Archaeology and Political Evolution

Humans are able to aggregate and cooperate at scales larger than almost all other animals. In contrast, however, to species such as social insects, whose communities are composed of close biological relations, humans form large groupings with individuals who are not necessarily close kin. Although from a global, long-term perspective, the size and density of human social groupings reveal a basic trend toward larger political affiliations and concentrations of people, the specific historical pathways from place to place and region to region have been neither uniform nor unilinear. Human social networks and cooperative arrangements are generally fragile, so that the course of political history is littered with failed states and institutional collapses, as well as eras of rapid growth, imperial expansions, and the foundation of dense urban centers. The temporal record of human political formations, changes in them, and ultimate breakdowns and dissolutions in cooperative arrangements occurred before the advent of written records. These include key shifts that occurred in many global regions where mobile foraging populations settled down in more-sedentary communities, a shift that frequently provoked new behaviors, challenges, and institutions. Likewise, the establishment of the earliest cities and their associated means of governance often preceded the presence of documentary accounts of how such processes occurred. For these reasons, archaeological fieldwork and interpretation now is recognized as a vital empirical basis to document, study, and compare human political evolution over time. As recently as the mid-20th century, a much-narrower vision for archaeology that scripted little potential for the study of prehistoric sociopolitical organization was followed. Sociopolitical organization was seen as nearly impossible to investigate. To study ancient social organization, archaeologists had to frame the right questions and then devise the investigatory means to address them. The current examination of preindustrial human political evolution and change reflects more than a century of iterative interplay and debate involving models of political behavior derived from history and social sciences and the collection and processing of multiscalar, global suites of evidence from archaeological research. As the empirical foundation of human political history is strengthened, and long-held unilinear models and dichotomous frames that artificially divide the West from the rest and the past from the present are transcended, we enter an exciting era in which the diverse forms and temporal pathways through which human cooperative institutions evolved must be acknowledged and used to help guide better futures.