The Materiality of Surveillance: Scale, Complexity, and Polity

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Textual and archaeological evidence make clear that most ancient polities were concerned with surveillance in some way. However, the scale of material investment in surveillance suggests different motivations in different contexts. This paper compares the material signatures of surveillance in Greek Bronze Age polities, Iron Age city-states, and Roman imperial territories, in order to elucidate different scales of and interests in surveillance. For example, inter-polity surveillance depends on human-derived information gathering; bureaucratic systems record information about land and subjects; monuments and fortifications demonstrate the capacity to observe just as much as they function to collect actual information. In the Greek world, these material interventions seem to be significant first in zones such as borderlands, where immediate territorial claims are at stake, along key land routes, and in productive hinterlands to monitor subjects or slaves. In Roman times such interventions are deployed as explicit, material extensions of imperial authority, especially in recently annexed cities and landscapes. A long-term view of surveillance in contexts from Mainland Greece, the Cyclades, and Jordan suggests that the spatial scale and organizational complexity of ancient polities are closely linked not only to their capacity to surveil, but to showing that they are doing it.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40188.0