Doctoral Dissertation Research: Early Development of Territorial Strategies

Suny At Albany, Albany NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates the relationships among politics, economics, and space in the development of territories in early complex societies. The territory, understood as the political organization of space, is fundamental for the characterization of both pre-modern societies and contemporary ones. Nowadays, there are still debates between protectionist views that argue that polities and regions can thrive by their own in isolation, and more globalists ones that focus on issues of cooperation and competition at a larger, even global, scale. This debate also raises questions on the territorial notion based on the nation-state and the spatial correspondence, or lack of it, between political and economic systems. By addressing these relationships at an early stage in the development of complex societies, the project will contribute to the current debate by assessing the relative weight of both economic and political interactions in the rise of social and regional inequalities. The project will address issues of territoriality, not only related to specific resources, but embedded in a broader social network where connections and links may be as important as the resources themselves. The project will test two alternative hypotheses regarding territorial strategies by assessing if the locations of secondary sites are related to the control of accesses or communication routes: 1) early polities locate themselves where they can take advantage of the broad trade networks without an attempt to control a defined geographical space, or 2) early polities tried to increase their access to, and even control, trade networks by expanding their geographical dominance through the establishment of dependent secondary sites in potential alternative routes beyond its own location. To test the hypotheses, the project will use (1) settlement patterns and spatial modeling to identify if site location was associated with regional and interregional communication routes, (2) record architectural layout patterns among sites to construct a rank hierarchy and infer political dependency, and (3) analyze artifact distributions to infer resource fluxes, relationships among sites, and identify extra regional connections. With this data, the project will be able to characterize the spatial organization of an early polity, and gain insight on the mechanisms behind the development of early complex societies, their spatial relationships, and the political construction of space, to ultimately contribute to our understanding of the processes that have modeled the contemporary political landscape. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.