Archaeologies of Empire: Local Participants and Imperial Trajectories (School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series) 0826361757, 9780826361752

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Archaeologies of Empire

School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series Michael F. Brown General Editor Since 1970 the School for Advanced Research (formerly the School of American Research) and SAR Press have published over one hundred volumes in the Advanced Seminar Series. These volumes arise from seminars held on SAR’s Santa Fe campus that bring together small groups of experts to explore a single issue. Participants assess recent innovations in theory and methods, appraise ongoing research, and share data relevant to problems of significance in anthropology and related disciplines. The resulting volumes reflect SAR’s commitment to the development of new ideas and to scholarship of the highest caliber. The complete Advanced Seminar Series can be found at www.sarweb.org. Also available in the School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series: Walling In and Walling Out: Why Are We Building New Barriers to Divide Us? edited by Laura McAtackney and Randall H. McGuire The Psychology of Women under Patriarchy edited by Holly F. Mathews and Adriana M. Manago How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet edited by Sarah Besky and Alex Blanchette Negotiating Structural Vulnerability in Cancer Control edited by Julie Armin, Nancy J. Burke and Laura Eichelberger Governing Gifts: Faith, Charity, and the Security State edited by Erica Caple James Puebloan Societies: Homology and Heterogeneity in Time and Space edited by Peter M. Whiteley New Geospatial Approaches to the Anthropological Sciences edited by Robert L. Anemone and Glenn C. Conroy Seduced and Betrayed: Exposing the Contemporary Microfinance Phenomenon edited by Milford Bateman and Kate Maclean Fat Planet: Obesity, Culture, and Symbolic Body Capital edited by Eileen Anderson-Fye and Alexandra Brewis Costly and Cute: Helpless Infants and Human Evolution edited by Wenda R. Trevathan and Karen R. Rosenberg For additional titles in the School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series, please visit unmpress.com.

Archaeologies of Empire Local Participants and Imperial Trajectories Edited by Anna L. Boozer, Bleda S. Düring, and Bradley J. Parker

School for Advanced Research Press  • Santa Fe University of New Mexico Press  • Albuquerque

© 2020 by the School for Advanced Research All rights reserved. Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-8263-6175-2 (paper) ISBN 978-0-8263-6176-9 (electronic) Library of Congress Control Number: 2020939818 Cover illustration: Carpenters at Work, Tomb of Rekhmire, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, licensed under CC0 1.0 Designed by Felicia Cedillos

The seminar from which this book resulted was made possible by the generous support of the Annenberg Conversations Endowment and the Ethel-Jane Westfeldt Bunting Foundation.

We dedicate this volume to our colleague, friend, and influential empires scholar Bradley J. Parker (1961–2018)

Contents List of Illustrations  ix List of Tables  xi Acknowledgments  xiii Bradley J. Parker in Memoriam  xv Bleda S. Düring and Patrick Ryan Williams Chapter One. Archaeologies of Empire: An Introduction  1 Bleda S. Düring, Anna L. Boozer, and Bradley J. Parker Chapter Two. Colonial Entanglements: Imperial Dictate, Individual Action, and Intercultural Interaction in Nubia  21 Stuart Tyson Smith Chapter Three. The Great Wall as Destination? Archaeology of Migration and Settlers under the Han Empire  57 Alice Yao Chapter Four. Inka Provinces of the Kallawaya and Yampara: Imperial Power, Regional Political Developments, and Elite Competition  89 Sonia Alconini Chapter Five. Agents of Empire: Imperial Agendas and Provincial Realities in Roman Egypt  115 Anna L. Boozer Chapter Six. The Assyrian Threshold: Explaining Imperial Consolidation in the Early Assyrian Empire  145 Bleda S. Düring Chapter Seven. Historical Time and Imperial Formation in Aztec Mexico  167 Lisa Overholtzer Chapter Eight. Wari and Tiwanaku: Early Imperial Repertoires in Andean South America  199 Patrick Ryan Williams, Donna Nash, and Sofia Chacaltana

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Chapter Nine. Re-modeling Empire  229 Bradley J. Parker Chapter Ten. Conclusions  255 Anna L. Boozer and Bleda S. Düring References  265 Contributors  317 Index  319

Illustrations Figure 0.1. Bradley J. Parker  xiv Figure 1.1. World map showing imperial formations discussed in this volume  xx Figure 2.1. Map of Egypt and Nubia  22 Figure 2.2. Tutankhamen as a Sphinx  27 Figure 2.3. Temple of Ramesses II  32 Figure 2.4. Scene of the Inu ceremony  35 Figure 2.5. Tombos cemetery plan  40 Figure 2.6. Jewelry and amulets of the dwarf god Bes 43 Figure 2.7. Proportion of Nubian pottery from different areas  45 Figure 2.8. Tumulus superstructure, Egyptian amulets, and Nubian jewelry  49 Figure 2.9. Bes vase and frog lid from a cosmetic box  51 Figure 3.1. Han Empire  58 Figure 3.2. Juyan frontier region  64 Figure 3.3. Juyan landscape and site maps  71 Figure 3.4. Distribution of artifact types  72 Figure 3.5. Bronze Age and Han archaeological sites  74 Figure 3.6. Settler tombs of the Western and Eastern Han periods  80 Figure 4.1. Territorial and hegemonic control  93 Figure 4.2. Map of the Inka Empire  94 Figure 4.3. Inka period settlement pattern in the Oroncota Valley  100 Figure 4.4. Imported ceramic styles found in the Yampara region  101 Figure 4.5. Kallawaya as trusted royal litter bearers  106 Figure 4.6. Inka period settlement distribution in the Kallawaya region  107 Figure 4.7. Urcosuyo Inka polychrome and Taraco Inka polychrome styles  108 Figure 4.8. Kallawaya region, storage capacity  109 Figure 5.1. Map of Roman Egypt  116 Figure 5.2. Map of the Great Oasis  123 Figure 5.3. Detail of the painting inside the tomb of Petosiris  127 Figure 5.4. Relief adorning the main gate of the temple at Deir el-Haggar  128 ix

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Figure 5.5. Map of Eastern Desert Roman roads  131 Figure 6.1. Territorial expansion of the Assyrian Empire  144 Figure 6.2. Schematic representations of the Assyrian Empire 148 Figure 6.3. Map of Middle Assyrian repertoires of rule per region  154 Figure 7.1. Map of the Aztec Empire  171 Figure 7.2. Double temple pyramid of the Templo Mayor  174 Figure 7.3. Aztec “imperial matter”  177 Figure 7.4. Neutron activation analysis data  185 Figure 7.5. Aztec II and Aztec III ceremonial precincts  191 Figure 8.1. Map of the Wari and Tiwanaku imperial extents  200 Figure 8.2. Maps of example Wari provincial centers  204 Figure 8.3. Map of Tiwanaku  205 Figure 8.4. Tiwanaku and Wari settlement patterns  211 Figure 8.5. Tiwanaku ceramics, textiles, and bronzes  214 Figure 8.6. Wari ceramics, textiles, and bronzes  215 Figure 9.1. Pathways of power  240 Figure 9.2. Modified version of the territorial-hegemonic continuum  243 Figure 9.3. Modified territorial-hegemonic continuum applied 244 Figure 9.4. Schematic model of primary and secondary imperial expansion  246 Figure 9.5. Composite model of imperial expansion  249

Tables Table 2.1. Periodization of Lower and Upper Nubia  30 Table 3.1. Population Estimates for Two Imperial Frontier Regions from 61 BCE, 2 CE, and 140 CE  69 Table 3.2. Shangsunjia Cemetery. Periodization of Interments by Han Imperial Reign Dates  79 Table 3.3. Gender Ratios for Shangsunjia and Taojia Cemeteries in Xining, Qinghai  81 Table 4.1. Storage Capacity Comparison of Several Regions during the Inka Empire  103 Table 5.1. Egypt’s Western and Eastern Deserts under Roman Rule  137 Table 5.2. Roman Imperial Aims in Egypt’s Western and Eastern Deserts  137 Table 5.3. Local Conditions in Egypt’s Western and Eastern Deserts under Roman Rule  138 Table 6.1. Overview of the Transformations Occurring in the Four Discussed Regions under Assyrian Control in the Late Bronze Age  152 Table 7.1. Artifact Frequencies per Hundred Rim Sherds in the Structure 122 Aztec II and Aztec III Middens  185

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Acknowledgments First and foremost, we wish to thank the exemplary staff at the School for Advanced Research who facilitated our time at SAR and helped to move the publication forward: Michael F. Brown (president), Paul Ryer (director, Scholar Programs), Maria Spray (program coordinator, Scholar Programs), Sarah Soliz (director, SAR Press), Leslie Shipman (director, Guest Services), and Doug Dearden (director, Information Technology). Jill Seagard (Field Museum, Chicago) prepared our map illustrations for publication. We have benefited enormously from the many excellent empire scholars who came before us. In particular, Carla M. Sinopoli and an anonymous referee provided us with invaluable suggestions and expertise as we prepared this book for publication.

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Figure 0.1. Bradley J. Parker presenting at the Advanced Seminar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, May 2017. Photo by Anna L. Boozer.

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Bradley J. Parker in Memoriam

Bleda S. Düring and Patrick Ryan Williams

On January 5, 2018, Bradley J. Parker passed away at the age of fifty-six (Figure 0.1). His death was a shock to all of us who had participated at the Santa Fe seminar in May 2017, and for many of us, it meant the loss of a friendship that spanned many years, in some cases even decades. He was full of energy, cheerful and with a joke up his sleeve, and always kind. We lost a great person. Bradley’s academic interests were diverse, and he has made significant contributions on topics such as ethnoarchaeology (focusing on beer and bread production); household archaeology (producing one of the key volumes on the topic); survey archaeology (numerous reports on the Upper Tigris, the Araxes River, and in the upper Nasca headwaters of the South-Central Andes); the Ubaid period (which he excavated at the site of Kenan Tepe); and archaeology and politics (on which he published a volume with Ran Boytner and Lynn Schwartz Dodd). Bradley’s most sustained and continuous academic interest, however, was no doubt on archaeologies of empire. Here we highlight why his work on empires was innovative and thorough; we follow with a list of the publications he produced on this specific topic. As a PhD student at UCLA, Bradley chose to work on the archaeological imprint of Assyrian imperialism in the peripheral region of southeastern Anatolia. He wanted to analyze survey data gathered in the extensive surveys executed by Guillermo Algaze in the Upper Tigris region in advance of dam projects that would flood much of the region. This was an audacious plan. At that time, empires were almost exclusively studied on the basis of textual and iconographical data, and archaeological contributions to the study of empire were primarily relegated to the excavation of imperial palaces, fortifications, and temples. The idea that survey data might reveal how landscapes and societies were transformed as a result of imperial expansion was, at least in the archaeology of the Near East, a new one. xv

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Bradley’s choice was also bold for another reason. As he was well aware, the survey data he was using as his main dataset were far from unproblematic. Ceramic chronologies were poorly known, hampering the dating of sites and their association with particular groups of people present in the imperial encounter of the Upper Tigris in the Iron Age. Moreover, the representativeness of the survey data obtained by Algaze and his team clearly was an issue. Instead of being dismayed, Bradley overcame these problems by adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combined textual and archaeological data to arrive at a more comprehensive reconstruction of what happened in the Upper Tigris region. In the course of his PhD research, Bradley produced a series of eloquent and hard-hitting publications that quickly made him a household name in Near Eastern archaeology. These were followed by his magisterial monograph, The Mechanics of Empire: The Northern Frontier of Assyria as a Case Study in Imperial Dynamics. This volume contained detailed reconstructions of imperial strategies in various regions of Upper Mesopotamia and the dynamics of the relations between the Assyrians and their adversaries. In this study, Bradley also showed his skills in the fields of modeling and theorization. The book contains various innovations in how empires are conceptualized, including new adaptations of the territorial/hegemonic model and network models of empire. For the first time, Bradley demonstrated how the Assyrian Empire was not a homogenous system with different modes of domination in a series of concentric zones, but rather exemplified the highly variegated and dynamic nature of imperial power. The Mechanics of Empire was a game changer in the study of the Assyrian Empire, and if its effects on the field were delayed, the conservative nature of Near Eastern archaeology was to blame, as Bradley was clearly ahead of his time. It is only in recent years that scholars such as Timothy Matney, Jason Ur, and Daniele Morandi Bonacossi have started to address the agenda first articulated by Bradley in 2001. Meanwhile, Bradley was already moving to even broader levels of analysis, as indicated by his subtitle, The Northern Frontier of Assyria as a Case Study in Imperial Dynamics. He was particularly interested in the dynamics and processes occurring in frontier regions, on which he produced an interdisciplinary volume with Lars Rodseth in 2005 with studies from anthropology, history, and archaeology, which he followed up with various articles. Further, he took up the topic of comparing empires in the Near East and the Andes and addressed this issue in his most recent contributions. Throughout these studies, Bradley was

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interested in developing new models for better describing and understanding ancient empires, and though he took his efforts very seriously, he also described his efforts as tools rather than ends. Notwithstanding his great contributions in modeling empires and frontiers, it would be disingenuous to portray Bradley primarily as a theoretical archaeologist. He was an avid fieldworker, loving all aspects of fieldwork, which he did throughout his career, first in the Upper Tigris region, where he directed the Kenan Tepe excavations; then in Naxçivan in the Araxes River valley; and finally, over the last years of his life, in the Central Andes, where he collaborated on projects in Moquegua and Chicama and codirected a new research program in the Nasca headwaters. Months prior to his death, he received a large ($200,000) grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue archaeological work in the Nasca headwaters in the Ayacucho Region, Peru. Like much of his fieldwork, this money was to map out the effects of imperialism, in this case of the Inka and Wari empires, on the ground. Bradley had just begun a new chapter in his research career, and he was pursuing it with the infectious vigor that characterized his two decades of research on Assyrian imperialism. He had embarked on a new, truly comparative framework for assessing empire cross-culturally. It is unfortunate that he was not able to further develop his exciting research on Andean empires and the comparative frameworks of empire. Bradley Parker’s Publications on Empires Parker, Bradley J. 1997a. “The Real and the Irreal: Multiple Meanings of Maşi in NeoAssyrian.” State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 11: 37–54. ———. 1997b. “Garrisoning the Empire: Aspects of the Construction and Maintenance of Forts on the Assyrian Frontier.” Iraq 59: 77–87. ———. 1997c. “The Northern Frontier of Assyria: An Archaeological Perspective.” In Assyria 1995, edited by S. Parpola and R. Whiting, 217–44. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project. ———. 1998. “Archaeological Evidence for the Location of Tušhan: A Provincial Capital on the Northern Frontier of Assyria.” In Intellectual Life in the Ancient Near East: Papers Presented at the 43rd Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, edited by J. Prosecky, 299–314. Prague: Oriental Institute. ———. 2001. The Mechanics of Empire: The Northern Frontier of Assyria as a Case Study in Imperial Dynamics. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project.

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———. 2002. “At the Edge of Empire: Conceptualizing Assyria’s Anatolian Frontier ca. 700 B. C.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 21: 371–95. ———. 2003. “Archaeological Manifestations of Empire: Assyria’s Imprint on Southeastern Anatolia.” American Journal of Archaeology 107: 525–57. ———. 2006. “Toward an Understanding of Borderland Processes.” American Antiquity 71: 77–100. ———. 2009. “Ašipâ Again: A Microhistory of an Assyrian Provincial Administrator.” In Of God(s), Trees, Kings, and Scholars: Neo-Assyrian and Related Studies in Honour of Simo Parpola, edited by M. Luukko, S. Svärd, and R. Mattila, 179–92. Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society. ———. 2011. “The Construction and Performance of Kingship in the Neo-Assyrian Empire.” Journal of Anthropological Research 67: 357–86. ———. 2012. “The Assyrians Abroad.” In A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, edited by D. T. Potts, 867–76. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2014. “Geographies of Power: Territoriality and Empire during the Mesopotamian Iron Age.” In Territoriality in Archaeology, edited by J. F. Osborne and N. P. VanValkenburgh, 126–44. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2015. “Hegemony, Power and the Use of Force in the Neo Assyrian Empire.” In Understanding Hegemonic Practices of the Early Assyrian Empire, edited by B. S. Düring, 287–99. Leiden: NINO. ———. 2017. “The Neo-Assyrian Kings in Nineveh.” In Nineveh, The Great City, Symbol of Beauty and Power, edited by L. Petit and D. Morandi Bonacossi, 142–46. Leiden: Dutch National Museum of Antiquities. ———. 2018a. “Neo-Pericentrics.” In Imperial Peripheries in the Neo-Assyrian Period, edited by C. Tyson and V. Hermann. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. ———. 2018b. “What’s the Big Picture? Comparative Perspectives on the Archaeology of Empire.” In The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes. A Comparative Study of Empires in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean World, edited by B. S. Düring and T. D. Stek, 324–50. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. ———. Forthcoming. “Remodeling Empire.” In The Archaeology of Imperial Encounters in the Levant during the Second and First Millennia BCE, edited by I. Koch and C. Uehlinger, n.p. Fribourg: Academic Press. Parker, B. J., and L. Rodseth, eds. 2005. Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology and History. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Rodseth, L., and B. J. Parker. 2005. “Theoretical Considerations in the Study of Frontiers.” In Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology and History, edited by B. J. Parker and L. Rodseth, 3–21. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Figure 1.1. World map showing imperial formations discussed in this volume. Produced by Jill Seagard.

