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1 Home Turf: Archaeology, Territoriality, and Politics

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 1
Home Turf: Archaeology, Territoriality,
and Politics
Parker VanValkenburgh
University of Vermont
and
James F. Osborne
Johns Hopkins University

ABSTRACT
Archaeological studies of political life have often assumed that the control of territory is an inherent aspect
of social power, particularly within complex polities. Frustration with the rigid territorialism of archaeological
approaches to politics has fostered enthusiasm for alternative models of political space, including networks. While
we concur with this frustration, we argue that territorial models should still be integral to archaeological studies
of political landscapes. However, archaeologists should reframe the control of territory as one of many modalities
through which authority can be claimed and reproduced and focus attention on variability in territorial patterns
and processes. In this introduction, we review previous approaches to territoriality in anthropology and corollary
fields, outline dimensions of variability in territorial behaviors and institutions, and provide a foundation for the
series of essays in this volume, which collectively seek to invigorate the study of territoriality in anthropological
archaeology. [territoriality, archaeological theory, landscape archaeology]

I n the early 21st century, the challenges of interpreting po-

litical space center on what Steinburg (2009) has called
the “paradox of modern territoriality.” On the one hand,
the growth of offshore labor outsourcing, terrorist networks,
world internet traffic, international travel, and supranational
governing organizations suggests that territorial boundaries
are increasingly less relevant to social experience—that, as
one popular author puts it, “the world is flat” (Friedman
2005). On the other hand, territorial sovereignty continues
to play a leading role in structuring modern societies, not
only by delimiting spaces for the legitimate use of violence,
but also by defining citizenship and spheres of economic
production. Struggles over land and ocean territory con-
tinue to define conflicts between state and non-state actors
(Diener and Hagen 2010; Haughney 2012; Mares 2012), and
sovereign territories still animate the political imaginations
of ethnic nationalist movements (Knight 2005; Shin 2006;
Toft 2010; Updegraff 2012; Wolff 2010).
While the geographic scale and speed of 21st-century
global connections may be unprecedented, archaeological
interpretations of ancient political life also confront ten-
sions between the dynamism of social networks and the
reification of territorial forms. However, it is only recently
that the complex relationship between these processes has
come into focus in archaeological scholarship. For many
decades, anthropologists treated the political control of ter-
ritory as either a fixed characteristic of state-level societies
that arose through linear political evolution (Fried 1967;
Maine 1861; Morgan 1877; Service 1962; Spencer 1877) or
a passive reflection of cultural identity (Benedict 1934; Boas
1932). In the 1980s and 1990s, popular interest in global-
ization fostered anthropological studies of mobile subjects,

ARCHEOLOGICAL PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, Vol. 22, Issue 1, pp. 1–27, ISSN 1551-823X,
online ISSN 1551-8248. 
C 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/apaa.12000.
2 Parker VanValkenburgh and James F. Osborne
transnational identities, and global flows of capital and infor-
mation (Appadurai 1988, 1990; Gupta and Ferguson 1992;
Hannerz 1986; Kearney 1995; Ong 1999; Roseberry 1983;
Wolf 1982). In this theoretical climate, the study of ter-
ritory often seemed anathema, and archaeologists focused
new attention on interregional interaction and world-systems
approaches (Algaze 1993; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1993; Hall
and Chase-Dunn 1993; Santley and Alexander 1992; Schort-
man 1989; Schortman and Urban 1987, 1992).
As the pace of global interaction has increased in the
21st century, archaeological scholarship is arguably still
undergoing a “global turn,” and one salient trend in this
vein has been the growth of archaeological theories that re-
envision societies as networks. For some authors, network
models solve a graphic problem: how to represent politi-
cal space on two-dimensional surfaces. Unlike simplistic
depictions of polities and other social groups as unitary
“blobs,” networks exclude large areas of “empty” space in
which authority may be incomplete or unclaimed in com-
plex polities (Parker, this volume; M. L. Smith 2005, 2007;
Sugandhi, this volume; Wilkinson 2003). For others, net-
work models are sophisticated conceptual tools that allow
for flexible accounts of how power accrues (and dissolves)
in specific relationships between individuals and resources
(Campbell 2009; Golitko et al. 2012; Knappett 2011; Mun-
son and Macri 2009; Schortman and Urban 2011, 2012;
Urban and Schortman, this volume).
Conceptualizing polities as webs of social relationships
may indeed help us more accurately chart the pathways
through which political institutions take shape, both in the
present and in the past. However, we (the editors) believe
that entirely discounting the role of territoriality in social
life significantly hampers archaeological understanding of
spatial politics. We argue that representations, perceptions,
and experiences of territory are central elements of political
life in many past and present contexts. However, rather than
seeing the control of territory as a fixed characteristic of po-
litical evolution, of cultural tradition, or of human nature, we
envision territorial control as one of many possible modali-
ties through which authority can be claimed and reproduced.
Archaeologists have commonly used the term territori-
ality in discussions of economic and political landscapes in
small-scale societies, particularly those practicing foraging
and pastoralist lifeways (e.g., Casimir and Rao 1992; Holl
1998; Rowley-Conwy 2001; Vita-Finzi and Higgs 1970;
though see Bintliff 1999). Among these studies, Dyson-
Hudson and Smith’s (1978) “defensibility” model has served
as perhaps the most popular and successful analytical vehi-
cle for explaining variation in territorial behaviors, linking
the defense of territory to the density and predictability of
essential economic resources. Yet while highly useful, the
resource defensibility model does not exhaust the range of
questions raised by either observed variability in territorial
phenomena or the complexities of how territorial control
interfaces with other modalities of social power, including
networks.
To expand the scope of archaeological studies of terri-
toriality, we draw on scholarship in cultural geography and
political economy that explores how borders and boundaries
shape social identities and political institutions (e.g., Agnew
1994; Barth 1969; Benton 2010; Murphy 2012; Raffestin
1984; Sack 1986; Soja 1971). We also broaden our focus
beyond small-scale foraging and pastoralist groups to in-
corporate studies of large-scale polities. Rather than seeing
territories as either entirely material or entirely conceptual,
we regard territoriality, the dynamic configuration of bound-
aries within the landscape, as a product of the engagement
of political institutions, physical environments, and human
subjectivities. Territorial boundaries may be created and
defended in order to secure access to dense and predictable
resources, as suggested by the defensibility hypothesis.
However, their effects are not restricted to these intended
purposes. Territorial behaviors and built environments “feed
back” on the individuals and entities that create them, shap-
ing social identity and political institutions in the process.
This chapter begins with a discussion of key terms—
territory and territoriality—and a review of the history
of anthropological and archaeological scholarship on these
subjects. In the second and third sections, we first focus on
cultural historical and evolutionary scholarship, and then
examine cultural geography, political economy, and so-
cial landscape perspectives. We argue that dynamic models
drawn from human evolutionary ecology, social landscape
archaeology, and political economy are better equipped to
explain the complexity and variability of human territoriality
than linear evolutionary and cultural historical approaches.
However, we also assert that even recent, dynamic models
of territoriality have yet to fully appreciate the diversity of
territorial phenomena in the past and present. In the fourth
section of the essay, we outline this diversity by highlighting
five axes of territorial variability and framing questions that
they pose for archaeological studies of territoriality. Finally,
in the fifth section, we present a brief introduction to the ten
additional chapters that make up this collection.
Defining Terms: Territory and Territoriality
What is territory, and how have archaeologists made
sense of it? Etymology provides a touchstone and highlights
several tensions and ambiguities in the term. The English
word territory appears to derive from two Latin sources,
Archaeology, Territoriality, and Politics
terra (terrain or land) and territorium (an area from which
people are warned) (Agnew 2009:57; Connolly 1995:xxii;
Crampton and Elden 2007:822; Delaney 2005:13–14;
Neocleous 2003:103). According to the Oxford English Dic-
tionary (online edition, 2000), the term territorium itself
may also derive from terrere, “to frighten,” the root of the
English word terror (“territory,” OED etymology). Terri-
tory first appeared in the English language in the mid-15th
century to describe “the land or district lying round a city
or town and under its jurisdiction” (“territory,” OED def.
1a) and “a tract of land, or district of undefined boundaries;
a region” (“territory,” OED def. 2). By the late 15th and
early 16th centuries, it could also refer to “the extent of the
land belonging to or under the jurisdiction of a ruler, state
or group of people” (“territory,” OED def. 1b), and it was
applied metaphorically to refer to “an area of knowledge;
a sphere of thought or action, a province” by the mid-17th
century (“territory,” OED def. 3). Use of the term to describe
“an area selected by an animal or a group of animals and
defended against others”—one of its most common mean-
ings in anthropological literature—does not appear until the
end of the 18th century and did not become common un-
til its use by ethologists in the mid-20th (“territory,” OED
def. 1d).
We take several significant points from the history of the
word territory. First is its somewhat confusing (but sugges-
tive) fusing of references to land, politically defined space,
and areas of knowledge. As we discuss below, archaeologists
have employed the word territory in each of these different
senses, sometimes to confusing effect. Second, while some
archaeological studies of territoriality draw on animal be-
havior as their primary inspiration, the ethological use of
the term is relatively recent. Therefore, while territorial dy-
namics among nonhuman animals may serve as productive
analogies for studies of human territoriality, they are not
an obligatory starting point. Third, the word’s origins in the
Early Modern period coincide with a critical, though slow
and uneven, shift in the nature of sovereignty in Western
Europe. That is, between the 14th and 17th centuries, po-
litical and legal regimes gradually shifted from envisioning
sovereignty as a “vertical” phenomenon, concerned with
linkages between earthly and heavenly authority, to seeing
it as a “horizontal” problem of defining the spatial limits of
authority within different principalities (Larkins 2009:6–7).
