Diplomatic Gifts: An Introduction to the Forum

Kustermans, Jorg

doi:10.1163/1871191x-bja10064

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…There is an obvious potential for IR to build on this work in order to identify the boundaries and density of interaction of prehistorical (proto)-systems. If we take into consideration that gift-giving seems to be a ubiquitous aspect of diplomacy and hypothesize that jewelry and other luxury goods such as crockery will be among the goods exchanged, there is also a potential here for us to deepen our understanding of basic preconditions for diplomacy ( Numelin 1950 ;Kustermans 2021 ). We are, however, wary of pushing this kind of research, for it probably demands more knowledge about the meaning aspect than we have at present.…”

Section: Functional Differentiationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prehistorical International Relations: How, Why, What

Neumann

Glørstad

2022

Global Studies Quarterly

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Archaeologically produced knowledge of prehistory has grown to a point where international relations (IR) may begin to incorporate it in their own work. In this article, we try to facilitate this process by introducing IR scholars to archaeology's material data and ways of thinking about it. New types of system units, such as households and kinship, emerged in prehistory and had effects on temporality and territoriality as well as knock-on effects on institutions, such as war and trade. If we understand the origins of these phenomena better, we are better equipped to understand how they work at the present time. Focusing on a key topic in IR, namely systems emergence, we splice archaeological and IR approaches to systems. Four key factors for systems emergence appear: competition for resources, interaction capacity, social imitation, and stable food resources. We then show how these factors were at work in the two earliest proto-systems to be found in Europe, namely House Polity Proto-systems (9000–4500 BCE) and Segmentary Polity Proto-systems (4500–2500 BCE). They are still active. We conclude that when studies of prehistoric systems, institutions, and practices point up deep structural factors like, we should not expect them to lose their relevance any time soon.

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Section: Functional Differentiationmentioning

confidence: 99%