Chapter One

Archaeologies of Empire An Introduction

Bleda S. Düring, Anna L. Boozer, and Bradley J. Parker

Why Empires? A large portion of the population throughout world history lived, and some would argue continue to live, under imperial rule (Goldstone and Haldon 2009; Burbank and Cooper 2010, 3). Although scholars do not always agree on when and where the roots of imperialism lie, most would agree that imperial configurations have affected human history so profoundly that the legacy of ancient empires continues to structure the modern world in many ways (Hardt and Negri 2000; Maier 2006; Bernbeck 2010). It is therefore not surprising that empires have been the focus of sustained investigation in academe and have resonated in art and popular culture, such as in movies and video games. In recent decades we have witnessed a resurgence in academic studies of empire. These studies have focused primarily on colonial British, Spanish, and Portuguese imperialism (e.g., Wilson 2004; Stoler et al. 2007; Howe 2010; Benton 2010; Burbank and Cooper 2010). Historians who are part of what has been called the new imperial history have given voice to subaltern voices and the multifaceted ways in which empires were constructed in imperial peripheries, and in doing so, they have refocused our understanding of how empires were constituted. For example, Kathleen Wilson (2011) has demonstrated the profound impact that colonial rule had upon family structure, sexual practices, and gender roles. Scholarship on empires has thus shifted from the assumption that these were more or less homogenously run centrist states to the view that empires are best described as heterogeneous and dynamic patchworks of imperial configurations in which imperial power was the outcome of the complex interaction between evolving colonial structures and various types of agents in highly contingent 1

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relationships. This new perspective effectively dissolves the distinction between ancient and modern empires, which was often held to revolve around greater control in modern empires (Bang and Bayly 2011, 5–8). For the most part, the study of ancient empires has been bypassed by these new historical perspectives on empires. Especially in the old world, descriptions of ancient empires continue to characterize them as a neatly ordered set of institutions, which can be summarized through a discussion of the actions of key rulers (e.g., Morris and Scheidel 2009; Cline and Graham 2011; Barjamovic 2013; Karlsson 2016). Numerous exceptions to this institutionalist model of ancient empires can, of course, be mentioned. Interestingly, archaeological studies that foreground the heterogeneity of ancient empires and the importance of bottom-up, agentcentered studies of imperialism have been best developed in regions with limited historical evidence. Thus, for example, the archaeological study of Andean and Mesoamerican empires has highlighted diversities of imperial practices and how they affected non-elites for decades (e.g., Schreiber 1987; Brumfiel 1991; D’Altroy 1992). This research initiated avenues of investigation that dovetail remarkably well with the new imperial history (see also the conclusions to this volume). By contrast, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, where textual sources are almost invariably more abundant, reconstruction of ancient empires has traditionally been dominated by institutionalist perspectives put forward by historians. By contrast, archaeologists have demonstrated the heterogeneity and local effects of ancient empires in India, Egypt, Anatolia, and the Mediterranean (Sinopoli 1994; S. T. Smith 1995; Morrison 2001; Parker 2001; Glatz 2009; Mattingly 2011). However, these studies have remained relatively marginal in the study of ancient empires in the Old World. These Old World empires continued to be studied predominantly as more or less coherent and homogeneous states best illuminated through the investigation of elites, royal courts, and imperial institutions. Although the limited corpus of textual data available for many ancient empires may have contributed to this homogenizing perspective, the fundamental bias comes from the persistent view that empires are best understood as an elite affair. For example, Tilly (1994, 7) influentially characterizes empires as “concatenating central military organizations, thin regional administrations, trading networks, and organizations of tribute in which local and regional rulers—often maintaining cultural identities distinct from that of the empire’s center—enjoyed great autonomy in return for collaboration in the collection of tribute and support in the empire’s military campaigns.” Overall, it is striking that the study of ancient

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empires has been predicated on perspectives that are radically different from those dominating the historical analysis of colonial ones. We cannot blame this predicament entirely upon the “tyranny of the text.” There is a persistent view even within archaeology that non-elite groups were not dramatically affected or had little or no agency under imperial rule. It is precisely this dominant institutionalist and elite-centered focus of ancient empires that has kept archaeologists from realizing the potential of their data. Archaeologists have often studied empires by exploring elite assemblages, monumental architecture, fortifications, and other substantial signs of imperial overlay (see also Khatchadourian 2016). The local specificity that archaeologists find on the ground is often aggregated into rigid imperial models, which obscure the complex and dynamic configurations that occur in specific places. Unwittingly then, archaeology has been a collaborator in the perpetuation of traditional centrist views since it has often been used as an illustrative device for “known” imperial histories. As has already been mentioned, numerous archaeologists, as well as historians such as Terrenato (2011, 2014), have moved on to study more bottom-up and agent-centered aspects of ancient imperialism. To date, these studies have not yet led to a fundamental shift in the ways that archaeologists approach ancient empires. We can explain this lack of impact in two ways. First, these studies were presented as isolated case studies, and the comparative potential of the results was not foregrounded. Thus, it is relatively easy to ignore such studies as relevant only to a specific empire or region. Second, these studies did not pursue an explicit programmatic agenda with the aim of changing the models we apply to ancient empires and how these empires were constituted. In order to better understand ancient empires, as well as modern ones, archaeologists must join broader conversations on empires that crosscut regions and time. This volume takes a major step toward harnessing the momentum of these previous studies and furthering them to demonstrate the local and dynamic constitution of ancient empires. Why Archaeology? Because empires are more or less omnipresent in historical contexts with substantial written archives, they are often regarded by historians as self-evident and universal entities whose structures and dynamics merit little critical investigation. Given these rich written sources, why is archaeology necessary for the study of ancient empires?

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First, imperial archives were written by a miniscule percentage of the population, usually elite males living in imperial centers and often belonging to, or beholden to, a dominant ethnic group (Harris 1989). Most of this literate group was also supportive of the imperial project, since empires, like state societies, predominantly serve the needs of the elites. The very creation of these textual sources therefore makes them problematic for an accurate appraisal of many questions fundamental to an understanding of ancient empires. Archaeology can tell us about peoples, places, and times that were unrecorded or were only obliquely recorded, for example in bureaucratic documents of imperial institutions. Second, as archaeologists, we know that empires are far from self-evident. Even if we limit ourselves to regions with complex urban civilizations, such as Mesopotamia or China, a number of problems become clear. For example, empires often appear several millennia after the consolidation of urbanized and socially complex societies. Why and how does this transformation from states to empires take place, and in what sense do empires differ from other complex polities? Archaeology can help to address these questions. Many states embark on trajectories toward empire and develop several imperial repertoires that facilitate their success at creating and maintaining imperial power. In this volume, we use the term imperial repertoires, or simply repertoires, to denote the dynamic packages of technologies, institutions, cultural practices, and religious and ideological ideas harnessed by empires (compare to “repertoires of rule” in Burbank and Cooper 2010). Imperial repertoires include a wide array of practices, ranging from agricultural, administrative, and logistical technologies, to particular types of social and legal arrangements that define much of the context in which people live out their lives, to embodied and normatively charged ideas on how one should eat, dress, defecate, have sexual intercourse, and be buried, to religious and ideological justifications of imperialism, often cast as divinely sanctioned or a mission of spreading civilization. Many of these repertoires exist in pre-imperial states, and empires typically combine, rework, and intensify preexisting repertoires for their imperial needs. Thus, for example, destruction of enemy settlements and abduction of people as slaves is a practice that can be documented in deep history, but many empires develop this into a systematic practice of social engineering, in which the demographic composition of targeted regions is completely altered through combinations of colonization

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and deportation practices and the use of both force and positive incentives for settlers (see Smith, Yao, Alconini, Boozer, and Düring, this volume). With these imperial repertoires, empires embark on pathways of economic, social, ideological, or political power (Parker, this volume; also, Mann 1986). Many states do not manage the transition to more durable or consolidated forms of empire, or in the terminology of Mann, to successfully develop infrastructural power (Ando 2017, 9). For this reason, most empires were brief affairs only—short-lived entities that might best be termed “conquest empires.” From Hammurabi to Attila, we see instances of sudden conquest of large swathes of territory followed by equally abrupt collapse. For example, the polity created by Alexander the Great is the quintessential example of an empire that never moved into the critical phase of consolidation—its life course consisted entirely of conquest and fragmentation. Perceived from an Achaemenid perspective, Alexander was a spectacular failure, managing to undo what had been consolidated over centuries. Why were some empires more successful at making this transition to consolidation, sometimes characterized as the “Augustan threshold,” than others (Doyle 1986, 93; see also Düring, this volume)? What are the means by which successful empires achieved lasting domination? The answers to these questions are not easily addressed on the basis of imperial archives given their focus on the dealings at court and propaganda. Instead, we argue that we need to investigate the dynamics and interactions that occur in myriad places on the ground, and we ask how imperial agents transformed societies, landscapes, and economies, as well as what prompted enough people from various backgrounds to make it work. Archaeology is ideally positioned to investigate such questions because we can map out landscape changes, agricultural regimes, economic activities, and the myriad ways in which objects are implicated in a variety of imperial encounters. To some extent, these first two points emanate from the same fundamental problem: one can only understand how empires arose and how they were sustained if one understands how highly diverse actors made and remade empire across varied regions and social settings. Archaeology is uniquely positioned to expose what might be termed hidden histories. That is, archaeology can highlight the lives of people who neither wrote nor were the subjects of historical texts. In this sense, archaeology enables the subaltern to speak—something that is in most cases impossible on the basis of historical documents. For example, James C. Scott (1998) has convincingly argued that the failure of powerful

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imperial polities, such as the USSR, can be at least partially explained as a result of passive resistance by ordinary people. Archaeology can provide comparable examples of agency within ancient empires. Crucially, archaeologists have the toolkit to unlock the lives and circumstances of such people by documenting where they lived, what types of objects they used, what they ate, what they produced, and how all these things both transformed and were transformed by imperial dynamics. Archaeologists can recover the things people did not want to or think to write about, as well as those they could not record. Archaeology offers the opportunity to investigate the diverse contexts out of which imperialism emerged and the variegated outcomes that imperialism produced. Archaeologists can therefore explore the social and ecological conditions that allowed empires to take root and flourish (Rosenzweig and Marston 2018). Third, once trajectories of imperial consolidation have been developed, imperial traditions often prove to be remarkably enduring and versatile, endlessly reworked by successor states and empires, in some cases after centuries of political fragmentation. The case of Rome, starting as a polytheistic republic and ending as a Christian autocracy centered on Constantinople, is well known, although it is less commonly acknowledged that the final descendant of the Roman Empire was the Muslim imperial formation of the Ottoman Empire. Much later empires, such as the British Empire, continued to self-consciously model themselves after Rome (Dietler 2005). Similarly, long-lived chains of empires developed in the Near East, where Assyrian imperial repertoires were taken over by the Neo-Babylonians, the Achaemenids, the Seleukids, the Parthians, and the Sasanians; in the Andes, where Wari and Tiwanaku imperial traditions were taken up by the Inka; and in China, where we have the sequence of the Qin, Han, Jin, Sui, Tang, Yuan, Ming, and Qing Empires, we also find the persistent sequence of imperial formations. This tenacity of imperial practices, once established, is remarkable and requires scrutiny (also Motyl 1999, 2001; Stoler 2016), as does the shift of imperial cores from one region to the next and the reworking of imperial residues of the deep past (Covey 2014; Williams et al., this volume). This Volume In sum, empires emerge as the interplay between imperial structures and agents working with and against the empire. The structures of empire have been studied, but the agents that (re)create these structures have not been studied

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systematically and comparatively in the ancient world. Archaeology reveals how empires are constituted through daily interactions in specific places and contexts in a way that is generally impossible for historical analysis to address because it exposes answers to questions that the ancient elites did not ask and did not record. For example, archaeology exposes perspectives on health, housing, foodways, population movements, violence, performance, and longterm dynamics. The synergies created between the empire and the local manifestations of these issues create the variety and dynamics of imperial interaction that are visible across and among empires, ultimately providing answers to our questions about development, sustainability, and collapse. Our goal for this volume, and for the Advanced Seminar at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) that formed the basis of the book, is to harness the work of the next generation of empire scholars in order to foster new theoretical and methodological perspectives that are of relevance within and beyond archaeology and to foreground empires as a cross-cultural category. We aim for a step change in how we study ancient empires and for scholars of ancient empires to join ongoing discussions of empire that are presently centered in other disciplines and periods. Archaeology not only has much to learn from these discussions, but also has much to contribute (see Boozer and Düring, this volume). Although many archaeologists have engaged in research on ancient empires, archaeology as a discipline has contributed relatively little to the study of imperialism in a manner that speaks to the broad scholarly community. A 2001 volume, simply titled Empires, is an exception (Alcock et al. 2001). This book provides case studies drawn from across the globe, illustrating the range of possibilities among ancient empires. Theoretical goals were not integrated across the volume, however, and so this book did not generate real shifts in terms of how ancient empires could be studied. Since the publication of Empires, a small group of scholars has been steadily changing the way we study particular empires. Many of these scholars are included in this volume. Bradley Parker and Stuart Tyson Smith, for example, have produced two of the most well known and influential of these regional studies (Parker 2001; S. T. Smith 2003a). In recent years, Areshian’s edited volume (2013) brings together a number of key ancient empires, but, like the earlier volume by Alcock et al., it lacks a clear comparative agenda. A recent volume edited by Düring and Stek (2018) has a comparative perspective but focuses upon the archaeology of imperial peripheries and provinces. By contrast, this book aims to reach beyond archaeology to demonstrate how

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archaeological research can impact our conceptualization of empires across disciplinary boundaries. The volume has three main aims. The first of these is to draw on archaeological evidence to demonstrate the great diversity found within ancient empires, especially the many nameless individuals whose daily actions constituted the ancient empires under study. The idea is to foreground how these contexts are not epiphenomenal but central to imperial projects, both ancient and modern. The second aim is to move the conceptualization of empires beyond the typologies through which they have often been described and to foreground the messy and contiguous nature of empires. Finally, we seek to outline how tenacious imperial traditions are, once articulated, and how they reemerge in chains of empires spanning millennia in discrete parts of the globe such as China, the Near East, and the Andes. Breaking the Mold In order to realize these three aims, we must break the mold that has traditionally shaped studies of ancient empires. Specifically, we must reconsider conventional taxonomies. Archaeologists and ancient historians have developed and used various typologies to categorize ancient empires. These typologies, while initially useful, later became detrimental to imperial studies, as studies of ancient empires overly focused on pigeonholing empires, and the investigation of the actual constitution of empires is often neglected as a result. Although Parker (this volume) provides a clear overview of these models, it is worthwhile reviewing them here to highlight their role in molding past studies of empires. For example, the influential distinction between territorial and hegemonic power was first formulated by Luttwak for the Roman Empire (1976). In this model, a distinction is made between direct rule through and annexation, on the one hand, which is costly but results in high levels of control, and indirect hegemonic rule, which requires fewer resources but also means that the empires have less power on the ground. This dichotomy was further developed by Hassig (1985, 1988) for the Aztec Empire (also Ohnersorgen 2006) and D’Altroy (1992) for the Inka Empire (also Alconini 2008). Luttwak’s work has also been of enormous influence on scholars working on Old World empires (Parker 2001; Glatz 2009) and has provided a means of assessing the modes of governance in ancient empires. Likewise, Doyle’s (1986) work on empires, in which he argued that empires are best understood as the relationship between the imperial core (metropole)

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and the dominated peripheries, rather than from a perspective foregrounding either the center or the periphery, has been influential in archaeology, mainly because it was transformed by M. E. Smith (2001; M. E. Smith and Montiel 2001; Matthews 2003), into an archaeological list of correlates that could be readily applied to archaeological datasets. By the same token, however, this model lacks explanatory power, as it simply lists a series of characteristics not necessarily universally present in or exclusive to empires without discussing how these imperial forms came about and why they were constitutive of empire. Other scholars have favored a network perspective on empires, in a view mirroring Tilly’s interpretation that empires are overlays graphed upon Indigenous societies (1994). Scholars such as Liverani (1988) and Bernbeck (2010) have compared the Assyrian Empire to a network of Assyrian enclaves and strongholds in alien territories, and Glatz (2009) has likewise argued for a network model of empire, grounding her ideas on the influential work of Michael Mann and his IEMP (ideology, economy, military, politics) model of power (1986). Mann’s idea is that there are diverse forms of power at the basis of imperial formations, and that, for example, military and ideological power require different, but interrelated, imperial repertoires. Moreover, imperial power of all four categories is expected to be unevenly distributed with, for example, a stronger imperial investment near key economic resources than in peripheral regions. On the basis of these premises, Claudia Glatz (2009, 2013) has mapped out the differential distribution of various types of Hittite manifestations across the territories it controlled, contrasting, for example, the distribution of administrative technologies with pottery repertoires. Although not explicitly working from the same theoretical ideas, there are remarkable parallels to this type of multi-stranded analysis in the work of Sonia Alconini on the Inka (2005, 2008). Finally, Bradley Parker proposes a modified version of the Mann/network model in this volume in which he discusses imperial power as consisting of economic, social, ideological, and political power and as distributed unevenly along nodes in a network. All three of these approaches can be problematic when confronted with archaeological data. Our datasets suggest that these models are too neat, suggesting a homogeneous state of imperial configurations or a clear zoning of them, which invariably does not match what our increasingly detailed archaeological datasets reveal. There is a mismatch between these rigid models and the data that archaeologists collect. Thus, although such taxonomies are useful to aid us in conceptualizing and comparing ancient empires, they can also be