Finally, the link between territory and terrere evokes a re-
lationship between territorial entities and violence, or the
threat thereof.
Discussions of political space in the social sciences
have suffered from slippage between the terms territory and
territoriality (Elden 2010:801). Territoriality first appeared
in the English language in the 18th century (“territorial-
3
ity,” OED def. 1). However, it has been employed in two
rather different ways in anthropological literature. In some
instances, authors have used the term to refer to the state
or condition of territories existing in a given landscape or
to the defense thereof, or to both. Johnson’s (1977:491)
suggestions that “agricultural settlement may favor terri-
toriality” and that “territoriality may not be required to
produce relatively closed mating networks in some non-
linear settlement systems” are examples of this usage. Sim-
ilarly, Dyson-Hudson and Smith (1978:23) define territori-
ality as the “exclusive use of a spatially fixed and clearly
bounded area by some means of defense or communica-
tion.” And geographer Robert Sack (1986:19) adapts the
term to refer to a particular kind of power strategy involv-
ing territory: “the attempt by an individual or group to
affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and rela-
tionships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geo-
graphic area.”
In other instances, archaeologists have used the term
territoriality to refer to a variable property of relationships
between social institutions and landforms. Holl’s (1998) sug-
gestion that “pastoralist territoriality [in the West African
Holocene] involved changing, flexible networks of places
comprising grazing lands, groves of fruit trees and wild
grain, water-places, settlement areas, burial places, and sym-
bolically charged localities” exemplifies this second usage.
Here, Holl uses the word territoriality to suggest both plu-
rality and dynamism in human–land relations—a range of
different ways in which social phenomena are and are not
territorial. In this introductory essay, we use the term terri-
toriality in this latter, more flexible sense. Where we refer to
a behavior consisting of the defense of bounded parcels of
land, or the control of such areas by an individual or group,
we use the more descriptive terms territorial defense and
territorial control.
Evolutionary, Ecological, and Cultural
Historical Approaches
Anthropologists have written a great deal about territo-
riality, both explicitly and implicitly. We organize our review
of this literature into two parts: the first focuses on evolu-
tionary, ecological, and cultural historical approaches, cul-
minating in a discussion of human evolutionary ecology; the
second, on perspectives drawn from political economy and
cultural geography, ending in a more detailed discussion of
social landscape approaches and the territorial-hegemonic
spectrum of strategies in ancient empires.
In the drive to create unified schemes for understand-
ing humanity’s common history, evolutionists attempted to
4 Parker VanValkenburgh and James F. Osborne
explain the social and cultural diversity of the late 19th-
century world, as well as antiquity, by defining universal
historical stages. Territory played different roles within the
first wave of social evolutionism. It was of seemingly lit-
tle interest to Edward Tylor, whose magnum opus Primitive
Culture (1871) scarcely contains the word territory, and fo-
cuses little attention on the spatial qualities of social life.
Herbert Spencer (1877) referred to territory in two senses,
the first being in a manner roughly equivalent to contem-
porary usage of the word environment. Anticipating several
key elements of Robert Carneiro’s (1970) model of circum-
scription, he speculated that
social integration is easy within a territory which, while
able to support a large population, affords facilities for
coercing the units of that population: especially if it is
bounded by regions offering little sustenance, or peopled
by enemies, or both. [Spencer 1877:25]
Spencer also employed the term in a second sense, to
refer more precisely to the land under the control of a so-
cial group or political confederation. Yet here, Spencer saw
territory as little more than an ancillary aspect of super-
organic (i.e., social) evolution. Like organisms, societies
evolved as groups and territories were compounded and
re-compounded into larger aggregates (Spencer 1877:463–
470). As a result, the large, integrated domains of civiliza-
tions and empires indexed higher levels of social develop-
ment. Where political landscapes remained fragmented in
the late 19th century, they could be read as relicts of bar-
barous eras and as impediments to social progress.
The relationship between territoriality and social de-
velopment was also central to the political theory of Lewis
Henry Morgan. Unlike Spencer, however, Morgan saw ter-
ritory as one of the most basic contexts of social solidarity,
rather than simply a pale reflection of staged evolutionary
transformation. Indeed, Morgan viewed the tribe’s posses-
sion and defense of territory as actually anterior to any
of its other distinguishing characteristics, such as language
and political organization (Morgan 1877:112). Territorial
control was also a defining political characteristic of civi-
lization. As tribes underwent the transition from barbarism
to civilization, their governments, “founded upon persons or
gentilism” (and ultimately kinship), became “governments
founded upon territories and property” (Morgan 1877:ix, 7).
For Morgan, it was ultimately the state’s control of landed
property, as opposed to gens or population, that was its most
defining characteristic.
Morgan’s and Spencer’s identification of territorial gov-
ernment with higher stages of social evolution followed the
work of Henry Maine (1861). But whereas Spencer and
Morgan saw the emergence of territorial sovereignty as a
marker of progress between evolutionary stages, Maine saw
it as a singular moment in human history. Following the col-
lapse of the universal dominion of Rome, local sovereigns
exerted their power over populations (Franks, Burgundians,
Vandals) and territorial sovereignty, which Maine defined as
“the view which connects sovereignty with the possession of
a limited portion of the Earth’s surface,” was best understood
as “an offshoot of . . . feudalism” (Maine 1861:107–108).
Maine’s template—that the control of population was
antecedent to the control of territory, and that the division
between these two ways of organizing political dominion
could be definitively separated from one another in histor-
ical time—was to long outlast evolutionism, holding sway
over international relations theorists and political historians
throughout much of the 20th century.
Following the heyday of evolutionism, early 20th-
century American anthropology expressed little interest in
political territoriality. Instead, Franz Boas and his students
focused on recording the most expressive elements of cul-
tural practices, from religious ceremonies to language and
portable material culture. Accordingly, their preferred con-
cept for describing the geographical extent of anthropologi-
cal phenomena was the “culture area,” which comprised the
geographic distribution of a set of cultural traits (Wissler
1914, 1927). Boas himself used the word territory as a
virtual synonym for culture area, referring to the areas
occupied by tribal and linguistic groups as, for example,
“Athapaskan territory” and the “territory of the He’iltsuk”
(Stocking 1989:95–102). From this perspective, archaeol-
ogists could contribute to defining territories-qua-culture
areas by identifying the geographic and chronological dis-
tribution of stylistic elements among excavated materials
(Kidder 1924; Kroeber 1931).
Across the Atlantic Ocean, cultural historical ap-
proaches held different political implications, allowing na-
tional and regional histories to be projected into eras pre-
dating the development of writing (Childe 1925). While
European archaeologists rarely asserted that archaeological
culture areas could be interpreted as political territories,
some ethnic nationalists seized on distributions of stylistic
traits as bases for territorial claims. Most famously, Kossinna
(1911) asserted that the archaeologically defined extent of
putatively “German” artifacts in central Europe could be
used as guidelines for German national expansion (Trigger
1989:166–167).
As structural-functionalist approaches emerged in
British social anthropology during the mid-20th century,
the field refocused attention on the political dimensions
of territoriality. Asserting that political systems were not
isomorphic with linguistic and cultural areas, Fortes and
Evans-Pritchard (1940) pursued a comparative approach to
Archaeology, Territoriality, and Politics
studying political diversity in a range of African soci-
eties. They posited that two types of political systems ex-
isted among the eight case studies they examined in detail:
“Type A” systems, organized around centralized authori-
ties, administrative apparatuses, and judicial institutions and
with significant economic cleavages; and “Type B” systems,
which lacked these traits as well as sharp divisions of sta-
tus and wealth (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940:5). In their
investigations, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard found that terri-
torial divisions were present in each of the societies they
examined, but that boundaries played different roles within
Type A and Type B systems. In societies with Type A sys-
tems, administration was manifestly territorial: the chief
operated as head of a territorial division, often with final
economic and legal control over all land and population
within its boundaries (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940:10).
In Type B societies, territorial units were not defined through
administration but rather through lineage ties and usufruct,
and political offices did not carry rights over defined areas of
geographic space (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940:10). Ul-
timately, they concluded that “political relations are not sim-
ply a reflexion [sic] of territorial relations” but that “the polit-
ical system in its own right, incorporates territorial relations
and invests them with the particular kind of political signif-
icance they have” (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940:11).
Fortes and Evans-Pritchard’s contributions to the an-
thropological study of territoriality were critical in two
senses. First, theirs was among the first studies to frame
the diversity of territorial systems as being not simply di-
achronic (whether historical, as suggested by Maine, or evo-
lutionary, as posited by Morgan), but also synchronic and
systemic. Second, they defined territorial relations as so-
cially embedded phenomena, such that understanding ter-
ritoriality required appreciation of how territorial divisions
and categories articulated with other social institutions, in-
cluding kinship systems and exchange networks.
During the 1950s and 1960s, many American anthro-
pologists returned to core concepts of 19th-century evolu-
tionism. Like Morgan and Spencer, scholars such as Leslie
White again saw the emergence of territorial control as part
of an evolutionary transition to higher order social systems.
While the tendency of clans in “tribal” societies to clus-
ter in villages could lead to spatial divisions between kin
groups, it was not until the emergence of “civil” society
that these entities “became territorial units in the political
system” (White 1949:310). Here, territorial political bound-
aries emerged as population pressure led to the dissolution
of kin-based organization and the emergence of increasingly
solidified systems of property ownership (White 1949:310).
Territoriality was thus mechanically related to bureaucratic
development.
