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Author: Susan Keech McIntosh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1999-06-10
Total Pages: 190
ISBN-13: 0521630746
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book reintroduces an African perspective on archaeological theorizing about complex societies.
Author: Robert L. Carneiro
Publisher: Eliot Werner Publications
Published: 2017-12-31
Total Pages: 370
ISBN-13: 173337695X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat many anthropologists regard as the major step in political development occurred when, for the first time in history, previously autonomous villages gave up their individual sovereignties and were brought together into a multi-village political unit--the chiefdom. Though long neglected as a major stage in history, recent years have seen the chiefdom come in for increased attention. As its importance has been more fully recognized, it has become the object of serious scholarly analysis and interpretation. In this volume specialists in political evolution draw on data from ethnography, archaeology, and history and apply fresh insights to enhance the study of the chiefdom. The papers present penetrating analyses of many aspects of the chiefdom, from how this form of political organization first arose to the role it played in giving rise to the next major stage in the development of human society--the state.
Author: Ronald K. Faulseit
Publisher: SIU Press
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 553
ISBN-13: 0809333996
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book interprets how ancient civilizations responded to various stresses, including environmental change, warfare, and the fragmentation of political institutions. It focuses on what happened during and after the decline of once powerful regimes, and posits that they experienced social resilience and transformation instead of collapse.
Author: Timothy Earle
Publisher: Eliot Werner Publications
Published: 2021-12-31
Total Pages: 185
ISBN-13: 1734281855
DOWNLOAD EBOOKChiefs are political operatives who hold titles of leadership over groups larger than intimate kin-based communities. Although they rule with the consent of their group, they are all about building personal power and respect. Many scholars have viewed chiefs as problem solvers--defending groups against aggressors, resolving disputes, providing support under hardship, organizing labor for community projects, and redistributing goods among those in need. Chiefs do these things, but much of what chiefs do is accumulate benefits for themselves, staying in power and legitimizing control. Anthropological archaeology is well suited to pursue the study of chiefs, their leadership institutions (chiefdoms), and long-term historical processes. The author argues that studying chiefdoms is essential to understanding the role of elemental powers in social evolution. As an illustration, he studies chiefs and their power strategies in historically independent prehistoric and traditional societies and discusses how they continue to exist as powerful actors within modern states.
Author: Timothy R. Pauketat
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 9780759108288
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book sweeps away the last vestiges of social-evolutionary explanations of 'chiefdoms' by rethinking the history of Pre-Columbian Southeast peoples and comparing them to ancient peoples in the Southwest, Mexico, Mesoamerica, and Mesopotamia.
Author: Neil Kodesh
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2010-03-12
Total Pages: 281
ISBN-13: 0813929709
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWinner of the 2011 African Studies Association Herskovits Award Beyond the Royal Gaze shifts the perspective from which we view early African politics by asking what Buganda, a kingdom located on the northwest shores of Lake Victoria in present-day Uganda, looked like to people who were not of the center but nevertheless became central to its functioning. Drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines—history, historical linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology—Neil Kodesh argues that the domains of politics and public healing were intimately entwined in Buganda from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted throughout Buganda, Kodesh demonstrates how efforts to ensure collective prosperity and perpetuity—usually expressed in the language of health and healing—lay at the heart of community-building processes in Buganda. Kodesh's work offers a novel approach to the use of oral sources and opens up new possibilities for researching and writing histories of more distant periods in Africa's past. Beyond the Royal Gaze will appeal to students and scholars of health and healing, political complexity, and the production of knowledge in places where limited documentary evidence exists.
Author: Robin Beck
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-06-24
Total Pages: 321
ISBN-13: 1107022134
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOffers a new framework for understanding the transformation of the Native American South during the first centuries of the colonial era.
Author: Robert Chapman
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2003-12-08
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 113448240X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn up-to-date and critical analysis of how archaeologists study past societies, Archaeologies of Complexity addresses the nature of contemporary archaeology and the study of social change, and debates the transition from perceived simple, egalitarian societies to the complex power structures and divisions of our modern world. Since the eighteenth century, archaeologists have examined complexity in terms of successive types of societies, from early bands, tribes and chiefdoms to states; through stages of social evolution, including 'savagery', 'barbarism' and 'civilisation', to the present state of complexity and inequality. Presenting a radical, alternative view of ancient state societies, the book explains the often ambiguous terms of 'complexity', 'hierarchy' and inequality' and provides a critical account of the Anglo-American research of the last forty years which has heavily influenced the subject.
Author: Peter Mitchell
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 340
ISBN-13: 9780759102590
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the exodus of early modern humans to the growth of African diasporas, Africa has had a long and complex relationship with the outside world. More than a passive vessel manipulated by external empires, the African experience has been a complex mix of internal geographic, environmental, sociopolitical and economic factors, and regular interaction with outsiders. Peter Mitchell attempts to outline these factors over the long period of modern human history, to find their commonalities and development over time. He examines African interconnections through Egypt and Nubia with the Near East, through multiple Indian Ocean trading systems, through the trans-Saharan trade, and through more recent incursion of Europeans. The African diaspora is also explored for continuities and resistance to foreign domination. Commonalities abound in the African experience, as do complexities of each individual period and interrelationship. Mitchell's sweeping analysis of African connections place the continent in context of global prehistory and history. The book should be of interest not only to Africanists, but to many other archaeologists, historians, geographers, linguists, social scientists and their students.
Author: Timothy Earle
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-13
Total Pages: 386
ISBN-13: 0429981627
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Timothy Earle has set out to offer the most comprehensive view now available of the economic foundations of early societies, and it may well be that he has succeeded. Bronze Age Economics is a pioneering contribution to archaeological theory." —Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge
