Polity, collectivity and trade: a Mediterranean island across temporal and social boundaries

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper examines the organization and control of trade on Sicily and the different forms of polities on Sicily during shifts across the traditional archaeological boundaries of Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age. In other parts of Europe, these periods are currently conceptualized as going from more egalitarian, to more authoritarian, to more egalitarian again. Often, developing forms of polity are assessed only through comparison of social conditions via household wealth or individual status displayed in burials. Instead, we add economic concepts from Collective Action Theory: how leaders and/or rulers fund (or fail to fund) both public goods and their own regimes - collectivity and joint production versus non-collectivities such as external revenue or coercion. How do shifting forms of trade and shifting forms of polity compare with extant assessments of developments in social differentiation?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51243