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misleading. To begin with, researchers must avoid letting any single theoretical stance on the nature of imperial rule take on a life of its own and become a paradigm that researchers set out to prove rather than a theory that is shaped by the emerging data. It is not sufficient to say, for example, that the British Empire held hegemonic rule over vast territories or that Wari imperialism created a mosaic of different types of domination across much of the central Andes and act as if that is enough of an explanation of the diverse modalities that imperial subjects experienced. Any such categorization will inevitably result in a flattening of imperial experience and the homogenization of the very real complexities that make empires such unique, difficult, and interesting subjects of study. However, a nihilistic view of theoretical perspectives is also problematic. Theories and models are necessary to organize and give structure to the diverse datasets that emerge from research on ancient empires. Importantly, archaeologists need theoretical constructs that highlight—instead of homogenize—the vagaries of imperial realities that we witness within our own datasets. Although this type of approach has yet to completely coalesce and thus has not yet been systematically integrated into mainstream archaeological thought, a number of archaeologists have been charting, for particular imperial trajectories, the diversity of imperial configurations. Various scholars studying particular empires have run up against the diversity of imperialism in particular contexts. Schreiber (2001, 2005a) used the phrase “imperial mosaic” to capture this diversity, Parker borrowed the language of D’Altroy (1992) to discuss the “territorial/­hegemonic continuum” (2001), and Stuart Tyson Smith has spent much of his career mapping out the diversity of imperial negotiations and identities in Egyptiandominated Nubia (2003a, 2013). The idea that empires are heterogeneous and cannot be coherently captured in existing taxonomies is one we want to pursue in detail and take further in this volume. The current volume aims to do just that; by bringing together scholars studying an array of ancient empires, we empirically expose the diversity of the imperial experience. The Advanced Seminar that led to this volume was based on the argument that archaeologists should approach the study of this subject from a standpoint that integrates agency-centered perspectives along the lines of those proposed by Bourdieu (1977) and Giddens (1984) in social anthropology. Crucially, both scholars, although using different terminologies, argue that the social structures that give shape to our aggregate world are produced through daily interactions of people going about their business and generally trying to further their own interests. By adhering to social rules in their interactions,

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social structures are reproduced; for example, by marrying particular types of people, existing class differences are reproduced unwittingly. Another suite of scholars has described the acts of engaging, applying, exercising, or practicing ideas as “praxis” (e.g., Arendt 1958). In other words, praxis bridges the divide between the theoretical world of ideas and the lived experience of the agents who worked with and influenced imperial repertoires on the ground. In this volume, we term all of the individuals who engaged in the making of empire “imperial agents”—or simply “agents”—and their actions as “imperial praxis.” We ask what means were available to those working for ancient empires, what incentivized people of various backgrounds to partake in imperial projects, and how people responded to the creation of empire. While this theoretical orientation is not new in academe, it has yet to be applied systematically to the study of ancient empires. We argue that it should be. To do so, we must consider imperial configurations as an interplay of imperial structures (both real and cognitive) and the agency of people in various social positions and of diverse cultural backgrounds. This volume thus foregrounds how daily practice constitutes and contests imperial domains and integrates this perspective with the larger imperial processes. We suggest that archaeological datasets permit researchers to explore both the similarities and the heterogeneity of imperial polities and how people responded to them and resisted or reproduced imperial structures. Themes We have grouped the papers in this volume into three broad themes: migrant settlers and local communities, the dynamics of imperial provinces and peripheries of empires, and trajectories of imperial development. These themes are deliberately broad and based on discussions we had in an Advanced Seminar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. We have decided to use these three themes to shape the structure of this volume, but we could have chosen many other ways to group the papers. Migrant Settlers and Local Communities One of the characteristics that often sets empires apart from other types of states is the degree to which they engage in social engineering, that is, the deliberate displacement of populations in order to create new social realities on the

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ground that better suit the needs of the empire. Many empires mix populations on a massive scale, either as a deliberate strategy to divide and conquer or by creating the conditions that facilitated the large-scale migration of people in search of better livelihoods. In the study of many empires, emphasis has been placed on the brutality of imperial social engineering. While there can be little doubt that on many occasions, significant segments of populations that resisted were killed and/or deported, and that this caused significant social, political, and economic disruption in the affected societies, scholarly emphasis on imperial violence has, we feel, partially obscured two significant imperial realities. First, people and their labor were the main resource of ancient empires across the globe, and the main concern of empires would have been to protect this resource. Second, empires could not rely exclusively on policing and violence, whether actual or structural, to keep people at work. It required entirely too much imperial investment to make such a practice practical (Parker 2001). Apart from the stick, a carrot was necessary to make imperialism function. In other words, incentives were provided—in some cases meager, in some cases not—for people of imperial and other backgrounds to participate in the imperial project (Alconini 2005; D’Altroy 2005; Alconini 2008). Some authors have also argued, much like the famous Monty Python skit What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?, that individuals living within empires achieve a better way of life than those living outside of it (Darwin 2012). Empires tend to expose their populaces to a wide range of goods, infrastructure, economic potential, and health improvements. Scholars of empire often feel awkward pointing out these advantages, but they must be brought to the surface so that we can understand the full range of experiences among those living within the empire. Thus, if we want to understand how migrants (or immigrants, see Yao, this volume) benefited from empire within the systems that were meant to exploit them, we need to examine specific case studies from both agencycentered and process-oriented perspectives. One of the most productive ways of investigating such interactions is through the concept of entanglement, which describes the interwoven and interactive nature of imperial-local interactions. Stuart Tyson Smith defines and describes this phenomenon in detail in his chapter, while the chapters by Alconini, Boozer, and Yao also pick up on this theme and develop it further in their own case studies. One of the reasons entanglement has not caught on as a theoretical concept in empire studies is that scholars have been preoccupied with the idea of local peoples taking on imperial practices to the detriment of

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more nuanced interpretations. This preoccupation grew out of the immense literature on Romanization, which has led to descendant concepts such as Egyptianization (Smith, this volume) and Inkanization (Alconini, this volume). In her chapter, Boozer discusses the pitfalls associated with the originating concept of Romanization as part of the suite of concepts that have grown out of Rome’s dominating influence on conceptions of empire. She follows S. T. Smith in suggesting that the term entanglement better describes the agentive practice of intertwining imperial and local traditions. This deconstruction of inherited concepts is a crucial contribution of this volume. Stuart Tyson Smith discusses the intricate relationships between Egyptian settlers and local society on Egypt’s Nubian frontier during the Middle and the New Kingdoms (chapter 2). While there is good evidence for war—the Egyptian authorities built massive fortifications in the area—the analysis of domestic and burial contexts demonstrates how imperial and vernacular traditions often became entangled (see Van Dommelen 2005; Smith, this volume). Nubian burial traditions occur alongside and mixed in with Egyptian elements in “colonial Egyptian cemeteries,” while Nubian cooking wares appear in seemingly Egyptian households. Smith also shows how both Egyptian authorities and people in the region could foreground particular social identities as occasion required. For example, Egyptianized Nubian nobles were portrayed as Nubians in state propaganda, while at home in Nubia they were represented as Egyptian. Colonists, officials, administrators, and indigenes who could operate within more than one cultural—and presumably linguistic, sphere (in other words, those who maintained flexible identities), clearly benefited in a variety of ways from Egyptian imperialism. Colonists, officials, administrators, and locals entangled the imperial and the vernacular in complex configurations that occur in imperial environments. These creative entanglements demonstrate the praxis of all agents who are part of the imperial project. Alice Yao’s case study of Chinese Han migrants living in peripheral regions demonstrates that the state needed more than physical bodies to transform geography into political territory (chapter 3). The empire needs a “frontier citizenry” who are not simply physical bodies but also capable actors who harbor an affinity for, rather than a fear of, the frontier geography. Yao convincingly demonstrates that Han settlers, unlike the Han soldiers posted in the same regions, transformed the region they had come to occupy, creating essentially a homescape. Crucial to this transformation was the development of ties to the new region through both space and time. This included intercommunity connections and entanglements

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between colonists and Indigenous groups (Dietler 2010; Smith, this volume), as well as the development of funerary practices that bound immigrants with the past, present, and future of the frontier. Han settlers were usually recruited from the lower tiers of Han society. Consisting of convicts, the destitute, and men and women who had no respectable future in the crowded Chinese heartlands, many settlers likely participated in this colonial enterprise as a way of bettering their social position. By creating a new home in this rugged frontier region, Han settlers aided the empire in converting the imperial peripheral into an enduring part of the Han empire (also Düring this volume). These two chapters demonstrate the need to add participant perspectives in order to understand empires and to reconstruct what incentives made it attractive to settler and local groups to participate in the imperial project. This approach also imbues local actors with agency, one which they lacked in models that fetishize imperial control. They demonstrate that in the end, empires are rooted in community, family, and gender relations, and that these contribute to imperial successes and failures. Imperial Impacts: Provinces and Peripheries This second theme focuses on how empires transformed provincial and peripheral landscapes. Apart from social engineering, empires also typically radically transform conquered regions by building new infrastructures and fortifications, discontinuing existing centers and creating new settlements, and developing novel farming regimes and mining activities. In traditional studies of empire, there has been a tendency to categorize imperial policies toward conquered landscapes as blanket strategies applied homogeneously from the imperial metropole across conquered territories. For example, Wallerstein (1974; see also Allen 2005) argued for a clear pattern of transmission of goods and resources between the core, semi-periphery, and periphery of an empire. Such a formulation standardizes imperial configurations and ignores the roles of agents in shaping the form of empire. In contrast to this view, the chapters presented in this volume highlight the great variation and dynamic nature of imperial impacts on incorporated landscapes. This section aims, therefore, to highlight and explain variability in how empires interacted with, transformed, and, in turn, were transformed by imperial provinces and peripheries. The first chapter in this section, by Sonia Alconini, compares two frontiers of the Inka Empire and explores the very different historical trajectories that

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resulted from interaction between the Indigenous peoples of these regions and the expanding Inka polity (chapter 4). As the Inka Empire expanded, it encountered a diverse array of ethnic groups exhibiting varying degrees of social complexity. The Inkas engaged in social engineering by implanting migrants as mitmaqkuna colonies to stimulate regional production and convert staple products into transportable wealth (D’Altroy and Earle 1985; Earle and Jennings 2012). The Inka also sought various means of incorporating groups that were cooperative and clamping down on those that were not. Importantly, the application of Inka social engineering was tailored to specific demographic and sociopolitical circumstances of annexed regions. In some areas, such as the southern Inka frontier, there was very little demographic change as imperial efforts were predominantly focused on co-opting local elites. In other areas, such as the central Inka frontier, substantial agricultural development and colonization took place and ethnic differences were utilized to create divisions among the labor force and provide settlers with a sociocultural framework in their new environments. Williams et al. (this volume) develop a related theme in their discussion of the ways that imperial agents violated locally poignant monuments in order to underscore the full range of power displays employed by precursors to the Inka imperial project. This performative, embodied enactment of power draws from Lawrence Coben, who developed the concept of “theaters of power” (2006) to describe the performative and embodied role of power within empires. Alconini, Boozer, and Yao develop this theme further in their case studies by exploring the ways in which agents inscribe the empire upon local landscapes, either through the process of imperial incorporation or through the creation of homescapes. In chapter 5, Anna L. Boozer compares two of Rome’s desert borderlands in Egypt in order to demonstrate the divergent goals, approaches, and applications of imperial repertoires to these remote regions. She argues that in order to effectively dominate the diversity encountered through imperial expansion, imperial agents themselves—in this case low-ranking officials and administrators—had to become acculturated to local norms. These officials were literally and figuratively on the frontlines of Roman imperialism. The variety and impact of local influence upon imperial agents has rarely been explored by scholars of the ancient world. The norm has been to examine the ways in which local cultures changed as a result of imperial influence. The mutability of these imperial agents helps to explain the flexibility of

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the Roman imperial apparatus. In the Western Desert, for example, Roman agents built fortresses from which they grounded operations for taxation and border control. Imperial officials and local elite developed agricultural systems and new crops, which, though not necessarily demanded by the empire, supported expanded occupation. By contrast, the Eastern Desert was mainly a site of resource extraction and a nexus of trade for valuable commodities deriving from further afield. Whereas in the west, the imperial agenda was executed by people of various backgrounds opting into the new imperial opportunities, the exploitation of the Eastern Desert had to be undertaken by the Roman military, itself a multiethnic institution, which in this region came to resemble a modern multinational corporation bent on extracting resources despite episodic local resistance. In his case study of the Middle Assyrian Empire, Bleda Düring also highlights the diverse impact of empire on conquered territories (chapter 6). The nature of Assyrian involvement in the western territories varied from creating new agricultural systems farmed by migrants, to regions where only the administration changed hands and local societies were largely left alone. He argues that in order to understand such differences, we should investigate the means available to the empire, the composition of the agents of empire, including both Assyrians and subaltern populations of various classes, and the incentives provided to agents of diverse background to partake in the imperial project. By using a multistranded approach to this empire, we can make sense of not only why some regions were subjected to full-scale social and agricultural engineering while others were not, but also how these processes worked (or failed) from an agent-based perspective. These three case studies demonstrate the flexibility of imperial interventions in provinces and peripheries. In some instances, this mutability is deliberate, because agents in both the core and the periphery adapted to the complex configurations of societies and geographies encountered. In other cases, this flexibility was a by-product of imperial weaknesses. The ability of empires to effect change was often quite limited, in part because of the amount of manpower it would involve but also because they had limited ability to exchange knowledge quickly and effectively. Therefore, some of the variety that we detect on the ground is an unintended consequence of local and imperial agents acting on their own without substantial input from the core. Nevertheless, the patterns we encounter are not random. They are not simply a complex palimpsest of interaction between empire, people, and local affordances. Instead, they are

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a perfect illustration of agency theory, how agents pursuing their own goals consciously and unconsciously reproduce the structures of empire through their daily practice. Trajectories of Imperial Development At what point does a state transform into an empire? How can we understand states that behave like empires in some respects but not in others? How are imperial repertoires transferred from one polity to the next? Does it make sense to talk about an imperial threshold that was achieved in particular periods, and to regard succeeding empires as variations on a theme? Why are imperial traditions so tenacious, often spanning thousands of years? One of the aims of this volume is to investigate the ways that empires are comparable. While ancient empires developed along their own historic trajectories and each has particular cultural traditions that are of great importance in how the empire in question takes shape, ancient empires are nonetheless comparable in many ways. The reason for this is twofold. First, there are chains of empire in regions such as the Andes, the Near East, and China, where imperial traditions are transferred and reworked from one empire to the next, in what we call “the lives and afterlives of empires.” Second, ancient empires had to deal with very similar logistical problems: how to control diverse societies and economies across vast territories. Because they were dealing with similar problems, they came up with solutions that were, at least in part, similar. Further, during our seminar at SAR, we found that the archaeological footprint of empires diverges widely, and that some empires have confounded generations of archaeologists because they have been very difficult to identify in our material assemblages and chronological sequences. We dubbed these “elusive empires” at the seminar, following Sancisi-Weerdenburg’s work on the Achaemenid Empire : “The extant evidence seems to allow one to argue both for a monolithic empire as well as an amalgam of culturally distinct and politically semi-independent areas. The former position is founded on generalizations based on material from regions for which documentation is available. The second conclusion is generally derived from archaeological evidence” (1990, 263). The contrast that Sancisi-Weerdenburg identifies between regions with documentary evidence and those with archaeological evidence is one that we have also identified as problematic. Although two empires, the Achaemenid Persian and Aztec Empires, most exemplified this problem among our presented

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papers, we found that every empire also has imperial signatures that elude or betray archaeological identification. The contrast with the simplicity found in documentary sources requires more consideration in every empire. In a paper that was presented in Santa Fe but is not included here, Peri Johnson discussed how Achaemenid administrators purposefully opted to connect to predecessors in their use of places in the landscape, which were by the imperial period connected with the broader empire through a vastly improved road system that interconnected Persian-held territories. Imperial trade, a common signature of an imperial presence, was not visible in regional Achaemenid-occupied assemblages. This absence came as a clear contrast to the presence of Ionian and Athenian ceramics, which originated from outside the empire. This example is a reminder that trade and empire do not necessarily map neatly on to one another. Overholtzer’s contribution to this volume continues this theme of elusive empires in her discussion of “Aztec” trade items that appear in peripheral regions prior to the accepted chronological origin of the Aztec Empire, which derived from accounts given to Spanish chroniclers by the Aztecs themselves. These chapters remind all scholars of empire that signatures that we have always considered to be imperial might be precursors to the imperial project or ones that differ from the critical imperial “package” of material that has traditionally been assumed to accompany imperial conquest. While Overholtzer discusses this theme most poignantly, it also appears in chapters by Alconini, Düring, and Williams et al. In her study of central Mexico, Lisa Overholtzer demonstrates that many of the economic and social changes often attributed to the impact of the Aztec Empire, which include increased production for tribute and trade and the impoverishment of farmers and artisans due to increased taxation, actually occur much earlier than the ethnohistorical sources would have us believe (chapter 7). Various explanations can be put forward, including the one favored by Overholtzer that the Aztec Empire was actually much older than commonly recognized, or that the Aztecs were tapping into developments that had a long ancestry, making the question of when the empire started a moot one. Similarly, Ryan Williams et al. examine the lives and afterlives of Andean empires by discussing how two precursor states, Wari and Tiwanaku, contributed to the success of the Inka Empire and developed imperial pathways to power in their own rights (chapter 8). While not all scholars agree that we should call Wari—and particularly Tiwanaku—empires, Williams et al. demonstrate the failures and successes that lead toward the development of a