5
In contrast, Julian Steward’s (1955) focus on how human
groups adapted to the particularities of their environments
opened up space for the study of dynamic relationships be-
tween territorial systems, social institutions, and ecologies.
Steward himself was relatively uninterested in the politi-
cal control of property and used the term territory to refer
to discrete environmental units within which adaptive social
evolution occurred. For example, he defined ecology itself as
“the interaction of physical, biological, and cultural features
within a locale or unit of territory” (Steward 1955:30). As
bands grew, fissioned, and aggregated, the sizes and shapes
of their corresponding territories changed, but the political
control of territory was a byproduct rather than a mechanism
of adaptation (Steward 1955:170–171).
Steward’s vision had an immediate impact on the empir-
ical study of territoriality in archaeology. His assertion that
archaeology might, in Gordon Willey’s words, “best place it-
self in the position of contributing to the interpretation of the
nonmaterial and organizational aspects of prehistoric soci-
eties through a study of habitation and settlement types” was
the direct inspiration for Willey’s study of settlement pat-
terns in Peru’s Virú valley, which modeled new methods that
archaeologists could employ to study ancient territorial sys-
tems (Steward, quoted in Willey 1953:xviii). In particular,
Willey’s focus on what he called the “functional” implica-
tions of archaeological settlement patterns—their relevance
for the study not only of environmental variability but also
of social and political organization—meant that surface sur-
vey now made it possible for archaeologists to access a vast
range of new information about the relationship between po-
litical institutions and territories (Trigger 1989:282; Willey
1953:1).
Steward’s perspectives also helped to foster the first
wave of “environmental” approaches in archaeology, which
created definitions of territories based on ecological factors
(Chisholm 1962; Clark 1952, 1972; Fitzhugh 1975). Vita-
Finzi and Higgs (1970) advocated “site catchment analysis”
as a way of studying archaeologically recovered settlement
systems in ecological context. Sites had two types of eco-
nomic territory: an “exploitation territory,” consisting of
that area around a site habitually exploited by its inhabi-
tants, and an “annual territory,” defined by the total area that
its residents exploited in the course of a year (Vita-Finzi and
Higgs 1970:7). In flat or relatively uniform environments,
they argued, “territories will tend to be circular” (Jarman
et al. 1972:63). In the eyes of site catchment analysis, then,
territoriality was a fixed property of a lifeway carried out
within a given physical landscape.
Site catchment analysis was (and remains) broadly in-
fluential in archaeological scholarship, providing a con-
venient way to delimit areas for studying the kinds of
6 Parker VanValkenburgh and James F. Osborne
resources that might be exploited by residents of a given
site and a window into site spacing (Munson et al. 1971;
Peebles 1978). However, critics suggest that the approach
pays too little attention to variability in ecological carrying
capacity and human behavior, as well as to the importance of
trade and long-distance interaction in subsistence (Flannery
1976; Roper 1979). Moreover, it de-emphasizes the politi-
cal dimensions of landscape, while failing to consider how
historical patterns of occupation and exploitation, including
property rights and land tenure, might constrain where and
how a site’s residents make their living.
Alongside these contributions, Sahlins and Service
(1960), Service (1962), and Fried (1967) further refined
social evolutionary approaches. However, each maintained
essential characteristics of earlier evolutionary definitions
of human territoriality. Service (1962:124–126) speculated
that there might be meaningful correlations between kin-
ship systems, residential configurations, and patterns of ter-
ritorial control—specifically, that tribal societies made up
of cognatic residential groups might be associated with
closed territories, while tribal societies with lineal resi-
dential groups might be associated with open territorial
systems. However, he ultimately resorted to a strict di-
vision between kin-based and territorial forms of orga-
nization, identifying the presence of boundaries or bor-
ders in chiefdoms and “criteria of membership . . . which
are not based merely on sentiments of kinship” as evi-
dence that they were approaching “civilizational ordering”
(Service 1962:159). On his part, Fried (1967) rejected the
strict association of non-territorial organization with small-
scale societies and territorial control with stratified societies
and states (Fried 1967:121). However, he also suggested
the state’s strict ordering of territorial space was only “su-
perficially like” the open territorial systems of egalitarian
societies and the slightly more well-defined, but still nonex-
clusive, territories of villages in ranked societies (Fried
1967:94–98, 175–178). Power in stratified contexts was
fundamentally rooted in the control of property and terri-
tory, and the state was a specialized apparatus that emerged
to maintain social stratification achieved through elites’
“paramount control over . . . population[s] and . . . area[s]”
(Fried 1967:191–196, 237).
More recent evolutionary approaches in archaeology
have also interpreted increasing degrees of territorial con-
trol as one of the hallmarks of social development. Johnson
and Earle (2000), for example, see “territoriality and war-
fare” as one element of a “cultural core” that serves as a
means for solving adaptive problems as societies progress
through stages of socioeconomic integration. At the family-
level stage, they argue, access to resources is mediated
by kinship, and defending large “base areas” as territories
is difficult if not entirely impractical (Johnson and Earle
2000:43). At the local group level, the control of territory
and warfare are common, and territories may be defended
either through latent threats or through organized battles
(Johnson and Earle 2000:125). At the level of the regional
polity, territories are well defined and are maintained by in-
creasingly professional militaries. Johnson and Earle’s cat-
egories are not entirely insensitive to diversity in territorial
behavior: they acknowledge, for example, that family-level
Shoshone bands within the Great Basin practiced different
degrees of territorial defense (Johnson and Earle 2000:64;
see also Bettinger 1978, 1982; Thomas 1972, 1973, 1983).
However, their interest in territoriality is not to explain such
diversity but to identify statistical regularities that allow it
to be connected to stages of evolutionary development.
In contrast, scholarship in human behavioral ecology
and evolutionary ecology has developed more dynamic and
predictive models of the relationship between political in-
stitutions, economies, and territoriality. Evolutionary ecol-
ogists share a fundamental assumption that human beings
are economistic agents whose behaviors are subject to se-
lection based on their costs, typically conceived in terms
of time and energy (Winterhalder and Smith 2000). Early
studies in evolutionary ecology focused on the emergence
of subsistence behaviors in ecological context (MacArthur
1972; Winterhalder and Smith 1981), but the field’s focus
has expanded to study the emergence of socioeconomic in-
equality and systems of power and prestige (Boone 1992;
Chabot-Hanowell and Smith, this volume; Summers 2005).
Dyson-Hudson and Smith’s (1978) “defensibility”
model remains the most influential study of human ter-
ritoriality in evolutionary ecology (see also Taylor 1988).
Writing at a time when a number of scholars had suggested
that humans might be “hardwired” to seek territorial control
(Ardrey 1966; Cohen 1976), the authors instead focused on
the correlation of forms of sociospatial organization and pat-
terns of resource distribution. In essence, they argued, where
the economic benefits of defending territories outweigh the
costs, stable territorial systems should emerge. Following
Brown’s (1964) study of territoriality among birds we should
expect to find territorial defense behaviors where essen-
tial economic resources are both dense and predictable, and
we should find “open” territorial systems where resources
are dispersed and unpredictable. In intermediate situations,
where resources are dense and unpredictable or disperse
and predictable, we should expect “information sharing”
patterns, in which families inform each other about the lo-
cations of dense resources, and “home range” systems, in
which settlement and economic activity cluster around a
central area but territory is not strictly defended (Dyson-
Hudson and Smith 1978:23–28).
Archaeology, Territoriality, and Politics
While archaeologists have most commonly employed
the resource defensibility model in studies of small-scale
foraging and pastoral societies, a number have found it
useful for understanding long-term change in agricultural
societies and large-scale political systems (Bintliff 1999;
Field 2005; M. E. Smith 2003). As Chabot-Hanowell and
Smith (this volume) note, the model has proven robust in
its prediction of the relationship between resource distri-
bution and the presence or absence of territorial behaviors
in their gross sense (Cashdan 1983; Casimir 1992). Like
all economistic approaches, the defensibility model faces
operational challenges: defining both the temporal scale of
analysis and a sensitive but standardized scale of conversion
that can balance the diverse “costs” of behaviors, in terms
of time, energy, and social or symbolic capital. For archae-
ological contexts in which detailed information about such
variables is unavailable, it may not be possible to effectively
employ the resource defensibility model. Still, for many
contexts, it remains a valuable approach that is particularly
well suited for considering how changing environmental,
political-economic, and technological circumstances may
precipitate archaeologically visible shifts in territorial pat-
terning.
Perspectives from Political Economy, Cultural
Geography, and Social Landscape Approaches
A second set of dynamic approaches to territoriality in
archaeology has focused on the relationship between terri-
tory, ethnic identity, and political subjectivity, particularly
in states and empires. Drawing on symbolic interactionist
sociology, world-systems theory, Marxist cultural geogra-
phy, and international relations theory, these perspectives
encompass diverse interests and methodologies. However,
all share a central concern with refining the often problem-
atic distinction between geographic scales of social analysis
and the geographic dimensions of lived experience. More-
over, unlike evolutionary perspectives, which have tended to
focus on how territories take shape amid distributions of ma-
terial resources and constraints, social approaches are more
attuned to the perceptual and representational dimensions of
territory. Finally, in addition to examining variability in terri-
toriality over time, political-economic and social landscape
perspectives have also sought to rethink territorial models
of state power, outlining how complex political institutions
acquire and maintain dominance through other means.
