Understanding Early Large-Scale Collectives

A Global Perspective

Justin Jennings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040365922
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume brings together perspectives from different parts of the world that showcase the wide variety of practices, institutions, and ideologies that allowed for shared identities and coordinated actions across broad collectives. It shows that there are many ways that people can work together.

How did the world's first large-scale collectives come into being? For much of our discipline's history, the answer was the state. People learned how to be part of a larger community via political, economic, and social scaffolding that tended to build from earlier ways of living in a region. This scaffolding was often wobbly and always under construction—its flexibility often a design strength rather than a flaw. This book demonstrates that violence and rulers often played pivotal roles in large-scale collectives, but so did gender complementarity, markets, ritual centers, fictive kinship, and egalitarianism. Earlier evolutionary approaches tended to obscure both the variability and malleability of earlier political forms in a desire to find ideal types hidden beneath cross-cultural noise. This volume's authors argue that this noise was politics-in-action and that there was no state, or other kind of polity, that was above the fray and divorced from the daily practices that brought people, animals, and other things together.

A better understanding of early collective action strategies provides a richer understanding of past politics and, just as importantly, demonstrates governance alternatives for our contemporary society that struggles to address climate change, pandemics, and other pressing challenges. This book will interest archaeologists and historians, as well as anyone who is curious about other ways that we can work together to solve common problems.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface by David Wengrow
• 1 The State of Archaeology: An Introduction
• 2 Institutions and Governance in Northern Iroquoian Confederacies: Implications for Contact Period Geopolitics
• 3 The Visible and Invisible Workings of Cahokia
• 4 Networks of Power in the Chaco World: Practices, Institutions, and Ideologies of Collective Action
• 5 A Comparative Consideration of the Institutions of Governance of the Native American Polities of La Florida
• 6 The Emergence of a Large Community at Aguada Fénix and Its Legacy in Southeastern Mesoamerica
• 7 Multiscalar Collectivities and Governance in Precolonial Mexico, from Neighborhoods to Confederations
• 8 Kin, Ancestors, and Commensality: A New Vision for Wari Imperialism in Middle Horizon Peru
• 9 Resilient Margins: Innovative Political Conservatism in Crete beyond the Knossian State
• 10 Reimagining Governance in the Zimbabwe Culture: Archaeological and Anthropological Insights from Ancient Mberengwa
• 11 States of Mobilities: Nomadic Institutions as the Foundations of Large-Scale Polities
• 12 Public Goods, Entrainment, and Inequality: The Reconstitution of the Shang Kingdom under Wu Ding
• 13 Egalitarian Regimes: Inequality, Ideology, and Governance in the Indus Civilization of Bronze Age South Asia
• 14 Reimagining and Reengineering Political Complexity in Early Vietnam
• 15 Place-Making, Fire, and the Praxis of Becoming Angkor
• 16 Islands of Ideology: Exploring Group Formation and Governance in Hawai‘i
• 17 Reframing Premodern Governance: Synthesis and Prospect
• Index