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“successful” empire. They found that much of the infrastructure of the Inka Empire was rooted in the Wari, such as the construction of provincial capitals, provincial temples, fortifications, roads, and agricultural terraces. On the other hand, many of the ideological components of the Inka Empire were grounded in Tiwanaku, which itself did not develop many of the attributes that we associate with imperialism despites its successes in developing a massive ceremonial center with connections to outlying areas. In this sense, Tiwanaku resembles other polities that do not make the transition to empire themselves but which did develop key imperial repertoires that are subsequently essential to the success of succeeding empires. Bradley Parker, by contrast, follows a different path by rethinking how we might model empires more broadly (chapter 9). He suggests that similarities arise because of structural resemblances in how empires managed diversity. Parker discusses theoretical models that have been formulated to capture empires, and what problems arise with these models—namely how they smooth over differences that we identify over space and time as well as the ways that power is enacted. Finally, Parker presents a new model that draws from the most convincing aspects of preexisting models so that we can compare empires across regions and over time, while remaining sensitive to particular articulations of people and landscapes that are key to what happens on the ground. Together, these three chapters encourage us to rethink how empires developed and transformed themselves over the course of their life histories and in response to various situations that arose. This dynamic approach to ancient imperialism reshapes our understanding of empires from stagnant entities to responsive and morphing states. Conclusion This volume then seeks to re-center studies of ancient empires across the globe at three levels of inquiry. First, it asks what motivated people participating in ancient empires and how they negotiated cultural differences and power imbalances to their own advantages. By doing so, we bring non-elite people back into the study of ancient empires. Second, moving up to a consideration of regional landscapes, we ask how empires transformed the regions they conquered and why their engagement with local societies, economies, and landscapes is so extremely diverse. This very diversity has gone largely unnoticed in the institutionalist views that continue to dominate the study of ancient empires. We

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are convinced that this variegated imperial interaction is key to understanding how empires function. Third, and bridging to more recent empires, we ask why imperial formations, once they have taken shape, are so resilient, with imperial repertoires appropriated and reworked by successor empires often over various millennia. Our results throw new light on the nature of empires both ancient and modern. Archaeology is crucial for understanding how empires could arise in the first place, why some empires were more successful than others, and how empires were constituted through the daily activities of people living across their dominions. That is not to say that historical and political approaches are irrelevant—we also require those perspectives to tell the full story of empire. But we argue that we must break apart the idea of monolithic empires spreading across territories by implementing a series of relatively homogeneous institutions. Instead, we view empires as heterogeneous and dynamic patchworks of imperial configurations spreading unpredictably across dominated territories. We need to study these messy imperial realities in order to understand how people operated in imperial structures and how empires came into existence, why they thrived, and why they ultimately faltered and transformed into something new.

Chapter Two

Colonial Entanglements Imperial Dictate, Individual Action, and Intercultural Interaction in Nubia

Stuart Tyson Smith

The material correlates of the Egyptian Middle and New Kingdom Empires in Nubia (ca. 2000–1680 and 1500–1070 BCE) seem to unambiguously reflect a heavy-handed approach dictated from the Egyptian core and can be contrasted with a more indirect approach in the Levant. Egyptian colonists in Nubia left a series of massive fortresses, temple-towns, and cemeteries full of Egyptian material culture that would leave us no doubt of Egyptian direct control even without the support of a rich textual record (Figure 2.1). As a result, archaeological and written sources at the macro scale have been used to infer a homogenous empire in Nubia characterized by direct territorial control, colonization, and eventually the Egyptianization of the Indigenous population from Aswan to the fourth cataract of the Nile in Sudanese Nubia. In contrast, Egypt’s physical presence in the Levant was minimal in the Middle Kingdom and limited even during the New Kingdom Empire. Direct evidence for stronger influence and enclaves is confined to a handful of key centers such as the ports of Gaza, Jaffa, and Byblos, and during the New Kingdom inland sites, such as Beth She’an, that dominated land routes. Trigger suggested that these differences—light touch in the Levant and heavy-handedness in Nubia—were the result of the level of respect accorded to Egypt’s Levantine vassals versus their Nubian counterparts, who were seen as simple barbarians and so required a stronger intervention (Trigger 1976). Kemp (1978) adopted a similar view in positing a “civilizing” impulse to southward imperial expansion, arguing that the main goal of Egyptian imperialism in Nubia was the expansion of Egypt’s cultural sphere through the Egyptianization of the populace. As Dietler points out for the idea of civilizing Roman 21

Figure 2.1. Map of Egypt and Nubia showing sites discussed in this chapter. Produced by Stuart Tyson Smith. 22

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Hellenization, however, these models ultimately owe more to legitimizing constructs that justified colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than to any ancient reality (Dietler 2010, 28–43; see also Boozer, this volume, in contrast to Alconini, this volume). The notion of Nubian inferiority also taps into the racial side of scholarship in the last century, which sought to minimize the accomplishments of African civilizations against those of Europe and Western Asia, in which Egypt was and often still is placed, despite its geographic location and cultural roots (Frankfort 1948; Wengrow et al. 2014; S. T. Smith 2018). This bias was reflected in Reisner’s characterization of Kerma as an Egyptian colony that eventually declined as Egyptian influence waned, rather than what we now know was a highly complex polity that was throughout its history a credible rival and for a time dominated Egypt (Bonnet 1990; O’Connor 1993; Bonnet and Valbelle 2006). A more likely explanation for the larger-scale differences lies in the adaptation of imperial strategies to local conditions in an intersection of imperial interests with local infrastructure and willingness to be co-opted (S. T. Smith 1995; also Boozer, this volume), as described by Alcock (1989) for the Roman Empire and Schreiber (1992) for the Wari. Schreiber notes that this dynamic can produce a kind of mosaic of control that might vary over space and time. As Bélisle has shown for the Wari Empire, this can include variability even within a region. Local impacts of the Wari expansion into the Xaquixaguana Plain were minimal outside of the colony. The villagers of Ak’awillay were apparently disinterested in Wari pottery and other material culture, a pattern evident across the plain, in spite of the installation of a colony. Parker’s borderland matrix model extends these principles through a study of the Assyrian empire by examining the dynamic interaction between geographic, political, economic, cultural, and demographic dimensions of boundary processes (Parker 2006; see also his chapter in this volume). This complexity is reflected in Nubia, where intercultural dynamics played out differently across time and space, sometimes leading to rejection or indifference and at other times adoption or adaptation of Egyptian practices and material culture. In spite of larger-scale patterns of assimilation in the New Kingdom, distinctively Nubian cultural practices with roots before the conquest never completely disappear and reemerge toward the end of the empire in a new cultural constellation blending and juxtaposing Egyptian and Nubian features (ca. 1293–1070 BCE). Individuals (and/or their families) chose to signal a more Nubian or Egyptian identity through the selection of burial monuments, practices, and

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grave goods, but also interwove elements from both traditions in different ways that resulted in a highly variable pattern both within and between sites and regions within Nubia. Similarly, expressions of foodways and material culture patterning within Egyptian colonies show mutual flows of interaction through the impact of Nubian influence at the quotidian level. Boozer describes a similar dynamic in the Oases in chapter 5. This pattern undermines the notion of homogenous imperial strategies correlated to a simplified stereotype of the dominated cultures—“sophisticated” Near Eastern or “barbaric” Nubian. Instead, imperial strategies and Indigenous responses varied through time and space in both regions, and indeed within those regions, in ways that produced both similarities and differences between the northern and southern Egyptian Empire. Understanding this complicated imperial dynamic requires a nuanced approach that avoids simple explanations based upon large-scale patterning in favor of multiscalar models that consider the accumulation of subtle shifts in local interactions and entanglements and their contribution to developments on a regional scale. A closer diachronic and regional examination along these lines does reveal a more complex and dynamic local and regional variability in imperial control, ranging from more direct to hegemonic. In a similar way, varying degrees of cultural and biological entanglement at different sites throughout the empire belie the state ideology of imperial self and Indigenous other that has too often informed Egyptological narratives of cultural domination and subordination in the empire. This chapter will focus primarily on Nubia, but the same model could be fruitfully applied to the Levant. For example, the New Kingdom Levantine Empire also had both regional and diachronic variability. Egyptian cultural entanglements were particularly strong at Byblos but lacking at other sites, and Egyptian investments in infrastructure and evidence for colonization reflect a more heavy-handed approach in the later New Kingdom during the Ramesside Period. Much of the Egyptian political and imperial investment in the Levant was aimed at managing maritime trade by securing key Levantine ports, but imperial expansion also focused along south-north and west-east routes extending far inland, for example the Jezreel Valley (Megiddo and the colony at Beth Shean) and along the Orontes, securing access to riverine and overland trade via the Euphrates and the Khabur region (Qatna, Qadesh, and earlier influence at Ebla). The boundary stela placed near Carchemish provides a northern correlate to the monumental inscription at the fifth cataract in Nubia. Established by Thutmose I (ca. 1501 BCE) and renewed by Thutmose III

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(ca. 1450 BCE) and Ramses II (ca. 1250 BCE), the latter was maintained over a span of at least 250 years. In each case, these boundaries may have been more about asserting a sphere of influence, since there was little or no evidence for direct Egyptian control, not even a light imperial footprint. For Nubia, I will first provide a critical discussion of Egyptianization models and instead suggest cultural entanglement as a better framework for understanding intercultural interactions in an imperial context. An overview of Egyptian imperialism from a macrohistorical perspective follows, examining the historical and archaeological evidence touching upon imperial policy from the Middle to New Kingdom, emphasizing the latter. Next, I will shift to a microhistorical approach through case studies focused on the Egyptian colony at Tombos and native colonial era cemetery at Hillat el-Arab. Focusing on localized shifts in cultural relations between Egyptians and Nubians within this larger historical context can allow for a better understanding of the complex interactions that characterized imperial Egypt’s southern frontier and ultimately influenced the course and afterlife of empire. I conclude with a consideration of the role of agency in the dynamics of entanglement, transculturation, and hybridity that emerged in the aftermath of empire. Egyptianization or Entanglement? Although as discussed above, a number of scholars have considered the military, economic, and political underpinnings of the rise and consolidation of Egypt’s Middle and New Kingdom Nubian Empires (Emery 1965; Kemp 1978; Frandsen 1979; Morkot 1987; S. T. Smith 1995; Morkot 2001, 2013), reconstructing the cultural dynamics of the colonial venture has proven more challenging. Egyptologists typically either ignore or deny the possibility that the conquered Nubians might have mounted any effective cultural resistance during the New Kingdom (e.g., Grimal 1992, 334; Bianchi 2004, 99–130). George Andrew Reisner’s unfortunate view of Kerma as an Egyptian colony colored early perspectives of Nubia as a “simple” chiefdom-level society, a periphery easily dominated by Egypt (Edwards 2004). The frequent translation of the Egyptian term wr, literally “great one,” as “prince” for the Levant and “chief ” for Nubia, is telling. Recent excavations at the site of Kerma in Upper Nubia have transformed our view of the Kingdom of Kush from simple chiefdom to complex, centralized state with a major urban center at Kerma (Bonnet and Valbelle 2006). The Kushite state of the Middle and New Kingdom was a geopolitical rival of Egypt,

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not an easily dominated periphery ripe for the extraction of resources. As for the Levant, the Egyptian state had the possibility of co-opting local leaders in order to exercise control over key resources and trade routes (see below). At first glance, Nubian culture does seem to have been wiped completely away in the face of overwhelming Egyptian cultural domination in much the same way as some have argued that contemporary globalization is destroying native cultures (King 1991). Although this idea has been deconstructed in the post­colonial literature (e.g., Bhabha 1994), Egyptologists nevertheless often still place interactions between Egypt and the Nubian Kerma civilization (ca. 2400–1500 BCE) within a classic relationship of dominant core and subordinate periphery (e.g., Emery 1965, 167–68, 177–78, 224; Grimal 1992, 334; Bianchi 2004, 74, 99, 126, 260; Redford 2004; Van der Mieroop 2014, 163, 225–27). The general adoption of Egyptianization models was reinforced by the macrohistorical pattern of assimilation seen in Lower Nubia during the New Kingdom (but see below). This notion was then projected uncritically to the Kerma culture farther south. Once Egyptian military dominance was established, Egyptian cultural assimilation would naturally follow. Breasted (1909, 331) adopts a typically Egyptocentric point of view with the comment that after the Egyptian conquest, “everywhere the rude barbarism of the upper Nile was receiving the stamp of Egyptian culture.” Egyptian ideology lends additional support to this model (Figure 2.2), since Nubians are consistently depicted as inferior and helpless to resist Egyptian hegemony (S. T. Smith 2003a, 10–29, 167–88). Trigger (1976, 109–10) used this evidence to argue that lack of respect for Nubian traditions drove an Egyptian policy of cultural assimilation in contrast to a more indirect imperial strategy toward the more culturally acceptable peoples of Western Asia, in spite of the fact that Asiatics are represented in the same negative terms (Figure 2.2 shows Tutankhamen as a sphinx trampling representatives from both ethnic groups). Echoing the globalization model noted above, Barry Kemp drew upon this notion of Nubian as “barbarian” when he concluded that “Egyptian culture must have had a considerable glamour in the eyes of Nubians. . . . It is not hard to understand how, in an age innocent of the esoteric delights of ‘folk culture,’ many of the local products, such as the decorated hand-made pottery and mother-of-pearl trinkets, did not survive the flood of cheap mass-produced Egyptian wares.” In line with his idea that ideological considerations drove Egyptian imperial policy (discussed below), Kemp concludes that “some recognition, at least, should be given to the positive side of this early attempt to extend what, to the Egyptians themselves, was a civilized way of life” (Kemp 1978, 34–35, 56).

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Figure 2.2. Tutankhamen as a Sphinx trampling an Asiatic and Nubian (Egyptian Museum, Cairo). Photo by Stuart Tyson Smith.

Using a borderlands approach that emphasizes theories of cultural entanglement, I take an alternative view of the cultural dynamics of the Egyptian New Kingdom Empire. I refer here to Dietler’s consumption-based model aimed at understanding intercultural interaction rather than Hodder’s more far-­ ranging conceptions of material entanglements (Dietler 2010, 55–74, drawing on Thomas 1991, 2002; cf. Hodder 2012). I agree with Dietler’s critique of concepts like hybridity, creolization, and méstissage as overly reductionist by virtue of their reliance on biological and linguistic models (Dietler 2010, 51–53; also Silliman 2015), although I agree with Liebmann that hybridity (and by extension the other concepts) might apply in narrow contexts (see below; Liebmann 2015). Cultural entanglement allows for a more nuanced characterization of the adoption and adaptation of cultural traits that also takes into consideration indifference to and rejection of cultural influence (e.g., for Nubia, see Smith 1998; for the Wari Empire, see Bélisle 2015). It also facilitates a robust consideration of the multidirectional flows of intercultural influence and borrowing. The limited

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evidence for mixed cultural practices during the New Kingdom goes against models stressing assimilation, instead reflecting a process of entanglement and transculturation resulting in an interweaving of different cultural threads through intercultural consumption that transformed both colonial and native culture (see below for further discussion). The key to understanding this phenomenon lies in adopting a bottom-up, agent-centered focus rather than a topdown normative view drawn from a historical record that emphasizes imperial power (S. T. Smith 2003a; and see in particular Boozer, Yao, and Overholtzer, this volume). Nubia can be seen from a borderlands perspective as a crosscutting zone of interaction rather than a conquered territory that was ultimately incorporated into the Egyptian world (cf. Lightfoot and Martinez 1995). As Parker (2006) points out, a borderland can be seen as a geopolitical space where boundaries are contested but can also be permeable. Boyarin (2005) views the Mediterranean world in similar terms as a contact zone in the context of religious interaction and the creation of Christian orthodoxy. Barth (2000, 31–32) argues that “we need to distinguish between the cognitive processes that construct the boundary—by what I might call acts of imposition—and the sociology of people living and acting around that boundary and thereby shaping an outcome.” In spite of the creation of a rigid cognitive and political boundary between Egypt and Nubia at the first cataract and symbolic and political borders marking the limits of direct and indirect control at the third and fifth cataracts of the Nile, conquered Nubia ultimately provided an arena for transculturation, a synthesis of different cultural features in a multicultural colonial setting, rather than a complete acculturation to Egyptian norms (S. T. Smith 1998; 2003a, 197–202). Nubians and Egyptians met and negotiated questions of difference and power, ultimately forging new, entangled identities, a dynamic and selective blending of cultural features as a result of the colonial experience (cf. Ortiz 1940; Pratt 1992, 5–7; Davis 1995; Deagan 1998; S. T. Smith 1998; Buzon, Smith, and Simonetti 2016). Archaeologists tend to think of agency in terms of somehow actually finding individual actors, which for us is difficult in the absence of historical records. But this represents a rather elitist view of agency, since the texts used to reconstruct agency tend to be written by men and in an imperial context are often ideologically charged and reflect imperial interests, especially in antiquity (S. T. Smith 2010; see Yao, Overholtzer, this volume). For most people, practice theory can help us find individuals in the more mundane archaeological record that reflects the materiality of everyday activities and encounters