Social approaches to territoriality emerged in the 1960s
out of anthropological attempts to refine the study of so-
cial space, including symbolic interactionism (Barth 1969;
Blumer 1969). Asserting that ethnic and cultural differences
7
were created through interaction and communication, rather
than sprouting from cultural continuity or “the occupation of
exclusive territories,” Fredrik Barth focused new attention
on boundaries as locales where group identity is generated
(Barth 1969:15). Instead of seeing group boundaries as phys-
ical frontiers, however, he saw them as sites of discourse,
and his vision of territory therefore emphasized its social as
opposed to its material dimensions.
Barth’s approach has become an essential reference
for studies of the social dimensions of ancient border-
lands (Lightfoot and Martinez 1995; Parker and Rodseth
2005), for which territoriality itself is perhaps of less interest
than how social distinctions are developed and maintained
through performances and physical constructions. Sharing
a Barthian sense of the dynamism of ethnic and territorial
distinctions, social studies of archaeological boundaries un-
derstand border behaviors to be intimately connected with
such phenomena as social memory, collective identity, and
social power (Field 2008; Golden 2010; Golden et al. 2008;
Scherer and Golden 2009). By demonstrating how polit-
ical and ethnic boundaries continue to define difference,
even as they shift in physical space due to conflict, migra-
tion, and demographic change, these studies have done a
great deal to uncouple ethnicity, society, and polity from
territory. Moreover, they help to demonstrate that politi-
cal institutions and identities take shape not just according
to bureaucratic design but also “at the margins” of political
life. At the same time, an exclusive focus on borders may de-
emphasize processes of territorial and ideological consolida-
tion and risk masking territorial variability subsumed within
borders.
In the 1970s, world-systems approaches gained con-
siderable influence among anthropologists (Frank 1969;
Wallerstein 1974). But more widespread attention to ques-
tions of space and scale emerged during the explosion of
anthropological interest in globalization and transnational-
ism between the 1980s and 2000s. In contrast to earlier
studies of closed corporate communities, the “global turn”
drew anthropologists’ eyes toward mobile and spatially dis-
tributed phenomena, including migration, tourism, diaspora,
and media (Appadurai 1990, 1996; Clifford 1988; Clifford
and Marcus 1986; Hannerz 1986; Kearney 1995; Trouil-
lot 2003; Tsing 1993). In the process, scholars reworked
the field’s treatment of the relationship between space, so-
ciety, power, and identity. The “assumed isomorphism of
space, place, and culture” that Gupta and Ferguson (1992:7)
identified in anthropological traditions stretching from evo-
lutionism to structural-functionalism needed to be replaced
by attention to cultural process, mobility, and discourse.1
Moreover, it was critical that anthropologists study how our
own spatial practices and ideologies (such as the distinction
8 Parker VanValkenburgh and James F. Osborne
between “home” and “field”) constructed our objects of in-
quiry (Gupta and Ferguson 1997).
Amid social-anthropological and popular discourses
on globalization, archaeologists also focused new atten-
tion on questions of social scale in studies of interre-
gional interaction and ancient world-systems (Algaze 1993;
Chase-Dunn and Hall 1993; Cherry and Renfrew 1986;
Hall and Chase-Dunn 1993; Santley and Alexander 1992;
Schortman 1989; Schortman and Urban 1987; Schortman
and Urban 1992; Stein 1999). Yet, like parallel critiques
in social anthropology, the positioning of these studies as
correctives to territorial models meant that they tended to
pay little attention to the ways in which territorial practices
and rhetoric might overlap with exchange networks, trade
diasporas, and other forms of long-distance interaction.
More recently, archaeological studies of territory have
been inspired by scholarship in cultural and social geogra-
phy. During the 1960s, geographic scholarship on territo-
riality paralleled developments in behavioral ecology, em-
ploying models based on territorial behavior in nonhuman
animals to shed light on human spatial organization (Crook
1968; Etkin 1967; Hediger 1961; Wagner 1960). In contrast,
Edward Soja (1971) found animal models to be provocative
analogies for human territorial behavior but concluded that
it would be more fruitful to examine human territoriality “at
the individual or personal level rather than seeking direct re-
lationships with . . . territoriality in animals” (Soja 1971:31).
He posited two types of territory: “personal territory” (ego-
centric space) and “societal territory” established through
the actions of states and other social institutions. Territo-
riality was, in turn, “a behavioral phenomenon associated
with the organization of space into spheres of influence or
clearly demarcated territories which are made distinctive and
considered at least partially exclusive by their occupants or
definers” (Soja 1971:19). All societies and individuals there-
fore had some form of territory “in that there exist certain
points, lines, or areas which elicit group identities” (Soja
1971:13). But it was only with states that society was de-
fined in territorial terms.
Soja’s multi-scalar definition of territoriality was ulti-
mately too general to serve as the basis of a new geographic
paradigm. Moreover, while he avoided the rigid equation
of territorial control and state authority present in unilin-
eal evolutionary frameworks, Soja maintained a restrictive
correlation between these two phenomena. Robert Sack’s
(1986) Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History pro-
vided a more parsimonious definition, framing territoriality
as a strategy “by an individual or group to affect, influ-
ence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by
delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area”
(Sack 1986:19). Accordingly, Sack saw territorial control as
a strategy that could be turned “on” and “off” at any social
scale. Within a household, for example, a parent seeking
to keep a child away from dangerous items in the kitchen
might chase the child around the house, or the caregiver
could opt for a territorial strategy and declare certain rooms
to be “off limits” (Sack 1986:19). At larger scales, territo-
rial strategies were embodied in municipal zoning systems,
the guarded borders of nation-states, and international trade
zones. In Sack’s view, territorial strategies possess distinct
advantages: they are more easily communicated than com-
plex rules about conditional access and are useful for ac-
tors who cannot create (or do not wish to divulge) a full
list of things they wish to control (Sack 1986:22). How-
ever, territorial boundaries may also be unenforceable in
certain types of landscapes, under certain political and eco-
nomic circumstances, or with certain historical and legal
precedents.
Even as Sack’s work has moved on to consider territori-
ality as only one part of broader processes of place-making
and the concentration of social power (Sack 1997, per-
sonal communication 2009), Human Territoriality remains
the single most influential treatise on the subject among
Anglo-American geographers. Critics have argued that he
inadequately addresses the actual mechanics of power, un-
derstates the violence implicit in territorial partitioning, and
fails to consider the ways in which the definition of territory
may create new conditions for both internal and external so-
cial conflict (Agnew and Paasi 2000; Elden 2010; Murphy
2012). However, Sack’s decoupling of territoriality from so-
cial power inspired a new generation of studies, including
an expansive literature among political geographers and po-
litical theorists rethinking territorial definitions of statehood
(Agnew 1994, 2009; Brenner 1998; Brenner et al. 2003;
Harding and Lim 1999; Krasner 1995; Murphy 1996; Paasi
1996, 2002; Ruggie 1993).
At the same time that anthropologists were beginning
to unmoor the concept of culture from territory, geogra-
phers and international relations theorists began to rethink
the spatiality of politics, questioning Max Weber’s classic
definition of the state as “a human community that (success-
fully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical
force within a given territory” (Weber 1946:78, our em-
phasis). In a highly influential essay, Agnew (1994) sug-
gested that international relations theory was mired in what
he called the “territorial trap,” a sort of “geographical un-
conscious” subsuming three fundamental premises: (1) that
state sovereignty is defined by strict borders; (2) that there
is a fundamental distinction between the “domestic” and the
“foreign” in political systems; and (3) that the state is a “con-
tainer” enclosing both economic and political processes. To
account for the ways that states operate in a globalized world,
Archaeology, Territoriality, and Politics
said Agnew, geographers should pay increasing attention to
nonterritorial forms of sovereignty and sociality.
Following Agnew, historical geographers and political
historians began to critically examine the evolution of state
territoriality. Beginning with Gross (1948), histories of the
modern international system had classically identified the
Peace of Westphalia—two peace treaties signed in 1648 be-
tween the principal monarchs of Western Europe at the end
of the Thirty Years’ War—as the definitive moment when
political sovereignty shifted from being exerted over pop-
ulations to being exerted over territories (see also Harding
and Lim 1999; Krasner 1995; Ruggie 1993). In contrast,
new histories suggest that this “Westphalia myth” has ob-
scured the facts (1) that many city-states in northern Italy,
England, and Germany were de facto territorial sovereigns
from at least the early 14th century (Benton 2010; Larkins
2009; Strandsbjerg 2010) and (2) that nonterritorial forms of
sovereignty, including the legal concept that all of the sub-
jects of a sovereign form part of an organic “body politic,”
continued to exist in Europe well after 1648 (Kantorowicz
1957; Neocleous 2003).
Skepticism about the relationship between state author-
ity and territory has gained purchase in a number of recent
archaeological studies of sovereignty in complex polities.
Drawing on Luttwak’s (1979) distinction between “terri-
torial” and “hegemonic” strategies of domination in the
Roman Empire, a number of scholars have attempted to
make sense of the patchiness of territorial control in ancient
empires (Alconini 2008; Browman 1997; D’Altroy 1992;
Hassig 1985, 1992; Parker 2001; Santley and Alexander
1992). In Luttwak’s framework, whereas territorial strate-
gies entail the establishment of imperial administrative cen-
ters in provinces and the direct control of tribute collection,
hegemonic strategies leave provincial bureaucracies intact
and rely on both prestige and the threat of military force to
extract tribute. These two political modalities are not meant
to be mutually exclusive; rather, they define two limits of
a spectrum along which hegemonic and territorial manage-
ment styles “grade into each other” (D’Altroy 1992:20).
