.0