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(Bourdieu 1977; Lightfoot, Martinez, and Schiff 1998; Barrett 2001). Grounded in the material expression of culture, a practice approach can provide a window into the everyday interactions and negotiations between colonists and natives that could have allowed Nubian society to survive and thrive once native political control returned, albeit to some extent as a colonial hybrid (in the narrow sense of Bhabha 1994, see below). Practice theory solves the inherent tension between social structure and agency by positing a constant dialectic between the constraints of habitus: cultural predispositions to some extent shared by other members of society, and the pressure of individual adaptation and innovation (Bourdieu 1977). The tension between individuals and habitus is particularly heightened in situations of intercultural interaction. As Barth notes, “Each move made by someone will affect the nature of the connections that arise along the boundary, and thereby affect the ‘rich image’ of the boundary that is retrieved” (Barth 2000, 31). Macrohistory: The Conquest and Colonization of Nubia After a series of raids, Egyptian Middle Kingdom pharaohs conquered northern (Lower) Nubia in ca. 2000 BCE, building an impressive series of fortresses over a period of around a hundred years. This construction campaign culminated in the reign of Senwosret III (ca. 1878–1841 BCE), who created an impressive hardened frontier at the second cataract of the Nile (see Figure 2.1). Their massive scale and elaborate defenses led William Adams (1977) to argue for an ideological purpose for the construction of the fortress system in an example of hyper monumentality similar to the construction of royal pyramids. Although these massive imperial constructs would have inscribed the landscape with a strong materialization of Egyptian imperial power and coercive force, this model was developed before recent excavations at Kerma, the capital of the contemporary Kingdom of Kush. Ongoing excavations led by Charles Bonnet since 1977 have revealed the existence of a strong centralized polity that would have posed a serious threat to Egyptian interests during the contemporary Middle Kerma Period (ca. 2050–1700 BCE; Bonnet 1990; Bonnet and Valbelle 2006). As I have argued elsewhere, evidence from the fortresses themselves suggests they had a multifaceted role (S. T. Smith 1995, 25–50), among which was securing Egypt’s southern frontier, both from the growing Kerma threat of raids and invasions, but also to keep in fugitives fleeing Egypt to escape the corvée or for political reasons (Williams 1999). A series of reports known as the Semna Dispatches

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Table 2.1. Periodization of Lower and Upper Nubia

Date BC

Egypt (Dynasty)

Lower Nubia

Upper Nubia

2050–1680

Middle Kingdom (11–13)

Egyptian Colony

Middle Kerman Kushite State

1680–1550/1500

Second Intermediate Period (14–17)

Kerman/Kushite Empire

Classic Kerman Kushite State

1550/1500–1070

New Kingdom (18–20)

Egyptian Colony

Egyptian Colony

1070–747

Third Intermediate Period (21–24)

Early Napatan Polity? Early Napatan Polity?

747–656

Nubian/Kushite Dynasty (25)

Napatan/Kushite Dynasty

Napatan Kushite Dynasty

documents the elaborate system of patrols that radiated out from the fortresses during the Thirteenth Dynasty (the later Middle Kingdom), including the minute attention to the movements of even small groups across the frontier (Kraemer and Liszka 2016). These imperial outposts were also placed at strategic points to facilitate riverine traffic through the rapids formed by the cataracts, granite outcrops that cross the bed of the Nile and create natural strategic chokepoints. The southern frontier was established at the second cataract in a particularly tricky spot for navigation, and it included a slipway at Mirgissa to move boats and transship goods past the worst rapids (Vercoutter 1970). The fortresses were also sited to support resource extraction locally, with a particular emphasis on gold. There is direct evidence for gold mining and extraction at Askut (S. T. Smith 1995). Other fortresses supported mining and quarrying expeditions into the desert, including at Ikkur and Kuban at the entrance to the Wadi Allaqi gold fields (Emery and Kirwan 1935). These fortresses also facilitated the collection of other materials, such as semiprecious stones like amethyst and carnelian and hard stone for the construction of royal monuments (for the connection between empires and resource exploitation, see also Boozer and Williams, this volume). The Kingdom of Kush continued to increase in complexity and power, coming to dominate Egypt in the Classic Kerma phase (ca. 1700–1500 BCE;

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O’Connor 1993, 46–57; Edwards 2004, 94–99; Bonnet and Valbelle 2006). Kush took control of all of Nubia by about 1680 BCE and even launched raids deep into a fragmented Egyptian state (Davies 2003). Initially divided between a group of rival dynasts, the civil war in Egypt eventually coalesced around the northern Syro-Palestinian fifteenth and southern native Egyptian Theban seventeenth dynasties. The Kushite state came to an abrupt end with Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose I’s conquest of Kerma in 1502 BCE (Bonnet 1990, 13), although the royal line and periodic Kushite resistance to Egyptian control seems to have lasted until the joint reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III (ca. 1460 BCE, O’Connor 1993, 60; Morkot 2001, 233–39; 2013). The ancient Egyptians established a far-reaching and complex empire during the New Kingdom (ca. 1550–1070 BCE). The territory was incorporated into the Egyptian administration through the office of the viceroy (literally, “king’s son”) of Kush. This hierarchical structure provides a point of contrast with the north, where there was no similar office. Texts particularly emphasize the viceroy’s importance in the collection and exploitation of gold mining, which may help explain the difference, gold being a critical resource for the Egyptian state (below and S. T. Smith 1995). An elaborate imperial bureaucracy initially included the heir of the king (hq3, literally, “ruler”) of Kush and groups of wrw (literally, “great ones” or “princes”), three from Wawat (Lower Nubia) and five from Kush (Upper Nubia) during the reign of Tutankhamen. The King of Kush eventually rebelled, and the office was eliminated around 1450 BCE, but the more localized princes proved more durable. So long as they remained loyal to Egyptian interests, they would have reaped the benefits of membership in Egypt’s elite. The fact that they consciously emphasized those ties in their tombs in Nubia suggests that this was a very successful strategy, even on a local level (S. T. Smith 2015). Most of the old Middle Kingdom fortresses were refortified, and a series of Egyptian rulers sponsored the construction of massive new temples in the Nubian colony, including the famous rock-cut complex of Ramses II at Abu Simbel (Figure 2.3, ca. 1250 BCE; Edwards 2004, 101–7). Farther south in newly occupied Upper Nubia, the Egyptians established colonial settlements with large cemeteries at Amara and later Amara West (later seat of the southern deputy of the viceroy), Sai Island (an important former Kushite center and earlier seat of the deputy), Soleb, Sedeinga, Sesebi, and Tombos (see Figure 2.1, page 22). Enclosing an area over four hectares, a recently discovered fortification system places Tombos as the southernmost and one of the largest, if

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Figure 2.3. The temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel in Lower Nubia. Photo by Stuart Tyson Smith.

not the largest, of the fortified temple-towns established in Upper Nubia after the New Kingdom conquest. Documents like the endowment stela of Seti I at Nauri show that in the early Ramesside Period (ca. 1300 BCE), and probably before, the reach between the second and third cataracts was thoroughly incorporated into the Egyptian state economic system (Morkot 2013). The Egyptian New Kingdom empire in Nubia thus provides another, earlier example of an imperial state crossing the so-called Augustan threshold, discussed for the Assyrians by Düring in this volume. Initially aimed at resecuring Egypt’s southern frontier and eliminating a powerful rival in the kingdom of Kush, Egyptian imperial policy increasingly turned to resource extraction employing a staple and wealth finance system (D’Altroy and Earle 1985; S. T. Smith 1995). The recolonization of Lower Nubia involved the creation of temple-centered institutions that as in Egypt would have played a central role in the collection of taxes and incomes on royal lands in the form of staple goods that would have helped to underwrite the extraction of wealth goods, especially gold, by providing a local source of food to supply the colony and support its extractive activities. Self-sufficient colonial settlements

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would in this way mitigate a significant part of the costs of resource exploitation (see also Boozer, Alconini, Düring, Yao, and Williams, this volume). For example, intensification and control over local staple surpluses would feed the laborers that extracted the resources while providing bases for trading expeditions that would at this time have relied on a combination of boats in riverine settings and donkeys in surprisingly far-reaching desert expeditions (Cooper 2012; S. T. Smith 2018). Staple finance would also have provided surpluses that supported the officials who managed the empire, especially those with titles connected to the extraction and collection of gold who were very active in Nubia (Vercoutter 1959; cf. D’Altroy and Earle 1985). They were based both at the colonial capital, situated in the renovated Middle Kingdom fortress colony of Miam (Aniba), and at other sites such as Tombos, where the owner of the largest tomb at the site held the title Scribe-Reckoner of the Gold of Kush. Gold also appears as a prominent theme in the artwork and texts from the tomb of Amenhotep Huy, viceroy under Tutankhamen (Davies, Cummings, and Gardiner 1926). In particular, the scenes of his investiture and the texts accompanying them show that the viceroy’s reach extended to the administration of southern Egypt’s gold resources, extending his authority as far north as Edfu in Egypt (S. T. Smith 1995, 178–84). The new, renovated, and for the most part self-sustaining colonial infrastructure would also provide a base for collecting semiprecious stones and access to trade routes used to acquire exotica from the savannahs that lay to the south, including ivory, ebony, incense, and other valuables. Imported pottery attests to flows of commodities coming from Egypt, especially wine. Even before the conquest, Egyptian transport vessels appear increasingly over time at Kerma (Lacovara 1987). Kushite influence and/or imports can also be seen in leather­ work associated with the Egyptian military. Kerma fine wares, in particular their distinctive polished blacktopped tulip-shaped cups, also appear in Egypt throughout the Second Intermediate Period, pointing toward mutual flows of products (Bourriau 1981). Even after the Egyptian conquest, long-distance exchange was not focused solely on the extraction of raw materials in exchange for finished products. The presence of ebony stools in Huy’s presentation scene (Figure 2.4, upper right) point toward the presence of artisanal communities who not only helped support a local elite lifestyle, but also supplied finished goods to Egypt. Large amounts of wealth extracted from Nubia in the form of gold, other exotica, and high-value subsistence goods such as cattle were central to Egypt’s

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New Kingdom political economy. Cattle are situated between D’Altroy and Earle’s (1985) categories of staple and wealth goods. On the one hand, they were raised locally and served to support the colonial infrastructure in line with staple finance, but on the other, they were easy to transport and valuable enough to be exported to Egypt in large numbers as wealth goods. At home, wealth finance supported royal display and the creation and maintenance of patronage relationships. Abroad, wealth goods were a key component of the international system of gift exchange that also had important diplomatic implications and gave Egypt access to exotica from the north. This was especially the case with silver, which could be exchanged equally for gold with both sides profiting, but also valuable stones like lapis lazuli and high-value staples like olive oil and wine. However, Barry Kemp has argued against an economic motivation for this imperial consolidation, asserting that cultural assimilation and royal ideology, not economic gain, was in fact the main purpose of imperial expansion during the New Kingdom. He cites the Egyptian ideological royal imperative to “extend the existing” that sought to expand Egypt’s cultural reach through imperial conquest and assimilative acculturation (Kemp 1978, 1997). As I have pointed out (S. T. Smith 1997), as have Liverani (1990) and Loprieno (1988), it is important not to confuse ideological topos with actual policy. The trope of “extending the existing” may have provided some ideological impetus for military campaigns and razzia, but it quickly devolved into a hyperbolic convention of naming places, such as the Aegean, that Egyptian armies never reached and were clearly not ever under Egyptian control. Not only do “heaven and all the foreign lands which god has created serve” Hatshepsut, but “commands are sent to an unknown land, and they do everything that she commanded” (Kemp 1978, 13). These statements represent Said’s “discourses of exceptionalism” discussed by Lisa Overholtzer in the introduction to chapter 7 in this volume, emphasizing the creation of order from chaos through conquest and the subduing of foreign enemies. The everyday actions of the bureaucracy and more prosaic texts reflect a very different and more realistic view of foreigners that belies the ideology of Pharaoh’s universal authority (Loprieno 1988; Liverani 2001a). Events like the New Kingdom presentation of Inu reflect this dynamic. The term is often translated as “tribute” but was in reality a more complex concept implying a degree of reciprocity that applied to both Egyptians and foreigners, both those within and outside of the empire (Bleiberg 1996; Spalinger 1996; S. T. Smith 2017). The annual presentation ceremony reinforced the topos of

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the king as universal monarch for a mainly internal audience, creating a false impression of Egyptian dominance over regions far outside Egyptian control (Liverani 2001a). The fact that the Lower Nubian princes, who depicted themselves as Egyptian officials in their own tombs, are shown in Nubian regalia in depictions of the event from officials' tombs at Thebes also contradicts the notion of the ideological value of assimilation (Figure 2.4). Darnell and Manassa (2002), Török (2009), and Van Pelt (2013) have argued that this apparent contradiction reflected a celebration of ethnic diversity within the empire. While this interpretation might be valid in some comparative cases, for example the Achaemenid Empire with its creation of an imperial identity that celebrated diversity as a vehicle to create a universal empire (Gates-Foster 2014), more often this kind of imagery represents the construction of a topos emphasizing an ordered inner ethnic self contrasted with a chaotic outer ethnic other (Loprieno 1988; Liverani 1990). It is this ideological trope that explains many similar depictions of the foreign other within imperial ideologies, both

Figure 2.4. Scene of the Inu ceremony from the tomb of Amenhotep Huy in Thebes. The Upper Nubian princes and their entourage are shown on the upper register, a group of Upper Nubian princes on the lower (cf. the Nubian depicted in Figure 2.2, after Davies 1926, plate XXVII, Copyright The Egypt Exploration Society).

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ancient and modern (e.g., Liverani 1990 for Assyria and S. T. Smith 2017 comparing the Egyptian Inu ceremony with the British imperial Durbars). The notion of a positive imperial celebration of ethnic difference is contradicted for Egypt by the theology of ma’at (order, right). The Nubian princes appear in the iconographic topos of Nubian, their ideological value as a foreign enemy of Egypt, a force of chaos (isfet) subordinated and tamed into order (ma‘at) by Pharaoh (S. T. Smith 2015). Moreover, had the conversion of Nubians, especially the elite, to Egyptian norms been an imperative, we would expect them to appear at such events as Egyptian officials, as they do in their own tombs in Nubia, broadcasting the empire’s success at “extending the existing” at an important, ideologically charged ceremony. Instead, they represent a fictional performance of the king’s creation of order out of chaos that bore little resemblance to the realities of colonial society. In the same way, the king of Babylon’s gift of chariots was presented to the Egyptian king along with the gifts of his Levantine vassals, in spite of the fact that Babylon was Egypt’s geopolitical equal. When Kadashman Inlil’s emissary reported this slight to him, the Babylonian king sent a curtly worded complaint to Pharaoh (Liverani 2001a). In his response, Amenhotep III quotes from the Babylonian king’s letter and tries to deflect the king’s outrage over the breach in protocol with an assurance that the chariots had indeed been received, while adding an implied counter complaint about the necessity of supplying the horses himself (Rainey 2014, 65): (88–95) As you spoke, saying, “He placed my chariots among the chariots of the city rulers, you did not review them separately! You humiliated them before the throng which is thus and (?) you did not rev[ie]w them separately.” Verily the chariots are here; verily the horses of my country are here! All the chariot horses had to be supplied! The reconstruction of an overarching strategy like Egyptianization has the problematic effect of homogenizing the empire in Nubia by proposing a topdown program of assimilation covering the entire colony. The reality on the ground was, however, far more complex and resulted in the kind of mosaic of control driven by administrative efficiencies and adaptation to local conditions seen in other imperial contexts where economic or geopolitical concerns were at the forefront (Schreiber 1992; S. T. Smith 1995; cf. Alcock 1989; Parker 2006 and Parker, this volume). Assimilation was one among several strategies that