In theory, the territorial-hegemonic model’s unidimen-
sional distinction between the territorial and the nonterrito-
rial should make it compatible with the resource defensibil-
ity hypothesis (Dyson-Hudson and Smith 1978). However,
its users have employed it not so much to examine the re-
lationship between resource distribution and imperial strat-
egy as to elucidate historic, institutional, and political fac-
tors that impact empires’ abilities to control people, places,
and resources (e.g., Hassig 1992:57–59, 65–67). Alconini’s
(2008) use of the territorial-hegemonic framework, in which
strategies are categorized based on costs (“investments”) and
benefits (“revenues”), shares terminology with the resource
9
defensibility model. Yet rather than focusing on pricing the
costs and expected returns of investment in territorial versus
hegemonic defense, Alconini uses this framework to high-
light an aberrant example from the Inka hinterland, the site
of Oroncota in Bolivia, where the Inka constructed an iso-
lated administrative center that appears to have had relatively
minimal impact on local settlement patterns and sociopo-
litical organization (Alconini 2008:68–78). Based on the
evidence, Alconini concludes that the Inka extracted little
revenue from the Oroncota region, despite investing a great
deal of effort into constructing a provincial center within
it. Rather than a territorial outpost, Oroncota was a “dis-
embedded center” whose primary value was to materialize
Inka hegemony within the region. While such investments
could be assigned a “price,” their putative returns (political
conformity and obedience) should be difficult to calculate.
Alconini’s case study therefore highlights the complexity of
assigning costs and benefits to actions whose impacts are
historically and culturally contingent and raises questions
about the limitations of economistic approaches to imperial
landscapes.
Inspired by Marxian geographers (e.g., Cosgrove 1985;
Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Zukin 1991), a series of recent
studies in landscape archaeology have focused new atten-
tion on the spatial qualities of political life. Adam T. Smith
(2003), the most prominent architect of this approach (which
we label “social landscape archaeology”2 ), builds an elegant
case for the reassertion of space in archaeological theory
through advocacy of a “relational” approach to spatial anal-
ysis (see also A. Smith 2011). Following Soja (1989), Smith
takes aim at the historicism of political thought since the
mid-19th century, particularly as expressed in archaeologi-
cal case studies. He then advocates attention to the political
production of landscapes in early complex polities as one
way to overcome the attitude of inevitability that suffuses
many accounts of political evolution. Rather than being a
static backdrop for social life, or an inaccessible dimension
of subjective experience, space constantly emerges in rela-
tions between objects, bodies, and places, all of which are
configured through political discourse (A. Smith 2003:25).
Once we understand space from this perspective, it be-
comes possible to see how the dominant political will con-
stantly assembles spaces at a variety of scales, from in-
ternational systems to polities, settlements, and buildings.
It is then the task of the archaeologist to describe “what
polities actually do” in landscapes—how they manufacture
sovereignty, secure power and legitimacy, and order sub-
jects through spatial practices and representations (A. Smith
2003:25). Like evolutionary ecological approaches to terri-
toriality and the territorial-hegemonic model of spatial con-
trol in empires, Smith’s conceptualization of geopolitical
10
landscapes is dynamic, seeking to reveal contingent rela-
tionships between spaces and forms of political authority.
Yet unlike these approaches, Smith’s goal is neither to de-
velop a framework for categorizing political strategies nor to
build a predictive model of how they might either be chosen
or selected-for. Rather, it is to “revel in [variation], exposing
the multiplicity of political strategies as well as antecedents
of contemporary [political] ambitions” (A. Smith 2003:22).
For this task, evolutionary ecological approaches appear too
reductive, and the territorial-hegemonic model is inadequate
because it tends to imagine that spaces and regions are fixed
objects for strategy rather than being themselves produced
through spatial practice and representation.
Recent studies inspired by Smith’s relational approach
(Johansen and Bauer 2011; Kosiba 2011; Kosiba and Bauer
2012; Lindsay 2006; Lindsay et al. 2008) have focused on
revealing how dominant political practices assemble spaces,
echoing earlier literature in critical archaeology that sought
to expose how manipulations of landscapes serve to “natu-
ralize” certain elements of social order (Leone 1984; Leone
et al. 1987). In turn, social landscape archaeologists have
generally avoided defining either political territories or ar-
chaeological “regions,” due to the perception that their his-
torical contingency, and their implication in projects of
nation-building and political marginalization, makes map-
ping them analytically (if not also politically) problematic
(A. Smith 2003:181).
Nevertheless, we believe that social landscape archae-
ology makes strong contributions to the study of hu-
man territoriality. By acknowledging the tensions between
the practical, experiential, and representational dimensions
of landscape—what geographer Henri Lefebvre (1991:33)
labels, respectively, “spatial practice,” “representational
spaces,” and “representations of space”—social landscape
archaeology opens up a suite of new questions for archae-
ological studies of territoriality, many of which we outline
below.
Dimensions of Territorial Variability
The dynamic vision of territoriality that emerges out
of recent literature in human evolutionary ecology, political
economy, and cultural geography opens up new potential for
archaeologists to contribute to the comparative study of this
complex phenomenon. Despite the antinomies that Norman
Yoffee (this volume) identifies between evolutionary eco-
logical and social landscape approaches, both sets of studies
share an openness to social and historical variability. How-
ever, we believe that previous studies have yet to fully map
the scope of territorial variation in the past and present.
Parker VanValkenburgh and James F. Osborne
The study of territoriality in the archaeological record
requires especially critical attention to variability in terri-
torial phenomena. Whereas scholars studying ethnograph-
ically or historically documented material may have direct
access to subjects’ reflections about their interactions with
territorial boundaries, archaeologists working in prehistoric
contexts are frequently left with no other option to study
territoriality than through its most overt material manifesta-
tions, such as walls and boundary markers (Eling 1987:474;
Ladefoged and Graves 2008; Quarcoopome 1993), forts and
lookouts (Arkush 2011; Arkush and Stanish 2005; Scherer
and Golden 2009), and “lines of cleavage” (unsettled gaps)
in settlement distribution (Greene and Lindsay, this volume;
Sanders et al. 1979; Tschauner 2001:297–305, 332–341;
Willey 1953:375–388). In this context, if we treat territo-
rial control as a one-dimensional variable–something that is
merely present or absent in a given social context–then we
risk affirming that all boundaries are equal and that territo-
ries are fixed containers for social, political, and economic
life.
In contrast, by acknowledging the high degree of vari-
ability present in territorial behaviors and configurations,
we stand to make better sense of how their material residues
index not only physical boundaries but also shifting relation-
ships between borders, institutions, and identities. Moreover,
we believe the study of territoriality becomes considerably
more interesting when questions are broadened beyond the
admittedly essential issue of whether social entities, spheres
of authority, or behaviors are territorial to include inquiries
into how and why they take on their particular spatial, tem-
poral, and institutional configurations. In this spirit, we lay
out five dimensions of variability in human territoriality that
have been underexplored in previous archaeological studies
of the subject. For each dimension, we provide historical
and ethnographic examples, as well as questions that they
pose for archaeological research. While these axes hardly
exhaust the diversity of human territoriality, they provide a
preliminary outline for future research.
Territories Are Variably Bounded
Recent archaeological literature on borders and fron-
tiers (e.g., Golden et al. 2008; Lightfoot and Martinez 1995;
Parker 2006; Parker and Rodseth 2005; Scherer and Golden
2009) has focused on the complex and often fluid ways
in which political boundaries are established, maintained,
and redefined. In contrast, discussions of territoriality have
afforded less attention to spatial and temporal variability
in border practices. Instead, archaeologists employing ter-
ritorial models have frequently assumed that borders are
Archaeology, Territoriality, and Politics
relatively uniform, both in space and time. Ethnographic
and historical examples demonstrate, however, that the re-
lationship between boundaries and territories is highly vari-
able. Modes of territorial definition and defense vary in their
intensity, materiality, and social coordination, and within a
given territory, boundary behaviors and defenses may vary
considerably along perimeters.
At the broadest level, we can distinguish between ter-
ritories that lack hard and fast boundaries and those that
possess them. For example, according to Lee (1979), social
space among the !Kung foragers of the Kalahari is divided
into various n!ore (localities) (Lee 1979:334). Whereas the
!Kung designate certain resources like water holes as de-
fensible territorial property that can be passed down from
generation to generation, n!ore possess more ambiguous
boundaries.
“I would often ask my companions,” recounts Lee,
“‘Are we still in n‘ore X or have we crossed over into
n!ore Y?’ [and] they usually had a good deal of difficulty
specifying which n!ore they were in, and two informants
would often disagree.” [in Johnson and Earle 2000:79]
Yet far from being irrelevant to social life, long-term settle-
ment within n!ore is closely affiliated with membership in
!Kung bands (Marshall 1960:330). In this scenario, territo-
ries, rather than being strictly delimited by boundaries, are
“tethered” to central points that are defended against out-
siders (cf. Taylor 1964). Similar, but more complex, radial
patterns of territoriality are present in the “capital-centric”
model of sovereignty in classical Chinese polities (Berman
2005:123), where sovereign power is imagined to radiate
from the capital city through a series of concentric zones,
diminishing along the way until it reaches the wild zone
beyond the pale of the state.
By some criteria, such as Eric Alden Smith’s (1983)
definition of territorial control as the “exclusive use of a
spatially fixed and clearly bounded area by some means of
defense or communication,” !Kung n!ore are not territo-
ries at all, but rather a loose series of emotive ties to the
landscape. Indeed, outside of the watering holes that form
the core areas of each n!ore, resources in the NyaeNyae
region conform to the low-density and low-predictability
conditions by which Dyson-Hudson and Smith (1978) pre-
dict a lack of territorial defense behaviors. However, ac-
cording to more-encompassing definitions of territory, such
as those employed by social landscape archaeologists and
cultural geographers, !Kung n!ore form part of a broader
spectrum of means by which social groups become attached
to places. The relevance of such radial territorial patterns to
archaeological research on territoriality therefore depends
11
on which definition is employed and the range of questions
about human–land relations that one finds compelling.
