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Power in space: archaeological and geographical studies of the state.

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Abstract

Discusses the relative neglect by geographers of major transitions in the history of human society. Five aspects of power are discussed, namely the state and efforts made to discover its origins, the recognition of states as territorial units, the growth of states and empires, core-periphery relations, and legitimation. -after Editor

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... I am grateful to the editors for the opportunity to present a more targeted argument here. 1 On territorial definitions of the state or other political entities: Weber 1968, 78;Carneiro 1970;Smith 1996. 2 On the importance (and difficulties) of understanding past formulations of political space : Cherry 1987;Smith 2003;Van Valkenburgh/Osborne 2013. 3 On Bronze Age Boeotia, see, most recently: Aravantinos 2020. ...
Chapter
This paper compares regional datasets for Mycenaean Central Greece. I focus on Boeotia and Euboea to examine issues of territoriality and political landscapes in the Mycenaean world. Based on this comparison, I argue that both palatial and non-palatial modes of landscape organisation existed side by side during the Late Bronze Age and that many regions are probably best considered non-palatial – that is, outside of the direct control or purview of any Mycenaean palace. I offer this as an alternative to “palatial dependency” models, multi-regional hegemony, or labels of province or periphery. I begin with a territorial model for Mycenaean palatial landscapes, using a combination of spatial modelling and the analysis of Linear B documents from Thebes. I next consider how we might apply such models in the absence of Linear B documents. Archaeological evidence from northern Boeotia suggests another type of territorial behaviour, focused on landscape integration. In Euboea, by contrast, there is little to no evidence for such centralizing activity, and the archaeological landscape suggests different modes of polity. In closing I turn to the postpalatial period, where comparative regional perspectives suggest that palatial systems altered long-term trends in settlement patterns only in particular regions
... La plasmación espacial del Estado implica una jerarquización funcional de los yacimientos que puede ser reconocida mediante la aplicación de modelos adecuados elaborados por geógrafos y antropólogos, y aplicados con éxito por los arqueólogos (Hodges, 1987;Cherry, 1987). La estratificación social impone así mismo contrastes acusados en el acceso a los recursos y en la capacidad de consumo, lo que normalmente denominamos distribución de la riqueza, y suele ir acompañada igualmente de otros contrastes residenciales. ...
... Archaeologists have sought to use settlement landscapes, therefore, to generate rules of thumb for identifying periods of sociopolitical change in the past, such as the emergence of chiefdoms or the rise of the state (Flannery 1998;W right1994). In addition to such indices of political scale and socioeconomic relations, archaeologists commonly examine how non-settlement building activity (state facilities, agricultural works, road networks, etc.) was used in the past as a strategy to promote the political and economic agendas of centralized government institutions at the local level (Cherry 1987;Kolata 1986;Schreiber 1987;Stanish1994;Ur2003). Read as either indices of political–economic relationships, or as a critical component of generating those relationships, landscape stands center stage in the study of political economies in the past, a point reiterated by the chapters in this volume. ...
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This volume examines the archaeology of precolonial West African societies in the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Using historical and archaeological perspectives on landscape, this collection of essays sheds light on how involvement in the commercial revolutions of the early modern period dramatically reshaped the regional contours of political organization across West Africa. The essays examine how social and political transformations occurred at the regional level by exploring regional economic networks, population shifts, cultural values and ideologies. The book demonstrates the importance of anthropological insights not only to the broad political history of West Africa, but also to an understanding of political culture as a form of meaningful social practice.
... However, of itself ranking does not determine the zones of influence of highly-ranked sites directly as, for example, the Renfrew tent model (see Cherry 1987 for a discussion) attempts. To do this we again exploit a random walker to access the global shape of the network, starting from site i, but with the proviso that, after each walk, we restart the walk from site i with probability p. ...
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In this paper we pursue a novel transdisciplinary approach to the question of cultural dynamics, focussing particularly on the transmission of cultural traits across socio-physical space. Using ideas from statistical physics, we start from known archaeological sites to create networks representing possible macroscopic interactions of the prehistoric Aegean (specifically the Middle and early Late Bronze Age).