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adapted to different local contexts in Nubia and evolved over the five-hundredyear course of the Egyptian empire. Securing Egypt’s borders and neutralizing a powerful enemy in Kush provided a powerful motive for the initial expansion. Lower Nubia, with its long history of colonization, was quickly brought into Egypt’s cultural, political, economic, and religious sphere, but south of the second cataract in Upper Nubia, there are indications that more ephemeral garrisons were established at sites like the former Kushite center at Sesebi and Sai Island (Spence et al. 2009; Rose 2017). As noted above, the Kingdom of Kush was allowed to continue to exist with the status of a vassal in a pattern of indirect control reminiscent of Egypt’s imperial strategy in the Levant, where the local infrastructure of city-states led by wrw (princes, or local leaders) was co-opted in order to meet imperial needs. After a series of rebellions, this approach was abandoned, and the king of Kush was removed and replaced by a colonial bureaucracy similar to the system already in place in Lower Nubia, where wrw were supervised by a deputy to the viceroy. A new program of infrastructure building resulted in the creation of a system of territorial control between the second and third cataract through a series of permanent colonies with Egyptian settlers. Some of these imperial establishments were placed at preexisting population centers, Sai Island in particular, but in the case of other sites such as Amara, Sedeinga, Soleb, Sesebi, and Tombos, the logic of their location is not so clear. Adams (1977) argued that they were not viable and must have been short lived, but this is contradicted by new excavations and reassessments of archaeology that show that the temple-towns were all occupied for extended periods of time. In some cases, occupation continued long after the end of the New Kingdom, as at Amara West and Tombos. The extraction of resources, especially gold, may have been a critical reason for the position of some colonies, in particular Sesebi, which has ample evidence of groundstone of a type used to process gold ores, as well as evidence of ancient mining nearby (Spence et al. 2009). Located at the headwaters of the third cataract and the end of the fertile Kerma basin, Tombos may have been sited at a key geopolitical frontier (Morkot 2013), an internal imperial boundary positioned for monitoring the remains of the Kushite kingdom and marshaling gold and other resources for the annual presentation of Inu, effectively tribute (for this ceremony, see S. T. Smith 2017). In contrast, there is comparatively little archaeological or textual evidence for direct control above the third cataract, in spite of boundary inscriptions

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by Thutmose I (ca. 1502 BCE), renewed under Thutmose III (ca. 1450 BCE) and Ramses II (ca. 1235 BCE), far upstream at Kurgus that threaten dire consequences for any violation of Egypt’s new southern border (Morkot 2001; Davies 2003; S. T. Smith 2003a, 86–96; Welsby and Sjöström 2007). The Egyptians invested heavily just upstream of the third cataract, building large stone temples at Pnubs (Dokki Gel), just north of the ruins of the old Kushite capital at Kerma, Tabo, located nearby on Argo Island, and farther south at Kawa and Gebel Barkal (MacAdam 1949; Dunham 1970; Jacquet-Gordon 1999; Bonnet and Valbelle 2006, 27–33). Surveys from the third to fourth cataracts, however, have failed to identify any evidence for a substantial Egyptian presence or Egyptianization upstream of the third cataract during the colonial period (Grzymski 1987; Welsby 2001, 589–91; S. T. Smith 2003a, 87–94; Zurawski 2003, 524–25; Welsby and Sjöström 2007). At the same time, the Egyptian monuments at Pnubs were accompanied by a round, Nubian-style temple, along with other architectural features, including royal tombs (Bonnet 2000, 144–56; Bonnet and Valbelle 2006) that suggest a lack of direct colonization. This evidence supports Morkot’s (1987; 2001, 238) argument that the area between the third and fourth cataracts was “left in the direct control of indigenous rulers who received military support for their regimes along with economic and other benefits.” He goes on to suggest that the region was not incorporated into the temple-town economy that prevailed through the third cataract and was controlled though a more indirect imperial system akin to the contemporary Egyptian strategy toward the Levant. In Liverani’s (1988) terms (discussed in detail by Parker in this volume), this could be characterized as a thickened colonial network running from the first to third cataracts that was firmly embedded in and transformed the cultural landscape, but with thinner links connecting colonial administrative/military nodes upstream and across desert routes that linked the colony to resource rich areas like the Wadi Allaqi and trading partners perhaps as far west as the Ennedi Mountains. The Afterlife of Empire Originally, scholars posited that the New Kingdom Empire collapsed completely, ushering in a kind of “dark age” with the Egyptian colonies recalled to Egypt and local society breaking down into a series of small-scale chiefdoms and reverting to Nubian cultural practices. Later Egyptian interventions

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brought “civilization” back to Nubia with a second round of Egyptianization that led to the emergence of the Nubian Twenty-Fifth Dynasty (Dixon 1964). However, historical evidence from the end of the New Kingdom contradicts this model, indicating that the last viceroy, Panehesy, split the colony away from Egypt, resisting any attempt at re-conquest. Recent archaeological evidence and reevaluations of older excavations support continuity at colonial centers like Tombos and Amara West (e.g., Williams 1990; S. T. Smith 2013; Spencer 2014). Instead of a dark age, a successor state of some kind is more likely, one that led to the emergence of the Nubian Dynasty and their assumption of the Egyptian throne in 747 BCE. The model of a dark-age gap is giving way to a more complex picture of the emergence of a new polity to some extent taking advantage of the previous imperial infrastructure through a program of renewal at former colonial centers. Microhistory: Egyptianization, Entanglement, and Persistence at Tombos, Hillat el-Arab, and Lower Nubia Tombos lay far downstream of the official border. Instead, the New Kingdom colonial cemetery, settlement, and fortress lay upon an internal boundary marking the transition between territorial and hegemonic imperial zones, marked through a series of stelae immediately after the conquest by Thutmose I (ca. 1502 BCE) and later by Viceroys Inebni (Thutmose III, ca. 1450 BCE) and Merymose (Amenhotep III, ca. 1350 BCE; Morkot 2001; S. T. Smith 2003a; cf. Hassig 1988; D’Altroy 1992). Excavation at Tombos has established the existence of a substantial wealthy Egyptian colonial community that initially seemed to support the Egyptianization model discussed above (S. T. Smith and Buzon 2017). Likely named Taroy, the southernmost fortress from which Merymose recruited soldiers for a military campaign, the settlement was enclosed by a massive dry moat fortification extending over 215 meters east-west and at least 230 meters north-south along the river. Strontium isotope analysis demonstrates that at least some individuals buried at Tombos had emigrated from Egypt, although most were born locally (Buzon, Smith, and Simonetti 2016). Funerary architecture (mud-brick pyramids, chapels, and chamber tombs), burial placement (supine with head to the west to receive the rejuvenating rays of the rising sun), and grave goods such as painted and inscribed mummiform coffins and specialized funerary objects including inscribed Ushabti figurines

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Chamber Tombs

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Unit7

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Bed

Unit 6

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Unit3 Unit18 Unit23

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Unit15 Unit24 Unit29

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Tumulus Cemetery Unit45

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Siamun

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Units 1, 4

Figure 2.5. Tombos cemetery plan with the Ushabti of the scribe Tiy (white asterisks indicate flexed burials). Prepared by Stuart Tyson Smith.

and a variety of amulets, strongly reflect ancient Egyptian funerary beliefs and practices (Figure 2.5; S. T. Smith and Buzon 2014). Nevertheless, at least six Nubian-style flexed burials, all of women, appear in Egyptian-style tombs alongside traditionally Egyptian style burials (see Figure 2.5). At least two of the women were placed upon a bed, another longstanding Nubian practice. All of the women were on their side facing north, and all but one of the women were positioned with head toward the east, in

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contrast to the usual Egyptian orientation but consistent with Nubian practice (S. T. Smith and Buzon 2017). This burial practice continued into the Third Intermediate Period with three women buried in flexed position facing north, two on beds, two with the head to the east and one to the west. All of those tested have a local strontium isotope signature (Buzon, Smith, and Simonetti 2016). Scarabs and pottery place the New Kingdom Nubian-style inhumations on a time scale ranging from the earliest use of the cemetery, either late in the reign of Thutmose III/Hatshepsut or early Amenhotep II (ca. 1480–1450 BCE), to the later New Kingdom around the reign of Amenhotep III (ca. 1350 BCE), long after the assumed disappearance of Nubian culture in the Egyptian colony but consistent with similar evidence from other sites. For example, flexed burials from the later New Kingdom appear along with Egyptian-style burials in tombs T37 and T38 at Soleb (Schiff, Robichon, and Leclant 1965, 305–21, figs. 603c and 616n), one of the colonial temple-towns established in the New Kingdom (O’Connor 1993, 60–62; Morkot 2001, 234–38). A radiocarbon date of 1121 plus or minus sixty years BCE taken from T37 initially would seem to point to a late Ramesside date (Schiff, Robichon, and Leclant 1965, 305), but when calibrated shifts to the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty through the Nineteenth Dynasty (1454–1188 BCE, with a 96 percent probability at two standard deviations using the radiocarbon calibration program OxCal, Reimer et al. 2016), around the same time as the Nubian-style burials at Tombos. A similar pattern of coexisting Egyptian and Nubian traditions also appears in Lower Nubia, arguably the most intensively assimilated part of the empire. Although like at Tombos and Soleb, the majority of burials reflect Egyptian practices, several burials in otherwise Egyptian-style tombs at Qustul, a rural cemetery, and at Serra East, one of the Middle Kingdom fortresses, contained Nubian-style flexed inhumations (Williams, Murnane, and Seele 1992; Williams, Hughes, and Knudstad 1993). The large colonial-era cemetery at Fadrus, like Qustul far from Egyptian colonial centers, predominantly reflects Egyptian burial practice, but a small number of burials there were also placed in Nubian-style flexed position (Säve-Söderbergh and Troy 1991). All of the contracted burials that were sexed were male, but given that hardly any of the burials at Fadrus were sexed, the significance of this pattern is unclear. This cemetery reflects a strong Egyptianizing trend that extends beyond the Indigenous elite in a more rural setting than the major colonial centers, where high officials were buried with all of the elaborate grave goods and practices of Egyptian elites (S. T. Smith 1998, 2015). The flexed burials at Fadrus include examples from the latest phase of the cemetery, roughly

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contemporary with the group of flexed burials at Tombos (Säve-Söderbergh and Troy 1991; Török 2009). It is possible that the complete suite of Nubian funerary traditions never completely disappeared in the north. Säve-Söderbergh (1989, 10) concluded that several cemeteries in the Scandinavian Joint Concession near the second cataract “show that Nubian cultural elements, especially burial customs, continued well in to the Eighteenth Dynasty, maybe in some cases even much later.” These cemeteries and the evidence from Tombos and elsewhere could represent a small number of nativist holdouts resisting imperial hegemony (SäveSöderbergh and Troy 1991, 13; S. T. Smith 1998). The strongly gendered pattern at Tombos represents the presence of women drawn from local groups, rather than immigrants from the north or the desert groups like the Medjay, since their strontium isotope signatures are all local. Had they spent a significant amount of time outside of the cataract’s distinctive geology as children while their permanent teeth were forming, they would appear as non-local. Citing similar evidence of mixed Nubian and Egyptian burial practice at Sanam, which runs from the later New Kingdom into the Third Intermediate/Napatan Period (Griffith 1923; Lohwasser 2010), Shinnie (1996, 103) goes farther, concluding that Nubian culture never completely disappeared during the Egyptian occupation, that “there had been a steady continuum of indigenous culture throughout the five hundred years of pharaonic rule stemming from the better known peoples of the Kerma and C-group cultures.” A closer look at the material from the Scandinavian Joint Concession excavations supports Shinnie’s observations. Cemeteries 176, 218, and 229 had large amounts of Egyptian New Kingdom pottery, but contained tumulus tomb superstructures, the characteristic form of Nubian burial monument. The pottery from Site 176 in particular points to a later Ramesside date (SäveSöderbergh 1989, plate 36). For example, a large rounded amphora with a funnel neck is of a type ranging in date from the reign of Ramses II through the Twentieth Dynasty (ca. 1290–1070 BCE; see Hope 1989, 94, fig. 2; cf. Aston 1998, 494–97, nos. 2487 and 2498). A large elongated bag-shaped jar finds parallels at Piramessa (modern Qantir) dating to the Ramesside Period (ca. 1293–1070 BCE; e.g., Aston 1998, 311, no. 999). A group of pilgrim flasks from the site also appears in the Ramesside assemblage, matching examples dating from the Twentieth to Twenty-First Dynasty (ca. 1185–945 BCE; Aston 1998, 549, nos. 2235–38). Nubian funerary traditions were, however, not unaffected by interactions

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during the Egyptian occupation. Cemetery 218, for example, contained no Nubian pottery, and although badly looted, it did include some indications of Egyptian influence, including the possible remnants of coffins (Säve-Söderbergh 1989, 222–23). Nubian-style flexed inhumations placed under tumuli attest to the survival of Nubian traditions in the fourth cataract region near Gebel Barkal/ Napata, but they also had Egyptian pottery (Welsby 2003). The presence of amulets of Egyptian deities at Tombos reflects similar cultural entanglements. In particular, one of the Nubian-style burials still wore a group of amulets of the popular Egyptian dwarf god Bes (Figure 2.6), who protected the household from spiritual and physical harm. Apart from a few typically Nubian nerita shell beads, other jewelry and amulets associated with the two flexed burials of women in this tomb were Egyptian, including a plaque with the solar gods Khepri and Nefertum, manifestations of the god Re who symbolize the rebirth of the sun at dawn, a central theme in both Egyptian cosmology but also funerary beliefs (Wilkinson 2003).

Figure 2.6. Jewelry and amulets of the dwarf god Bes and a plaque amulet showing the gods Khepri and Nefertum from the flexed Nubian-style burials in Unit 6 at Tombos (see Figure 2.5). Photos by Stuart Tyson Smith.

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On the domestic side, Nubian pottery appears regularly at all of the Egyptian colonial sites throughout the New Kingdom. Small amounts of Nubian pottery appear in both the cemetery and the poorly preserved settlement at Tombos, around 2 percent overall in the cemetery. One red-topped black-ware bowl was carefully placed next to two of the Nubian-style burials, demonstrating that Nubian ceramic traditions had not completely disappeared. The greatest frequency appears in the courtyard of the largest pyramid complex, including cooking pottery, which would have been used during the preparation of funerary feasts. This is consistent with the distribution of ceramics at the fortified settlement of Askut, one of the old refurbished Middle Kingdom fortresses located at the second cataract, the southern boundary of Lower Nubia and the limit of Egyptian control in the Middle Kingdom (Figures 2.1 and 2.7). Nubian pottery makes up a small percentage overall, only about 10 percent, but Nubian cooking pottery accounts for over 80 percent of its sub-assemblage in the New Kingdom, rising steadily from about 40 percent in the Middle Kingdom to as much as 93 percent in the New Kingdom. Similar pottery appears in the other Lower Nubian forts (e.g., Shalfak and Dunham 1967, plate LXIV, F; Semna, Dunham, and Janssen 1960, plates 113, 11, 12, 15; Emery, Smith, and Millard 1979, 185–88, figs. 5, 7, 33, 36, 47, plate 78; Bestock and Knoblauch 2014, fig. 2), as well as Upper Nubian temple-towns like Sesebi (Rose 2017) and Amara West (Spencer 2014). If we suppose that women did most of the cooking in Egyptian colonial contexts, then Nubian women influenced colonial culinary practices by maintaining and extending elements of their own ethnic cuisine. Women are often neglected in studies of empires, but they commonly enter into colonial communities, crossing cultural boundaries (e.g., Deagan 1996; Lightfoot, Martinez, and Schiff 1998). The disproportionate representation of Nubian cooking pottery at Askut and Amara resonates with the gendered patterning in funerary practice at Tombos, suggesting that Nubian women played a central role in negotiating intercultural interaction in both the funerary and domestic sphere. Barbara Voss (2008) rightly cautions that this kind of argument for a gendered Indigenous influence connected with colonial households and cuisine should not be assumed or universalized; gendered and sexual relationships in colonial contexts are complex and variable. However, there are good reasons to think that such a pattern would be consistent with Egyptian colonial societies on the Nubian frontier. Egyptian historical sources indicated that women’s social roles were tied to the household. For example, the Maxims of Ptahhotep state, “Do not control your wife in her house, when you know she

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Egyptian

Nubian

Figure 2.7. Proportion of Nubian pottery from different areas at Askut in Lower Nubia. Prepared by Stuart Tyson Smith.

is efficient. . . . Let your eye observe in silence, then you should recognize her skill” (Lichtheim 1973, 143). Framed as advice from an official to his son, this text was a popular classic during the New Kingdom, given to scribal students as both a writing and moral exercise. This gendered role is explicitly signaled at Tombos through the use of title Mistress of the House for elite women in the cemetery. These and other points of evidence demonstrate the emphasis that Egyptians placed on the gendered construction of household responsibilities, which would include foodways (Robins 1993). There are hints at internal variability at Askut that may reflect the complex nature of gendered relationships within the former colonial communities in Lower Nubia. For example, the association of sherds from peripheral trash disposal with different domestic complexes suggests that Nubian cuisine was strongest in houses in the older main fortified enclosure and outer group of houses. The variability in proportions of Nubian pottery between households could be the result of the different histories and relationships of their inhabitants but may also correspond to their ties to the larger political structure. In particular, the household of the descendants of Meryka (an ancestor