Yet even when research on territorial control is limited
to the defense of spatial distributions of resources against
outsiders, we find examples of groups and institutions that
maintain considerably different rules about boundaries along
different portions of their territorial perimeters. Contempo-
rary examples, such as the distinction between the United
States government’s differential treatment of its borders with
Canada and Mexico, highlight the ways in which differ-
ent borders are defined by different rules. Historical ex-
amples further expand the scope of variability. In Qin and
Han period China (221 B.C.E.–C.E. 220), for example, sig-
nificant investments were made in defending the empire’s
northern frontier from nomadic “barbarians,” particularly
the Xiongnu (Lewis 2007). In contrast, the southern frontier
commanded considerably less imperial attention.
In addition to spatial variability, significant differences
may exist in territorial defense behaviors between seasons,
particularly where fluctuations in rainfall and temperature
define major differences in resource distribution (Holl 1998,
this volume). Here, the resource defensibility hypothesis,
coupled with environmental and demographic reconstruc-
tion, should prove highly useful for predicting temporal
variability in territorial defense.
Together, these examples of spatial and temporal vari-
ability in territorial boundaries raise a series of questions and
considerations for archaeological research on territoriality.
Do we find archaeological evidence for seasonal variabil-
ity in territorial behavior, and do we witness differences in
how territories are defined along different portions of their
boundaries? Under what circumstances do polities make sig-
nificant investments in the erection of material boundaries
to define territories? Do they do so simply when the density
and predictability of resources located on one side of these
boundaries reach a certain threshold, outpacing the cost of
monumental construction? Or are such projects also pursued
when they do not “make economic sense”? Why is it that
boundaries are materialized in different ways and territorial
defense carried out through different means?
Territories Vary in Their Geographic Continuity
In Westphalian models of sovereignty in modern nation-
states, territories are envisioned as contiguous areas of ab-
solute space (Diener and Hagen 2010). The contiguity of
territory is also central to schema in evolutionary anthro-
pology that envision territorial states at the apices of po-
litical development. In Carneiro’s (1970) “circumscription”
model of state formation, for example, the integration of
12
territories as continuous wholes is essential to explaining
how states emerge in the first place. In regions where essen-
tial resources are abundant and evenly distributed, emerging
political elites struggle to gain control over subject popula-
tions because households and lineages are able to defect be-
yond centers of geographic control. In contrast, regions that
contain tightly circumscribed areas of essential resources,
such as the verdant valleys crosscutting the coastal Peruvian
desert, lend themselves to the emergence of complex politi-
cal institutions because they are naturally bounded, and few
alternatives for defection exist.
Ironically, ethnohistoric scholarship on coastal Peru
has provided what may be one of the clearest exam-
ples of noncontiguous territoriality in the anthropological
record. Rather than being “circumscribed” by the Andes,
as Carneiro suggested, Peruvian coastal communities ap-
pear to have been integrally connected with their highland
neighbors through “vertical archipelago” economies (Murra
1972). Communities living in varying ecologies exchanged
diverse products (e.g., fish from the coast, maize from coastal
and inland valleys, camelid wool and potatoes from puna
grasslands) through kin-based networks. Connections be-
tween distant regions were not founded on the basis of con-
tiguity, but were rather established through complex histo-
ries of familial and political affiliation. As a result, different
geographic “tiers” within vertical archipelago networks (the
coast, intermontane valleys, highland grasslands, tropical
lowlands, etc.) were not unified political territories. Rather,
within each zone, we find what Ramı́rez (1985) calls “pep-
pered” sovereignty (dominio salpicado): leaders claimed the
allegiance (and labor) of lineages distributed in discrete, but
noncontiguous territories that were scattered about the coun-
tryside.
Similarly, in late pre-Hispanic highland Mexico, the
political subjectivity of individuals to altepetl (Nahuatl for
“watery mountain”) appears to have been defined not strictly
by residence within contiguous territories but by tribute obli-
gations to individual rulers (Schroeder 1991; M. E. Smith
2003:151, 2008:90–93). While in many cases the members
of a given altepetl lived within a single contiguous area
(Hodge 1994; M. E. Smith 2008:91), and the heads of dif-
ferent altepetl always seem to have controlled some territory,
we find numerous examples where individuals subject to dif-
ferent altepetl lived interspersed among one another – for
example, among the subjects of Teotihuacan, Acolman, and
Tepexpan (Gibson 1964:46; M. E. Smith 2008:92, figure 1).
In both of these cases, the control of land remained
central to subsistence and tribute production within local
groups. However, both the late pre-Hispanic cacicazgos of
Peru’s north coast and the altepetl of central Mexico were ag-
gregated as polities through networked connections between
Parker VanValkenburgh and James F. Osborne
populations living in noncontiguous areas. Thus, territorial
control (and in some cases, defense) continues to exist at
one social scale but fails to appear at another.
To date, archaeologists have focused little attention on
this dimension of territorial variability, but the distinction
between continuous and noncontinuous territorial forma-
tions highlighted in these examples poses new questions
for archaeological scholarship: Under what conditions do
regimes that command allegiance and tribute from non-
contiguous populations arise? How do these circumstances
differ from those fostering aggregation among territorially
contiguous populations? How are not only distributions of
resources but also histories of migration, genealogies, mili-
tary conquest, and alliance-building implicated in these pat-
terns?
Territorial Polities Are Variably Affixed to Physical
Landscapes
In addition to assuming that territories have uniform
boundaries and are geographically contiguous, archaeolog-
ical models have tended to envision territorial polities as
fixed entities tied to physical landscapes. Even as “dynamic”
models acknowledge that territories grow and shrink with
the political fortunes of chiefs, kings, and dynasties (cf.
Marcus 1998), they still tend see them as emanating from
fixed geographic centers. Accordingly, when a center col-
lapses, or the territorial structure of society is fundamen-
tally compromised, archaeological models imagine that the
polity ceases to exist. However, historical examples of terri-
torial polities uprooted from their geographic locations and
reestablished in others suggest a more complex relationship
between political authority, social solidarity, and territory.
Among the Tiv of Nigeria, for example, territoriality entails
not so much attachment to specific landscapes but rather ro-
tating land ownership mediated by the “idiom of descent.”
Each Tiv “minimal lineage” of two to three hundred house-
holds possesses a territory (tar) within which all male heads
of households hold rights to cultivate enough land to feed
their families (Bohannan 1954:3–4). Each lineage territory
adjoins that of its nearest “sibling,” and these two together
define both a more inclusive lineage and an inclusive terri-
tory. Similarly, the territories of the next two most closely
related lineages are settled alongside one another, and so on.
In theory, the nesting of lineages and territories carries all the
way up the ladder of descent “to the apex of the genealogy,
back in time to the founder who begot the entire people,
and outwards in space to the edges of Tivland”—an area
containing over eight hundred thousand people in the late
1940s, at the time they were studied by Bohannan (1954:3,
Archaeology, Territoriality, and Politics
see figure 2). Within this system, no single tar is fixed in
space. Rather, social friction between lineages, caused by
each minimal segment’s constant drive to expand its terri-
tory, leads to an unending cycle of expansion and migration,
by which new tar are constantly claimed. However, the ideal
model of genealogical geography constantly wills lineages
to reestablish their territories alongside those of their closest
relatives, even as they relocate themselves in absolute space.
Recent studies of Classic Maya political geography pro-
vide further examples. Following scholarship that identi-
fied Maya “emblem glyphs” (Berlin 1958) as the names of
geographic places (Marcus 1976) and as regional polities
(Mathews and Justeson 1984; Stuart and Houston 1994),
new interpretations suggest that certain emblem glyphs may
refer to multiple “capital” sites occupied in succession. For
example, the Kaan (snake) polity seems to have constructed
a capital at the northern Maya site of Dzibanche as early as
the late fifth century C.E., before relocating and establish-
ing its capital at the site of Calakmul (Martin and Grube
2000:103–104). Similarly, the Postclassic Kowoj migrated
from the southern Maya lowlands and established a new base
of power in the Northern Yucatán (Rice and Rice 2009). In
light of such evidence, Martin (2005:12) suggests that Maya
ideas of territoriality and statehood were highly fluid, and
that emblem glyphs referred not to fixed geographic entities
but to “royal houses whose connections to specific territories
are less intrinsic than habitual” (Martin 2005:12).
We believe that, rather than being unique to Maya polit-
ical geography, these observations may be more broadly ap-
plicable to understanding ties between polity and territory.
While political institutions may forge allegiances, obliga-
tions, and identities among populations through references
to territories that they control, such relations are not in-
delibly bound to the geographic domains in which they are
created. Situated practice within territory enacts social and
political ties, through phenomena as broad as marriage, debt,
and emotional connections to place. In some circumstances,
such as the examples of the Classic Maya snake polity and
the Tiv, the institutions created by these interactions are ro-
bust enough that they can be reconstituted in new locations
following migration or other moments of dislocation. In
other cases, polities completely dissolve as their territories
are compromised.
What, then, are the particular circumstances (economic,
ecological, demographic, historical) under which political
institutions can be uprooted and reestablished in new land-
scapes? Is political capital more portable in contexts where
demographic pressure and resource availability are relatively
low, reducing interpolity competition for subjects and re-
sources? Or does competition strengthen these ties? Are
some culturally and historically particular modes of capital
13
accumulation and inheritance more conducive to the emer-
gence of what we might call “mobile territorial polities”?