... While Early IAIIA correlates with Megiddo VB, the Late IAIIA is manifested in Megiddo VA-IVB. State formation is a fascinating social process that has challenged scientists of varied disciplines (Cherry 1987;Johnson and Earle 2000;Maisels 1993;Routledge 2003). The subject of what generated the emergence of social complexity is the central issue in the debate on the origins of states and urban societies. ...
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... There are examples of this in the archaeological literature. For instance the Renfrew tent model (see Cherry 1987 for a discussion) uses a simple geometric picture based on physical separation to determine zones of influence. While physical distance is an important factor, we have already built this into the assignment of weights to links so let us again exploit a random walker to access the global shape of the network. ...
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In this paper we present a new interdisciplinary perspective on regional interaction patterns in archaeological contexts. It combines insights from graph theory, social network analysis and statistical physics to treat the interactions between sites in geographical space in terms of a network which minimises an associated Hamiltonian. To explore the various issues involved a case study from a heterogeneous physical environment is chosen, the archipelago environment of the southern Aegean, in particular the rich dataset of the Aegean Bronze Age. Our findings are of broader relevance for the study of interaction networks, as the use of statistical physics in this fashion represents a novel application in social science contexts.
... Archaeologists and historians have also settled upon the idea of a bounded zone as an appropriate method of analysis for ancient polities. John Cherry (1987) notes that it is advantageous for archaeologists to think of states as territorially bounded, just as rulers see states that way. The idea of territory thus becomes a convenient fiction for both modern analysts and ancient rulers, built upon a landscape abstraction. ...
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With broad lines and dark shading, the cartographic depictions of ancient states and empires convey the impression of comprehensive political entities having firm boundaries and uniform territorial control. These depictions oversimplify the complexities of early state growth, as well as overstating the capacity of central governments to control large territories. Archaeological and textual evidence suggests that ancient states are better understood through network models rather than bounded-territory models. Network approaches enable us to depict competition within and among polities as they grow, the efficient use of nodal points as a focus for political leaders, and the realities of nonoverlapping ritual, social, and economic activities that have an impact on political cohesion. Network maps and bounded-territory representations are compared for the Inka, Mauryan, and Sassanian polities.
... To consider basic human motivations such as the exercise of power or the role of gender in social relations is a pursuit far too important to be limited to a single discipline--or even a pair of disciplines (e.g., Cherry, 1987;Gero and Conkey, 1991;Saitta, 1992, pp. 894-895;Sherrat, 1993, p. 123). ...
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Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the past and the present have become commonplace: anthropologists now situate cultures in their historical contexts, while historians pursue particularistic ends within politicoeconomic or ideational structures. Archaeologists have cast their nets even more widely, not only toward anthropology and history, but to fields ranging from molecular biology to hermeneutics. Postmodernist approaches maintain that archaeologists should be looking at the past from multiple perspectives and listening to its multivocality. Archaeologists, in fact, not only develop different ways of understanding the past, but actually develop alternative pasts. This paper argues that multiple paths to alternative pasts enhance archaeological understanding and, at the same time, stimulate the development of archaeological theory.
... Model building based on natural science observations do not imply that humans are mechanistic or that they are incapable of cultural adaptations, but such models do "introduce and highlight methodological and theoretical issues that are common and intelligible to both the natural and social sciences" [15, p 351]. Examples of natural-science analogies to human social groupings include Cherry's [16] comparison of the trajectory of state growth with that of a bacterial colony and Johnson's [17] call for the application of gravity models derived from Newtonian physics to human societies. In the model developed below, animal behavior in landscapes is utilized to understand two components of the territory concept: resources and boundaries. ...
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