Bounding Empires and Political/Military Networks with Archaeological Data

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The archaeological analysis of territory, boundaries, and networks in empires and polities faces two hurdles. First, the conjunction of preservation, data recovery and analysis required for rigorous reconstructions is all too rare archaeologically. Second, the archaeology of political organization took a postmodern turn in the 1990s, inhibiting quantification, measurement, and the rigorous bounding of ancient networks and polities. Nevertheless, archaeologists have developed a small toolkit to answer two key questions: Was there an empire here? and, How was it bounded? I review the relevant methods and discuss a series of empirical and conceptual caveats and complications.

Michael E. Smith, professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University more