The Control of Territory Is Frequently (and Variably)
Dependent on Nonterritorial Forms of Power
As we have argued here, for much of the 20th century,
archaeological scholarship assumed that the control of ter-
ritory was a fixed aspect of social power. Recent critiques
have contrasted territorial and nonterritorial strategies and
sought to identify contexts in which sovereignty and identity
are mediated by nonterritorial obligations (Alconini 2008;
D’Altroy 1992; Luttwak 1979; Ramı́rez 2005; M. E. Smith
2008). As Sack (1986) notes, however, even where political
territories do exist, they are constantly sustained by nonter-
ritorial forms of power—armies to defend borders, tribute
collected to feed armies, and so on. An essential element
of the study of human territoriality is therefore clarifying
the ways in which territorial control is sustained by other
sources of power.
We see a great deal of variation in relations between
territorial and nonterritorial modes of authority, even within
the same milieus. Farriss’s (1984:148–151) discussion of
territoriality among Maya polities in the Yucatán Peninsula
during the C.E. 1540s offers a vivid example. Here, 16 or
more “provinces” coexisted within a single cultural and lin-
guistic unit and were ruled by individual halach uinics, or
lords (Farriss 1984:148). Rather than each serving as the
ruler of a modular territorial polity, halach uinics appear to
have maintained different levels of control over their territo-
ries. Some relied to a greater degree on tributary extraction,
while others were more directly involved in the supervision
of agricultural production. However, all controlled at least
some small parcels of land. To date, it is unclear why author-
ity took on different shapes within these polities, but further
exploration might draw on both evolutionary ecology and so-
cial landscape perspectives. Some terrestrial resources are
fairly evenly distributed across the Yucatán peninsula, but
attention to variations in land cover and water availability
(following the examples of Garrison 2007; Lucero 1999,
2006, 2008 for pre-Columbian Maya landscapes) may help
to explain variability in territorial control among colonial
Maya polities. Alternatively, social landscape perspectives
might highlight such factors as variation in built environ-
ments constructed by colonial Maya leaders and historical
relationships between halach uinics and their subjects.
Such examples raise additional questions for archaeo-
logical studies of territoriality. How are territorial and non-
territorial forms of authority and capital accumulation re-
lated? Rather than rejecting the material, experiential, and
14
perceptual dimensions of territoriality as a mirage and re-
placing them with an analytical focus on networks, how can
we take territory seriously and make sense of how social
networks and territorial patterns configure social and polit-
ical life within the same milieu? What effects do territorial
claims and boundary behaviors have on the construction
of networks, and how are social ties mobilized to establish
territorial control?
Territorial Strategies Have Variable (and Frequently
Unintended) Consequences for Social Life
If we follow Sack (1986), territorial control can be
treated as a power strategy, but to be enacted, territorial
boundaries must be represented and performed, through
what Lefebvre (1991:33) calls “representations of space.”
Territory is performed not only by walls and fences but
also maps and ceremonies that seek to objectify the spaces
of claimed sovereign domains. During the Early Modern
period, scientific mapmaking in Europe served as an inte-
gral tool facilitating imperial claims to transatlantic space
(Barber 1992; Mignolo 1995; Montaño 2011; Padrón 2004;
Strandsbjerg 2010). Similarly, cartography has played a key
role in defining spaces of authority in postcolonial nation-
states (Ramaswamy 2002; Winichakul 1994). In practice,
however, both imperial and national representations of terri-
tory are often contested by subaltern mapmakers with their
own visions of the world and political ambitions (Mundy
1996; Peluso 1995; Wainwright and Bryan 2009). If we
imagine territoriality as emerging not just through situated
practice or straightforward territorial claims but through
friction between competing representations and practices,
this new perspective should add a great deal of richness to
our understandings of its social effects.
In addition to being contested, the representation and
establishment of territories may have unanticipated conse-
quences for the people who live among them. Over time, the
control of territory and the maintenance of territorial bound-
aries may “feed back” on political institutions and redefine
ethnic and national affiliations. The story of South Ameri-
can nationalisms, which emerged in the 19th century out of
broadly shared cultural and institutional backgrounds, of-
fers a particularly compelling example. Under the Hapsburg
monarchs, the whole of Spanish South America, as well as
Panama, formed part of the Viceroyalty of Peru (Basadre
1961). Within this overarching structure, the colonial gov-
ernment created a series of separate audiencias (high courts
that also served as councils of state) with territorial jurisdic-
tions centered on the cities of Panama, Bogota, Quito, Lima,
Charcas (Sucre), Santiago de Chile, and eventually La Plata
Parker VanValkenburgh and James F. Osborne
(Buenos Aires). During the 18th century, when reforms in-
stituted by Spain’s Bourbon monarchs sought to enhance
the crown’s administrative control over the colonies and its
capacity for tax collection, additional powers and responsi-
bilities were devolved from the viceregal capital in Lima to
a series of new viceroyalties (La Plata, Nueva Granada) and
captaincies general (Chile, Venezuela) (Lynch 1992). Within
each of these territories, centralized administrations estab-
lished institutional control and extended their reach over
land and population. Following the wars of independence
against Spain in the 1810s and 1820s, new territorial states
emerged largely along the boundaries of the former viceroy-
alties, though fragmentation into smaller former audiencia
units continued for several decades and conflicts over some
territorial holdings have continued in recent years (Palmer
1997). Over time, conflicts over territory with neighboring
states, the growth of festivals of independence and national
traditions, and the spread of media served to congeal na-
tional identities tied to specific territories (Anderson 1983;
Brading 1991; Mallon 1995; Sommer 1991).
Rather than seeing such patterns as exclusive to modern
nation-states, we might search for them in a variety of locales
where political boundaries are relatively stable over long pe-
riods of time. Social landscape approaches are particularly
well suited to addressing the questions that emerge at the
intersections of the relationship between territory and social
identity: How do different patterns of territoriality emerge
from both daily practices and bureaucratic constructions of
political landscapes? How do state interventions reinforce,
overlap with, or contradict territorialities emerging from sit-
uated practices? Where they overlap, how are tensions be-
tween representations of territory and territorial practices
resolved, if they are at all, in social experience? Under what
circumstances do state representations of territory effec-
tively transform not only political allegiance but also social
identities? How might alternative “representational territo-
ries” (to again paraphrase Lefebvre 1991) contest dominant
depictions of space, and what consequences do they have for
how the less powerful interact with territorial boundaries?
Conclusion
Scholarship on territoriality in anthropology and an-
thropological archaeology has varied widely over the past
century, not only in its epistemology and methodology but
also in its basic definitions of what territory is. For some
authors, territory is a material medium that both enables and
restricts human subsistence, and that bears little relevance
to questions about political life (Flannery 1976; Vita-Finzi
and Higgs 1970). For others, territories are spheres of social
Archaeology, Territoriality, and Politics
experience that vary based on cultural and institutional his-
tory (Hall 1968; Mantha 2009; see also Mantha, this vol-
ume). For a third set of perspectives, territory is not so
much a medium or spatial frame of reference as a form of
strategy employed when it suits the needs of actors seeking
social control (Sack 1986); communities attempting to safe-
guard their economic viability (Dyson-Hudson and Smith
1978; see also Bintliff, this volume; Chabot-Hanowell and
Smith, this volume); or states and empires striving to achieve
balance between tribute extraction, counterinsurgency, and
defense against external political threats (D’Altroy 1992;
Luttwak 1976; see also Parker, this volume). Finally, some
view territories as the product of overlapping and contradic-
tory experiences, perceptions, and representations of land-
scape (Cosgrove 1985; Harvey 1989; A. Smith 2003; Soja
1989; see also Greene and Lindsay, this volume). Disjunc-
tions among these varied definitions and analyses of terri-
toriality create a series of antimonies within archaeological
scholarship on the subject, both within and without this
volume (Yoffee, this volume). Yet, while broad differences
between the goals of evolutionary ecology and those of so-
cial landscape archaeology may make these two approaches
incompatible on many levels, we believe that both funda-
mentally contribute to the study of human territoriality and
should continue to form part of the diverse toolkit that ar-
chaeologists employ to make sense of social space.
The historical examples we have presented in this
chapter suggest that, far from being a mechanical feature
of political evolution, territoriality emerges at the dynamic
intersection of political projects, local environments, and so-
cial experience. Rather than being modular, territories vary
in their boundedness, continuity, and fixity, as well as in their
relations with nonterritorial forms of power and their perfor-
mative effects on political institutions and social identities.
Such variability underscores the need for archaeologists to
be cautious in our interpretations of territorial phenomena in
the material record. Where we find the remains of fortifica-
tions, physical barriers, and lines of cleavage in settlement
patterns, we should not simply assume that they delimit
hardened spaces of political domination, but attempt to seek
out further evidence that will help to clarify both the con-
ditions under which these patterns emerged and the effects
they had on the people who lived among them.
By expanding the scope of archaeological studies of
territoriality, archaeologists may in turn better contribute to
interdisciplinary scholarship on the subject. Despite scat-
tered references to ethnographic material in geographic lit-
erature on territoriality (e.g., Sack 1986; Soja 1971), schol-
arship in geography and political economy has infrequently
drawn on archaeological case studies. Moreover, the same
literature has made comparatively little reference to territo-
15
rial configurations in small-scale societies and nonagricul-
tural economies. Archaeologists’ access to several millen-
nia’s worth of social and political diversity and our sensitiv-
ity to the material components of territorial discourse and
practice place us in a unique position to contribute to this
interdisciplinary project.