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from the Second Intermediate Period), stands out from the pattern prevailing throughout the fortress. The cooking assemblage, although heavily Nubian, retained a larger Egyptian component, and Nubian serving vessels almost disappeared. This residence was the largest at Askut and had a number of architectural features that mark it as an elite residence, including the overall layout, with its expansive floorplan arranged around a central columned room, fragments of a grilled window indicating the presence of a clerestory, a formal household shrine dedicated to Meryka, and a section of taurus molding indicating a stoneframed entry. The greater emphasis on Egyptian ceramics used in the preparation and consumption of food by the most prominent family at Askut might therefore correspond to Goody’s (1982, 51–52) notion that the elements of culinary practices can be impacted by larger political contingencies. If men were more engaged with the external political situation, as is likely given the overwhelming role of men in the Egyptian bureaucracy in both Egypt and Nubia, then this pattern could reflect a male strategy expressed through a greater emphasis on Egyptian foodways in the context of the colonial bureaucracy. Voss also points out that relationships between men and women in an interethnic frontier setting vary, including concubinage and domestic labor as well as marriage. Unlike the Spanish colonies, however, there was no bar to interethnic marriage from an Egyptian perspective, and there is no evidence for the kind of racial prejudice seen in modern times (S. T. Smith 2003a, 24). Bioarchaeological analysis at Tombos does strongly suggest that whatever their formal status, Nubians and Egyptians engaged in intimate relations, producing mixed offspring (Buzon, Smith, and Simonetti 2016). Military expansion and imperialism are also often accompanied by sexual violence, but in our case, there is very little evidence of interpersonal violence of any kind. This pattern contrasts with a relatively high incidence of such trauma at Kerma sites, suggesting that the empire may in fact have brought with it advantages, at least for those who collaborated (Buzon and Richman 2007). One of the women who was buried in Nubian style was disturbed by thieves targeting a necklace not long after her burial. This act of desecration could be taken as a sign of disrespect, but tomb robbery, even by burial parties, was an all too common phenomenon in Egypt itself. Given the social sanctions against the practice, the robbery instead points to the presence of a valuable piece of jewelry that was worth the risk of detection and punishment (S. T. Smith 2010, 180–38). Similarly, another very old woman buried in Nubian style was paralyzed in her lower limbs. The atrophied bones show that she had been well

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cared for over a period of many years. In contrast to the polarizing ideology of civilized Egyptian self and barbaric Nubian other, these examples point toward a social environment of mutual respect and a degree of tolerance of cultural choices that would allow for the kind of cross-cultural interaction that ultimately transformed colonial society. Drawing on Deagan’s (1996) earlier work, Lightfoot, Martinez, and Schiff (1998) argue similarly that Native women in California’s Russian colony at Fort Ross used cuisine and the organization of domestic space to assert a California Native identity within a pluralistic society akin to that prevailing at Askut and Tombos. More generally, McKee (1999, 235) notes that foodways and burial practice allowed slaves on southern plantations to maintain a separate ethnic identity, and cuisine continues to play a key role in African American ethnicity. The gendered dynamic at Askut, Tombos, and potentially other New Kingdom sites suggests that women played a key and previously unexpected role in Egyptian-Nubian intercultural interactions (S. T. Smith 2003a). Hillat el-Arab Evidence of mixed burial practices at Hillat el-Arab extends our picture of cultural entanglement during the New Kingdom Empire and beyond. The cemetery lies in the zone of indirect imperial control adjacent to Napata, which became the capital of the dynasty whose rulers eventually became pharaohs of Egypt’s Twenty-Fifth Dynasty (Vincentelli 2006). The site is not far from the royal necropolis at el-Kurru, which probably began after the end of the New Kingdom but also includes mixed burial practices (Geus 1991). It was likely the seat of one of the princes and lies opposite the large settlement and cemetery at Sanam, which as noted above like Hillat el-Arab, ranges in date from the late New Kingdom to the Napatan Period. All that remains at Hillat el-Arab are substructures cut into the sandstone bedrock. The tombs that date to the New Kingdom clearly take their inspiration from contemporary Egyptian architecture with shafts leading to multiroom burial complexes containing multiple inhumations (Vincentelli 2006). In contrast, single inhumations characterize Nubian burial practice (Geus 1991). Painted decoration in the first tomb, however, is very un-Egyptian and most closely resembles Nubian rock art, including a striking set of boats and a number of cattle with parallels at places like the extensive rock-art site of Sabu at the third cataract (Vincentelli 2006, color plates I and II).

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The evidence for funerary ritual at Hillat el-Arab reveals a number of departures from the Egyptian practices seen at contemporary colonial sites north of the third cataract (Vincentelli 2006, 169–70). Although the individuals are placed extended on their backs, their orientation is variable compared to the standard Egyptian position with head toward the west. Traces of beds were found underneath burials in the inner rooms, which Vincentelli attributes to the local prince. As noted above, bed burials are a long-standing practice within the Kerma culture and reappear in the Kushite royal burials at el-Kurru (Geus 1991). There is also a lack of specialized funerary objects such as heart scarabs and Ushabtis that one might otherwise expect in an elite tomb. I have argued against the idea that the absence of these items is an indication of a lack of real cultural assimilation in non-elite Lower Nubian cemeteries such as Fadrus (Säve-Söderbergh and Troy 1991, 9, 248; cf. S. T. Smith 2003a, 155–58; 2015). However, the lack of these items in the tombs discussed here is telling, since these kinds of objects are strongly correlated with elite social status (S. T. Smith 1992). Even more revealing is the absence of coffins, a ubiquitous practice in New Kingdom Egypt from the highest elite, who often had multiple coffins, through the middle and even lower classes, although the poorest people might be buried without them (S. T. Smith 1992, 197–98). Thus, as a suite of material, the absence of heart scarabs, ushabtis, and coffins in an elite tomb is certainly striking and each absence from one category reinforces the significance of absences in other categories. Another departure from Egyptian practice is the importance of pottery indicating a continuing prominence of provisions as grave goods, a practice that was extremely common in the Kerma culture prior to the conquest in Egypt during the Eighteenth Dynasty but was in decline by the Ramesside Period and largely disappeared by the Third Intermediate Period (ca. 1070–656 BCE; S. T. Smith 1992, 220; Aston 2009). In contrast, pottery offerings actually increase during the same period at Hillat el-Arab. Vincentelli concludes that “the community took its models from the Egyptian world, which was well established in the north of the country, but imitation was never complete or perfect” (2006, 169). I would add that the Nubians of Hillat el-Arab not only imitated, but also actively transformed Egyptian funerary practices into a Nubian cultural context, blending elements of both cultures into a new hybrid coming out of the colonial experience that transcended the binary categories of Egyptian and Nubian so heavily emphasized in Egyptian ideology. The revival of Nubian-style tumuli in a separate cemetery at Tombos starting

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Figure 2.8. A tumulus superstructure at Tombos; Egyptian amulets and Nubian jewelry from the burial of a woman in another tumulus. Prepared by Stuart Tyson Smith.

in the Ramesside Period and continuing into the Third Intermediate Period represents a break from the apparently exclusive use of Egyptian superstructures during the earlier New Kingdom (Figure 2.8, and see Figure 2.5). Tumuli also appear during the same period at Amara West, but alongside mud-brick pyramid tombs instead of in a segregated cemetery as at Tombos (Binder et al. 2011; Spencer 2014). At Tombos, a circular mound made of rough granite stones and boulders consistently tops burial shafts, which with one exception lead down to a northern side chamber sealed with mud bricks, an architectural style adapted from earlier Egyptian tombs in the cemetery. The tumuli at Amara West also had Egyptian-style substructures leading from rectangular east-west oriented shafts, but unlike Tombos, they lead to chambers to the east and west used for multiple inhumations, similar to New Kingdom pyramid and chapel tombs at Tombos and other colonial sites like Soleb and Sai. Apart from one flexed burial of a woman dating to the early Third Intermediate Period, the bodies buried under tumuli at Tombos were in Egyptian extended position, head to the west to face the rising sun (S. T. Smith and Buzon 2014). The New Kingdom burials at Amara West are more typically

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Egyptian in spite of their Nubian superstructures—supine and likely mummified and coffined—although flexed burials do appear in the aftermath of the New Kingdom Empire (Binder et al. 2011). The preservation of organic materials at Tombos is generally poor, but the fact that many of the burials had their legs tight together suggests the kind of binding consistent with simple mummification, a reconstruction supported by the presence of occasional fragments of linen. Decayed wood and rare scraps of paint indicate the provision of both Egyptian-style coffins and Nubian-style beds, sometimes appearing together with a coffined burial on top of a bed. This placement and orientation contrasts with the earlier Nubian-style flexed burials at Tombos, but this mixed practice of extended bed burial is attested in an early Third Intermediate Period cemetery at Sai and may have been widespread (Geus 1997). Several of the burials at Tombos also contained amulets of Egyptian deities, including Bes, Isis, Pataikos, Hathor, and the Eye of Horus (Figure 2.8). The construction of Egyptian-style tombs and Egyptian burial practice continued in the older part of the cemetery long after the end of the empire into the period of the Nubian Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, which controlled both Egypt and Nubia. Like the tumulus cemetery, these tombs reflect mixtures of Egyptian and Nubian burial practices and material culture, including the reuse of older tombs as well as the construction of new pyramid and other mud-brick tombs. Burials included both flexed (still all female) and extended burials and indications of both coffined and bed burials. At least at Tombos, only women were buried in the traditional flexed position, although most women, whether of Nubian or Egyptian ancestry, were placed in Egyptian supine position, head to the west to face the rising sun. Other Nubian features, such as bed burial, appear with both men and women, so the intersection of ethnicity and gender was complex and nuanced. The nearly intact tomb of a soldier highlights this dynamic of cultural entanglement coming from the colonial experience (S. T. Smith 2007). He was placed in an Egyptian-style mud-brick vaulted chamber tomb, supine and coffined with evidence of mummification, but upon a bed in long-standing Nubian fashion. One of the pots from the tomb was decorated in the old polished blacktopped redware style, even retaining the purplish white scum line characteristic of the latest Kerma phase, but was thrown on a wheel in a new vessel form, reflecting the integration of Nubian decoration with Egyptian technology adapted to a new shape. Jewelry also reflects the integration of different cultural forms, with Egyptian

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amulets combined with biconical quartz and black hematite beads evocative of Kushite traditions. The weaponry from the tomb included iron spear and harpoon points, reflecting the latest technology, but combined with microlithtipped arrows, a local tradition that extends back into the Neolithic. Finally, three copper alloy bowls and a wooden cosmetic box were elaborately decorated with motifs tied to the Iron Age International Style (Feldman 2014), signaling the tomb owner’s cosmopolitan ties, but the prevalence of cow imagery may reflect a kind of Nubian sensibility, given the long-standing importance of cattle in Nubia (Frankfort 1948; Emberling 2014a). The box is most likely a local product that adapts Egyptian themes in innovative combinations. A small perfume or oil vessel found within was decorated with figures of the Egyptian god Bes (Figure 2.9). Bes was particularly popular at Tombos and more broadly in Nubia from early in the New Kingdom (see Figure 2.6 and above). The selection of this vessel, and perhaps its creation if it was made in Nubia, reflects the integration and elaboration of this Egyptian deity into a local context.

Figure 2.9. Bes vase and frog lid from a cosmetic box found in the Unit 9 soldier’s tomb at Tombos. Photo by Stuart Tyson Smith.

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Conclusion: Agency and Imperial Dictate While archaeological and textual sources at the macro scale have been used to infer the complete assimilation of Nubians and disappearance of Nubian culture under Egyptian colonial rule (1500–1070 BCE), archaeological evidence at the local scale suggests the persistence of some practices, even in colonial settings, with a cultural hybrid blending Egyptian and Nubian elements eventually emerging in archaeological evidence. We can reach a more nuanced understanding of colonial encounters and their outcomes by recognizing that individuals fundamentally have choices, including in situations where social and political constraints may limit their options. As Boozer, Düring, and Yao discuss in their chapters, the decisions of imperial agents and local people drive imperial outcomes. Even in the context of the dramatic shift toward Egyptianization that characterizes the New Kingdom Empire, the material record reflects a complex and often subtle mix of cultural influences negotiated by Nubian and Egyptian women and men, transculturation rather than a wholesale assimilation by a hegemonic power, or even strict native maintenance and revival as a means of resisting conquest. Colonial outcomes in Nubia varied by region and period but also within communities, with Nubian women marrying into Egyptianized communities, members of the Egyptianized communities selectively incorporating some Nubian elements in their burials, and Nubian cemeteries in which Egyptian artifacts and/or practices are used in both canonical and non-canonical ways. Over time, these uses included, first, juxtaposition in an earlier colonial context, with Nubian-style burials in otherwise Egyptian cemeteries, at Tombos in a highly gendered pattern; second, at the same time, Egyptian elements taken up in local cemeteries like Fadrus, resulting in the broadly Egyptianizing pattern in Lower Nubia but with some continuation of Nubian traditions along the lines of the juxtaposition at Tombos; and, third, Nubian elements adopted and adapted in Egyptian colonial cemeteries in a diachronic pattern, appearing at Hillat el-Arab outside of the main zone of territorial incorporation and starting later in the empire during the Ramesside Period at colonies like Tombos and Amara West. At the same time, the religious and domestic spheres were subject to interpenetrating influence. The appearance and relative abundance of Nubian cooking pottery at Askut and other colonial contexts reinforces the gendered pattern seen in the cemetery at Tombos. The construction of massive Egyptian-style temples in Nubia from the first to fourth cataracts created an

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Egyptianizing sacred landscape in the conquered territory, but Nubian influence on Egyptian theology is reflected by the incorporation of ram imagery for Amun, rock-cut shrines like Abu Simbel, and a new origin myth for Amun centered on the sacred mountain of Gebel Barkal, the capital of the Nubian kings who later became pharaohs of Egypt’s Twenty-Fifth Dynasty (Török 2009). Entanglement, Hybridity, and the Afterlife of Empire At the individual level, Egyptians and Nubians transformed and were transformed by the colonial encounter. This is not to say, however, that the participants were entirely unaware of the origins of those cultural threads that when combined created new, polyvalent identities. In using the term hybrid to characterize some situations, I do not mean a phenomenon analogous to the biological concept, a model that has rightly been criticized as too reductionist (Dietler 2010; Liebmann 2015; Silliman 2015). In Nubia, this cultural interweaving was highly diverse, allowing individuals to generate new, polyvalent identities within pluralistic societies (cf. Lightfoot, Martinez, and Schiff 1998). Innovative cultural constellations appear in diverse entanglements that in some cases resonated with Egyptian and in others with Nubian origins. There was no single hybrid pattern; instead, the result was highly variable, depending on the region, the specific site, and even personal decisions made by women and men living at those sites. As Silliman (2009) points out for the more recent North American colonial encounter, it is also important to recognize that to at least some extent, the combinations of different cultural threads were at some point internalized, ceasing to be marked as Egyptian or Nubian by their practitioners—in Bourdieu’s terms becoming part of their habitus. In some contexts, the widespread if variable adoption of Egyptian practices and material culture, both quotidian and religious/funerary, should be acknowledged as an Egyptianizing trend covering different social spheres, if not the kind of comprehensive Egyptianization discussed above. This is not to say, however, that Egyptian colonists, Nubians, and their descendants were unaware of the intersection of cultural identity, the memory of countervailing Egyptian and Nubian pasts, and the larger geopolitical picture that provided the context for interaction (S. T. Smith and Buzon 2014). The Nubian-Egyptian hybrid that emerged during the empire occupies Bhabha’s (1994) liminal space between colonizer and colonized, creating ambivalence for the colonial venture, confronting the imperial ideological

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structures of Egyptian self and foreign, Nubian other. This colonial hybrid was not, however, a simple blending of cultures, but rather an innovative interweaving of cultural features resulting from “the complex webs of economic, political, social, and cultural linkages that can result, often inadvertently, from the consumption of alien material culture” (Dietler 2010, 53). The cultural ambivalence that this hybridity produced paved the way for the Nubian cultural and political revival in the aftermath of the Egyptian Empire that produced a powerful second Kingdom of Kush, whose rulers became pharaohs of Egypt’s Twenty-Fifth Dynasty in 747 BCE. As Bhabha (1994, 110–11) points out, hybridity’s creation of ambivalence can be seen as a strategic act of resistance within the deferential relations of colonial power (cf. Boyarin 2005). Liebmann (2015) argues that the ambivalence of hybrid forms can also serve the needs of the colonizer. For the New Kingdom Empire, the incorporation of new theological and iconographic elements drawn from Nubia, such as the adoption into Egypt of the ram manifestation and other Kushite features surrounding the cult of Amun (Török 2009), could have played a role in the integration of the colony into the Egyptian world (see also Boozer, this volume), but with the unintended consequence of assisting in the upending of the self and other dichotomy reflected in the topos of Egyptian order (ma‘at) and Nubian as chaotic foreign other (isfet). In this way, the ambiguities created through the colonial experience could have contributed to the emergence of the Kushite Dynasty as both distinctively Nubian and the legitimate successors of pharaonic kingship in spite of their foreign origin and mixed cultural practices. These interactions played out partly as a result of imperial policy at the macro scale during the New Kingdom and royal dictate in the Nubian polity that succeeded it, but also though a microhistorical accumulation of individual choices that ultimately created a new and diverse Kushite society in Nubia. Acknowledgments Principle support for the joint UCSB-Purdue University excavations at Tombos from 2010 to 2017 came from National Science Foundation grants BCS-0917824, 1359496, 0313247, and 0917815. The 2002, 2005, 2010, and 2013 excavation seasons were funded in part by grants from the National Geographic Society, the Schiff-Giorgini Foundation, and the Brennan Foundation. The project has also benefited from grants by the UCSB Academic Senate and Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research. The initial phase of excavation at

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Tombos (2000 and 2002) was made possible in large part by the generous financial support of James and Louise Bradbury, as well as other private donations. Additional bioarchaeological analyses by my codirector, Professor Michele Buzon of Purdue University, were supported by the American Philosophical Society, American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Killam Trust, Institute for Bioarchaeology, Purdue Alumni Association, and the Purdue College of Liberal Arts. Mohamed Faroug Abdelrahman Ali directed the work in the settlement. The people of Tombos have welcomed us into their village and assisted with the excavations each season. We also gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance provided by the Sudanese National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, especially Senior Antiquities Inspector Al-Hassan Ahmed Mohamed. George Pagoulatos and all the staff at the Acropole Hotel proved invaluable to all the logistical aspects of the project, and Julie Anderson, Bruce Williams, Charles Bonnet, Brigitte Gratien, Jacques Reinold, and the late Francis Geus were generous in their hospitality, encouragement, advice, and assistance. Last but not least, we would like to thank Ali Osman M. Salih (University of Khartoum) and David Edwards (University of Leicester) for their generous suggestions and encouragement to pursue these investigations and their kindness in allowing our work to overlap for a time with the University of Khartoum concession.

