Chiefdoms at the threshold: The competitive origins of the primary state

This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.

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“…References: Bocquet-Appel (2002); Bowles and Gintis (2011); Boyd and Richerson (2005); Redmond and Spencer (2012); Smil (1994).…”

Section: The Grand Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grand Challenges for Archaeology

Kintigh¹,

Altschul²,

Beaudry³

et al. 2014

Am. antiq.

269

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“…Essential to statecraft among incipient and early states is that political power becomes centralized, a process that typically involves the coalescence of autonomous communities into a single polity (Algaze 1993;Flannery 1998Flannery , 1999Marcus 1992Marcus , 1998Marcus and Flannery 1996;Spencer 1990Spencer , 1998Spencer , 2009Spencer , 2010Redmond and Spencer 2012;Wright 1977Wright , 1986Wright , 2006.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Territorial Expansion in the Virú State: Updating Old Settlement Patterns to Explore New Ideas

Downey¹

2018

Preprint

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Highlights:-The territorial-expansion model is examined in context of the development of the Virú state Evidence is presented to show that the Virú state incorporated the earlier Puerto Morin polities and that a three-tiered settlement hierarchy existed at this time. Drawing from cross-cultural evidence and recent studies on Virú expansionary dynamics, I propose a hypothesis that the Virú state expanded rapidly throughout the valley early in its developmental history and pursued a policy of territorial consolidation later in its history. Ultimately, the Virú case supports the territorial-expansion model of early state development.

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“…archaic states | territorial expansion | core outposts R esearch carried out over the past decades suggests that territorial expansion and consolidation often played a key role in the crystallization of early states (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18). Drawing from historical case studies from Madagascar, Wright noted that statecraft generally takes place in contexts of conflict and expansionary dynamics in landscapes that often featured closely spaced and competing centers and that this process is usually marked by many successes and failures before enduring states emerge (18).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Redmond and Spencer's work (5,6,(10)(11)(12) has helped document various key aspects of the expansionary dynamics of early states, including annexation strategies, administration practice, and issues related to the cooption of indigenous leaders, delegation of authority, and responses to varying conditions of local competition or resistance (see also ref. 7).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…3 and 8). The effective management of the newly annexed territories often fostered the delegation of partial authority to subordinate administrators stationed at distant outposts who maintained control and managed the extraction and transfer of resources back to the state core (6,10). Rather than being associated with "imperial" phases of later state development, it seems that outposts were therefore often part and parcel of the initial processes of statecraft and were marked by cycles of growth and decline, successes and failures (3).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Statecraft and expansionary dynamics: A Virú outpost at Huaca Prieta, Chicama Valley, Peru

Millaire

Prieto

Surette

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

Self Cite

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Interpolity interaction and regional control were central features of all early state societies, taking the form of trade-embedded in political processes to varying degrees-or interregional conquest strategies meant to expand the polity's control or influence over neighboring territories. Cross-cultural analyses of early statecraft suggest that territorial expansion was an integral part of the process of primary state formation, closely associated with the delegation of authority to subordinate administrators and the construction of core outposts of the state in foreign territories. We report here on a potential case of a core outpost, associated with the early Virú state, at the site of Huaca Prieta in the Chicama Valley, located 75 km north of the Virú state heartland on the north coast of Peru. This site is discussed in the context of other possible Virú outposts in the Moche Valley, Pampa La Cruz, and Huaca Las Estrellas, and as part of a broader reflection on expansionary dynamics and statecraft.archaic states | territorial expansion | core outposts R esearch carried out over the past decades suggests that territorial expansion and consolidation often played a key role in the crystallization of early states (1-18). Drawing from historical case studies from Madagascar, Wright noted that statecraft generally takes place in contexts of conflict and expansionary dynamics in landscapes that often featured closely spaced and competing centers and that this process is usually marked by many successes and failures before enduring states emerge (18). Viewed as a process rather than as an evolutionary breakthrough, research into statecraft has contributed to the anthropological study of early civilization by documenting the varied historically contingent trajectories ancient polities followed as they developed more complex systems of political organization.In his work on the expansionary dynamics of primary state formations, Algaze (1) stressed the important role played by core outposts in early statecraft. Such outposts were founded at crucial nodes along trade routes, near resources concentrations, or amid strategically located native polities in control of existing corridors of communication and trade and functioned as centers attracting information, services, population, and resources from the surrounding regions. Reviewing archaeological evidence from different regions around the world, Algaze found that outposts often represented the culmination of earlier patterns of interregional exchange that had by then intensified and become formalized, that, for their own political ends, local elites were often initially amenable to granting such access to foreign powers, and that transportational constraints "meant that the most efficient way to channel regular exchanges between such contrastive polities was precisely by means of isolated core outposts embedded within distant peripheries" (ref. 1, pp. 319-320).To Algaze, core outposts were therefore important "instruments of expansion" founded on the asymmetrical relatio...

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Chiefdoms at the threshold: The competitive origins of the primary state

Cited by 64 publications

References 39 publications

Grand Challenges for Archaeology

Grand Challenges for Archaeology

Territorial Expansion in the Virú State: Updating Old Settlement Patterns to Explore New Ideas

Statecraft and expansionary dynamics: A Virú outpost at Huaca Prieta, Chicama Valley, Peru

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