Presentation of the Present Volume
This volume originated as a symposium held at the An-
nual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in
2009. The editors convened the session with the goals of ex-
amining current theoretical and methodological approaches
to territoriality in archaeology and with a particular interest
in examining the relevance of scholarship in political geog-
raphy to the theorization of territoriality in archaeology. A
majority of the papers that were presented in that sympo-
sium are now chapters in this volume, while several authors
who were not able to participate in the symposium were
invited to contribute to this collection. We have organized
their work in three sections, each containing three chapters:
Origins and Transitions: The Emergence of Early Territorial
Polities (Section II), Contingency and Variability in Political
Territoriality (Section III), and Territoriality and Politics in
Ancient Empires (Section IV).
The chapters in Origins and Transitions: The Emer-
gence of Early Territorial Polities address one of the pri-
mary questions that result if territorial control is no longer
regarded as a necessary dimension of social power: why is
it that political regimes that are based on territorial control
emerge in some contexts, but not in others? John Bintliff
(Chapter 2) adopts a diachronic perspective to explain the
development of varying modes of political territoriality in
ancient Greece. He is quick to point out that strict control
of landed property is, in fact, well evidenced in classical
city-states. Yet he argues that territorial polities were either
nonexistent or territorial control was manifested in differ-
ent ways both prior and subsequent to the Classical era.
For Bintliff, ecological factors help to explain why territo-
rial control existed in some periods and not in others, but he
ultimately points to social and economic conditions—in par-
ticular, the changing scale of administrative hierarchies and
the reorganization of economic networks and institutions—
to explain the relationship between social power and territo-
rial organization.
Augustin F. C. Holl (Chapter 3) discusses the devel-
opment of territorial polities in pastoralist societies based
on observed differences in the Late Stone Age (4000–200
B.C.E.) Eghazer basin (Niger) and the modern Shuwa-Arab
communities of the Houlouf region (Cameroon). His study
16
synthesizes a discussion of the ecological and political-
economic contexts in which pastoralist dispositions toward
territory develop. By comparing pastoralist societies that oc-
cupy ecologically similar regions, but hold differing notions
of the values and possibilities of land, Holl’s essay under-
scores the importance of demography, ethnicity, and cultural
identity in the determination of political territoriality.
Through an examination of settlement patterns, archi-
tecture, and ceramics from Late Bronze Age (LBA; ca.
1500–1150 B.C.E.) fortresses and associated settlements in
Armenia, Alan Greene and Ian Lindsay (Chapter 4) examine
the connection between political territoriality and sedentism.
While archaeological models of political economy often as-
sume that monumental architecture, political complexity,
and the control of territory go hand in hand with one another,
Greene and Lindsay demonstrate that non-elite domestic
structures associated with LBA fortresses on the Tsaghka-
hovit Plain were transient in nature and that their inhabitants
were likely seminomadic. Based on this interpretation, they
argue that LBA elites necessarily developed nonterritorial
strategies of legitimation through subtle process of negotia-
tion with non-elite actors.
While the work presented in Section II highlights
questions about how territorial and nonterritorial forms of
sovereignty develop over time, Territoriality in Archaeol-
ogy also seeks to examine how different modalities of social
power coexist within the same milieus. The essays in the
third section, Contingency and Variability in Political Ter-
ritoriality, highlight the ways in which territorial and non-
territorial forms of sovereignty complement and contradict
one another in particular political and cultural contexts.
Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell and Eric Alden Smith
(Chapter 5) open the section with a discussion of analytical
approaches that are particularly well suited for exploring the
complex interaction of territorial and nonterritorial forms of
social power: evolutionary ecological models. While previ-
ous studies of territoriality have made use of evolutionary
frameworks, Chabot-Hanowell and Smith expand on this lit-
erature, arguing that evolutionary ecological approaches are
also well suited for addressing questions of political econ-
omy and human agency. They advocate for the continued
explanatory power of Dyson-Hudson and Smith’s (1978)
economic defensibility model, drawing on a wide range of
ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources from small-scale so-
cieties, and they touch on suggestions about how the model
might also be able to account for territoriality in more com-
plex societies as well.
Patricia Urban and Edward Schortman’s contribution
(Chapter 6) on the Middle Preclassic occupations of the
Naco and Middle Chamelecon-Cacaulapa valleys in north-
western Honduras deals more directly with archaeological
Parker VanValkenburgh and James F. Osborne
evidence and territorial interpretation. Examining settlement
patterns, architecture, and ceramic styles in these culturally
related regions, Urban and Schortman argue that contrasting
patterns of monumentality and ceramic production between
the two valleys are evidence that the relationship between
social power and land developed along different lines in
each valley. Their study underscores the lack of correspon-
dence between cultural traditions and political territorial-
ities, and they suggest that variability in the distribution
of high-quality arable land within each valley may help to
explain the different patterns of political territoriality that
emerged therein.
Jesse Casana (Chapter 7) challenges the assumption
that Near Eastern Bronze Age polities, whether modest city-
states or complex empires, had clear and discrete borders.
Analyzing contemporary texts with the goal of understand-
ing the basis of Bronze Age political authority, Casana con-
cludes that legitimacy in the Bronze Age was achieved not
through the control of strictly defined territories but through
extraction of agricultural produce and reference to personal
loyalties. On the basis of this assertion, he then explores the
possibilities offered by remote-sensing techniques such as
satellite imagery for conceptualizing the tell-based occupa-
tional landscape characteristic of the Bronze Age.
While recent work on political geography in ancient
empires (e.g., Alconini 2008; D’Altroy 2002; M. L. Smith
2005, 2007) has thoroughly unsettled the assumption that
territorial control was an inherent component of imperial
political economies, few studies have expanded on these
contributions to demonstrate how territorial and nonterrito-
rial forms of sovereignty were managed and deployed within
the same polities. The contributors to the final substantive
section of this volume, Territoriality and Politics in Ancient
Empires, attempt such analyses.
Bradley Parker’s case study (Chapter 8) demonstrates
that political territoriality within the Neo-Assyrian Empire
(934–609 B.C.E.) differed across regions, with some areas
held under firm territorial control and others merely serv-
ing as narrow transportation and communication corridors.
Parker’s model shows us that, much more than simply a
question of strategic decision-making, the Assyrian state’s
interest in and ability to control land was mediated by dy-
namic relationships with local populations and landscapes.
Namita Sugandhi’s contribution (Chapter 9) critically
reexamines territoriality in the Mauryan Empire (fourth to
second century B.C.E.) of South Asia. Inspecting texts and
stone monuments that historians and archaeologists have
conventionally used as markers of that empire’s borders,
Sugandhi suggests that the Mauryan polity was likely con-
siderably more diffuse and that it might be depicted more
effectively as a meshwork of connections than a unified
Archaeology, Territoriality, and Politics
territorial entity. Accordingly, we can read the Asokan edicts
carved into rock faces throughout the Indian subcontinent
not as claims to surrounding territories but as elements in
the construction of a moral landscape—spear points in the
“conquests of dharma” through which the Mauryan Empire
achieved hegemony over its domain.
In his discussion of the impact of the Inka conquest on
the Rapayán Valley of Peru, Alexis Mantha (Chapter 10)
explicitly criticizes the distinction between hegemonic and
territorial strategies of domination, finding that it does not
adequately account for the complex mosaic of differences
in the Inkas’ regional administration of land, labor, and
mentalité. Following Robert Sack, Mantha explores the
changing articulation of intra-site and regional territorial-
ity precipitated by the Inka invasion of Rapayán, drawing
on both regional settlement data and discussions of archi-
tecture and spatial organization. By discussing how Inka
territorial strategies intervened in local communal mortuary
landscapes, he also suggests that Inka re-territorialization of
Rapayán was explicitly engineered to provoke amnesia.
Finally, in his concluding comments, Norman Yoffee
(Chapter 11) reflects on the theoretical and empirical vari-
ety of this collection of articles, highlighting in particular the
antinomies between evolutionary ecology and social land-
scape approaches. His call to embrace theoretical diversity
rather than seeking out a single overarching framework for
explaining territorial patterning, and his call for us to see
territories not simply as tools but as “points of entry into
how people thought . . . about their identities and their neigh-
bors and their universes,” provide an elegant coda to this
collection.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Cathy Costin and the AP3A ed-
itorial committee, as well as several anonymous reviewers,
for their comments on this chapter and on this volume as
a whole. Rowan Flad and Matthew Liebmann offered feed-
back on an early version of this essay and Alexander Murphy
provided access to previously unpublished materials. Kathy
Cummins provided excellent copy editing and stylistic im-
provements to the chapter. Many thanks to the contributors to
this volume: John Bintliff, Jesse Casana, Benjamin Chabot-
Hanowell and Eric Alden Smith, Alan Greene and Ian Lind-
say, Augustin F. C. Holl, Alexis Mantha, Bradley Parker,
Namita Sugandhi, Patricia Urban and Edward Schortman,
and Norman Yoffee. We would also like to thank the par-
ticipants of the 2009 SAA Symposium whose work is not
represented in this volume: Sonia Alconini, Derek Anderson
17
and Marı́a Nieves Zedeño, Thomas Garrison, Morag Kersel,
Steven Kosiba, and Monica Smith.
Notes
1. In a flourish typical of the global turn, Gupta and
Ferguson (1992) do not cite a wealth of earlier literature that
understands the relationship between culture and place in
much more processual terms (e.g., Barth 1969; Frank 1969;
Wallerstein 1974; Wolf 1982).
2. We prefer the label “social landscape archaeology” to
the term “political landscapes approach” offered by Kosiba
and Bauer (2012). In choosing this label, we wish to under-
score the approach’s shared interests with social archaeology
(Meskell and Preucel 2004), which include the political con-
struction of social practice and human subjectivity.
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