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Chapter Three

The Great Wall as Destination? Archaeology of Migration and Settlers under the Han Empire

Alice Yao

Borders and Settlers Border security remains a presiding concern of empires past and present, with the Great Wall of China representing one of most iconic and enduring examples of a geopolitical barrier. While the geographic scale of the wall continues to excite imaginations, including recently that of President Donald Trump and his vision for the United States-Mexico border, scholars of China have long debated its actual impermeability as a barrier in dynastic history (Phillips 2017). Far from being the creation of one person’s vision, the Great Wall owes its existence to the Qin (221–207 BCE), whose ambitions of unifying classical states took on the project of linking disparate wall sections built by vanquished states. The expansion of the wall—roughly eight thousand kilometers, from modern-day North Korea to the Tarim Basin—was realized by the successor Han Empire (206 BCE–220 CE), which conquered a vast geographic expanse rivaling that of contemporary Rome. While a line of wall often marks the political boundary of the Han Empire on maps, the contiguity of this barrier in space has been the subject of much debate. Archaeologically, the Han wall is visible, but only in sections (Figure 3.1), thus opening to discussion its status as a geopolitical barrier (Lattimore 1988). Instead of the wall functioning to keep nomads from raiding the Han interior, scholars now contend that the structure was expanded to enclose new imperial territories and to keep Han migrants on the frontier from running away from state and tax obligations (Waldron 1992; Di Cosmo 2002). A third view even conjectures that far from an organic whole, the wall was less a boundary than a provisional front that moved with the military (Chang 2007). Although these 57

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Figure 3.1. Han Empire. Inset shows geographical extent of the empire following Han Wudi’s campaign in the late second century BCE. Wall sections in the northwest frontier are drawn based on China Cultural Relics Bureau (2011). Produced by Alice Yao.

interpretations give an account of the multiple and overlapping functions of a boundary as defensive and offensive, enclosing and open, what is missing is a conceptualization of the border itself (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2009). Do boundaries or borders, lines or zones, make an empire? Also at issue is that a focus on the boundary itself strays from the material realities of the Han frontier—a patchy extension of passes and towers interspersed with walls as well as gaps rather than enclosed geographic space. Appearing less like a barrier than a mosaic in formation, the frontier’s heterogeneous configuration reflects the interplay of different processes of border work and different ways of dwelling along its formations. The case of the Great Wall poses a challenge that is not unique to the Han Empire but is of general importance to the study of empire work. In place of approaching the border as the logical outcome of imperial expansionism, theorists are now trying to address and account for the uneven spatial development of borders and the variability in material culture identified with frontier settlements. Archaeologists, for their part, have also expressed frustration with the concept of border that is based on the modern nation-state ideal. They argue that its emphasis on a closed “rigid territorialism” overlooks how other

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open-ended models (e.g., networked and zonal spatial forms) drew on other “nonstate” actors to construct and secure the frontier (see Parker, this volume; VanValkenburgh and Osborne 2012). Bearing these criticisms in mind, I think terms such as border work and borderness are more productive (Rumford 2006; Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2009). On the one hand, the analysis of borders as work puts emphasis on its emergent nature as a built landscape rather than a predetermined projection over space. On the other hand, these interventions prompt us to confront archaeological inconsistencies of the frontier’s built environment in relation to the mediating role of other social actors. Categories such as inside/outside cannot be assumed to be stable points of reference but are grounded in the “subjective experiences permeating relations” between border inhabitants and new environments (Gardner 2017). Borderness thus refers to the provisional ways inside/outside spaces get worked out at the micro level. By opening the epistemological category of border to critique, this new direction treats the indeterminacy of the frontier space as real and a starting point for analysis. By examining two regions along the Han Empire’s northwest frontier (see Figure 3.1), I discuss how new migrants reckoned with conditions of borderness by building spatial and environmental relations often set apart from the built environment of the state. The analysis of consumption and discard activities in settler houses further highlights a depositional record distinctive in its emphasis on recycling and reuse, which helps contextualize the unique process of border work. Because exploration of micro-scale contexts forces us to approach bordering equally as a form of dwelling and belonging, it also engages the border zone as a distinctive place with a localized identity rather than an abstraction located somewhere in the dichotomy of center/periphery. Before I proceed with the settler archaeology of the Juyan and Longxi (Xining) regions, providing a brief background to empire building in early Chinese history helps draw out the analytical importance and purchase of this border work approach. The Han Empire The era of empire building in China refers to the expansionary projects initiated by the Qin state and pursued by its rival and successor state, the Han, over the course of the first two centuries BCE. The Qin was the first political state that succeeded in annexing rival classical states in north and central China, bringing these territories under unified dynastic rule. With the consolidation of

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rule under a centralized bureaucracy and the backings of a strong military, the Qin carved up these princely kingdoms and reorganized them into individual administrative units (the junxian “capital-commandery-county” system), placing them under the rule of officials. Qin statecraft also introduced measures toward the integration of citizen-subjects based on a system of hierarchically ordered social grades. This statute created new identity positions that not only departed from the feudal aristocratic order but also gave rise to a political body from which the state could recruit individuals for civil and military service. It is often taken as matter of fact that the Qin’s novel bureaucratic formulations laid the practical groundwork for the empire building that the Han adopted to realize its expansionist ambitions. Under Emperor Wudi (r. 187–141 BCE), the Han acquired new territories encompassing North Korea, Mongolia, and Vietnam, reaching a geographic extent comparable to Rome and a population of sixty million by 2 CE. Toward the late Western Han period, roughly 120,000 officials were deployed across its 103 commanderies (Loewe 2006). Although the Han state managed to extend its boundaries quickly, imperial advisers were keenly aware of the harsh and coercive measures tied to Qin statecraft and saw it as cause for political revolt. They thus debated ways of cultivating consent among imperial subjects, from elites to farmers and newly conquered groups. It is in this context that the status of colonists became as much a question about the logistics of border administration as it was about the moral nature of rule. The closest translation of the English word colony in Chinese texts relates to a strategy of border security involving military occupation—tun tian, a term formed from the compounds of Chinese terms meaning “stationing troops” and “raising fields.” Adopting the policy of its predecessor state, the Qin, Han administrators deployed soldiers to secure the frontier and develop surrounding agricultural fields in order to sustain a large contingency of expeditionary forces. Beginning with the regime of the Western Han (206 BCE–9 CE) and continuing under the Eastern Han (25–220 CE), soldiers, often with the support of convicts and slaves as well as personal attendants, were increasingly dispatched to occupy the frontier. They stayed there for the duration of their assignments and returned home at the end of service (Chang 2007, 117). However, the success of military colonies became an issue early in the Han, in particular as the court questioned the reliability of temporary communities in guarding the border. Soldiers who were only stationed on a rotational basis, reasoned the official Chao Cuo (200–154 BCE), “do not understand the character and capacities of the Xiongnu,” the political foes of the Han. Furthermore,

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he proposed that since soldiers’ allegiance was to their commanding general, they dispersed like birds and beasts upon their leader’s death. Implied in Chao Cuo’s commentary is a questioning of expeditionary soldiers’ commitments to the frontier project, for they could not be trusted to place their duty to the sovereign above their own immediate welfare. To improve border security, Chao Cuo advised the recruitment of civilians to create permanent populations: First set up houses and agricultural implements [at the borders] and then recruit convicts and those who have been pardoned to settle there. If this is insufficient, recruit adult male slaves who will be allowed to redeem their punishments, and household slaves excused by their owners in exchange for titles. If this is insufficient, recruit free people who desire to go, grant them high ranks, and let them establish families. . . . Provide them food and clothing so that they can be self-sufficient. In the event the wife survives the husband, let her retain that rank. Those who arrive [at the borders] will settle peacefully and not be struck by homesickness. Commoners will convince their acquaintances to come. . . . With healers and shamans to treat ailments and make sacrifices, marriageable partners, mutual assistance in times of need, space for funerary plots, the planting of groves and stock raising, and the establishment of households, civilians should voluntarily stay for the long term. (Ban et al. 1995, 2250–52) Chao Cuo reasoned that settlers, or sai ming (formally, “frontier civilians”), would be compelled to stay given the promise of higher economic and social status and additional incentives such as housing. Without land and status, people cannot develop affective ties that bind them to stay long term, for a feeling of common welfare necessarily helped restore and sustain people’s confidence in the frontier, further encouraging their commitment and loyalty to the imperial project. In fostering social relations to develop on the border, the state worked toward building a sense of mutual obligation, which was lacking and symptomatic of the social alienation affecting expeditionary soldiers of the Qin state. The making of Han frontiers, as highlighted in Chao Cuo’s recommendations to the emperor, belied the mechanistic problems facing a new imperial bureaucracy. Frontier lands that failed to inspire a feeling of belonging

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grounded in moral sentiment, could never become sovereign spaces. The conditions for creating such ties were both physical (making land habitable) and human (socializing the locality). Implicit in Chao Cuo and Emperor Wen’s exchange is an awareness that the state needs more than physical bodies to transform border regions into political territory; it needs a certain affective person/subject. This inquiry about the frontier civilian brings to light the role of nonmilitary actors engaged in the border-making process and the ways borderness was differentially experienced and negotiated (see S. T. Smith, this volume). Instead of associating borderness with the geography of walls and an experience of estrangement and marginality, the Han case shows that because borderness also entailed a process of homemaking, borders could become familiarized as local places. Cast in this light, the affective associations of the local and the inside are not easily captured by geographic notions of space. What is most surprising about Chao Cuo’s discussion of frontiers is that it preceded Han physical consolidation of the frontier regions by eighty years. That is, before the Han state incorporated frontier regions into directly administered units with centrally appointed governors, the court considered employing indirect means to achieve political sovereignty. Not unlike the Euro-American settler colonialism of more recent history (Gosden 2004; Elkins and Pedersen 2005; Veracini 2011), the emphasis on settlers and non-state actors points to an unacknowledged catalyst in early Han expansionary dynamics. To address processes internal to border spaces, I propose that we need to account for a settler archaeology that gives priority and visibility to border works that extend beyond the imperial built environment. Archaeology of Settler Localities Because the archaeology of Han frontiers has primarily focused on the study of military installations, settler communities remain poorly defined, if not absent, in the archaeological record. A crucial first step is therefore to redirect attention toward social activities outside of the imperial fortified outposts. This step requires not only engaging with the permanence or visibility of these sites but also with permanence as a way of negotiating border living. If settler communities aspired to establish distinctive homelands on the frontier, the archaeological exploration of border work must attend to varied local undertakings that worked to instill a sense of rootedness in space (Ingold 1993).

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A general approach to the process of emplacement must first consider how space—the physical environment—is transformed into socially constructed landscapes. This process proceeds through physical and cultural modification of the surrounding environment, in particular land-use investments, to support Han habitations, which in turn contribute toward the place of livelihoods on the frontier. Second, these associations with space are elaborated in the organization of settlements, in particular as occupation sites articulate with specific natural and physical land features to produce an idea of locality. I adopt locality as an analytic concept both to draw a distinction from location and to make an association with the local (Lovell 1998, 5). To approach borders as location runs the risk of inscribing geopolitical terms (county, districts, wards) in a way that prescribes places with predetermined or institutional meanings (Figure 3.1). 1 By contrast, locality elicits the idea of belonging that is predicated upon having a relationship to a particular place. It thus implies the local as a social identity coming into being as people gain a sense of familiarity and attachment with places and modify these to their own cultural needs. Much of locational thinking of the northwest frontier is defined according to a hierarchically structured civilian and military space (Figure 3.2). Provincial governors and the military commandant occupied a large fortified town. Each controlled a lower-level spatial unit; the commandant oversaw four companies (houguan), under which were several platoons (bu). Each platoon was responsible for several beacon stations (sui) (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). The provincial governor oversaw regularly spaced county-­level units. Below counties were districts and wards. Analyzing borderness from this vantage point not only prioritizes but also imposes spatial ideology on subject experience, unduly foreclosing on people’s experience and the creation of local meanings. On a methodological level, the border-as-locality tack requires a broader definition of habitations to include both sites and “non-site” spaces (see Banning 2002). These include spaces otherwise devoid of apparent human occupation, in particular including natural features (rock formations, outcrops, vegetation, and bodies of waters) or places where people frequented to appropriate resources. Instead of a search for regularity in the distribution of settlements interdependent with administrative units (cities and walls), then, I am interested in how occupations arrange and imbricate with topography, or the orientation of physical features, to enable and shape patterns of movement as well as a settler perception of the frontier as a locality. Together, these patterns

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Figure 3.2. Juyan frontier region. Inset map (redrawn from Map 3 Chang 2007) shows the administrative arrangement of commandant, fort, and beacon stations along the Juyan to Maomu frontier line. Map of Edsen-Gol settlements are based on Swedish survey reports (redrawn from Map 3 in Sommarström 1954). Produced by Alice Yao.

of micro-scale movement use and perceptions help describe the particular material relations that worked to affiliate borderness with a sense of locality and permanence. Although permanence implies a fixity to borderness, it also points toward a shifting relationship to mobility. In theory, Han guards closely monitored movement along the empire’s frontier and required citizens to carry passports, which presumably confined travel and communication to the imperial roads. I am, however, less interested in state controls on mobility across boundaries than in habitual kinds of movement. If civilian settlers, unlike stationed soldiers and traders, did not sojourn or return home, how did they move about and at what spatial scales? The smaller and localized scales of spatial movement are central to understanding how people engaged in social life on the frontier beyond the single occupation site to a wider view of networks that

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linked communities together in the micro-scale process of border work. Analytically, the study of local networks involves comparison of inter-site spacing below the county level at scales in the lower “household” levels (Chen and Shelach 2014). Permanence, as I further explore, is not only grounded in the physical establishment of settlements and fields but is also produced in the expansion of time experience. Mobility, as discussed above, prompts us to attend to the networks of personal relationships that foster a sense of connectedness and movement versus a feeling of isolation and stasis. Han soldiers wrote expressively about their ennui and fateful outlook in their letters bound for home: “On the northern frontier, I am living in wretched country and I have nothing to tell you” (translation of Dunhuang letter in Pirazolli-t’Stertevens 1982, 126). The problem of (im)mobility entails examining how migrants, who were unable to return, may have organized spatial practices to counter the indeterminacy of the future. I propose that these temporal experiences were alternatively negotiated through interconnections between habitation and non-habitation sites. Anthropologists and archaeologists, in particular, have emphasized the centrality of symbolic practices such as ancestral and funerary rites in enacting social reproduction and the inscription of generational time in space (Parmentier 1986; Alcock 2002; Yao 2016). By examining movements between cemeteries and settlements over periods of frontier expansion, I address the ways settlers may have used places of commemoration to endow borders with time and history. A focus on mortality patterns in settler cemeteries can also reveal livelihoods and health on the frontier—that is, whether people lived well compared to their compatriots in the imperial heartland of interior China. Further, in order for settlers to sustain long-term communities, a stable population is drawn into the settling of domestic space on the frontier. Scholars of settler colonialism have often noted the significance of a reproductive economy, in particular the sanctioning of sexual desires in order to ground a sense of group autonomy (Elkins and Pedersen 2005; Veracini 2011). The study of sex ratios in different age cohorts and census records offers one important avenue for identifying specific practices associated with biosocial relations in border work; these include practices previously documented by social historians such as infanticide or the delaying of marriage. Closer examinations of gender compositions and ancestral representations may show how relatedness was carefully produced in order to “domesticate” border spaces.

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The Northwest Frontier Historically, the northwest frontier occupied a strategic geographic trade route linking the Chinese state in the Central Plains and the Hellenistic kingdoms spanning from what is modern-day Afghanistan to Kazakhstan. Referred to as the Hexi Corridor, the region consists of a line of oases wedged between the rugged topography of the Tibetan Plateau and the Gobi Desert and the grasslands of Mongolia to the north (see Figure 3.1). During the second half of the Western Han period, the Han state sought to gain control and secure the region by negotiating treaties with the Xiongnu polity, whose leader controlled the region through alliances with local tribal groups (Di Cosmo 2002, 2009). In 121 BCE, Emperor Han Wudi initiated a series of campaigns that drove the Xiongnu from the oasis towns, effectively cutting off further collaborations between the Xiongnu and their Qiang allies. By 102 BCE, the Han government had divided conquered territories into four commanderies (Zhangye, Wuwei, Jiuquan, and Dunhuang) and built a line of defenses including sections of the Great Wall, fortifications, and watchtowers, the remains of which are still visible in the landscape. The two regions in northwest China that are the focus of this chapter present spaces either laying outside of or wedged between sections of the Great Wall and highlight varying bordering processes. During the early first century BCE, the Western Han campaign incorporated these three basins and river valleys and placed them under the administration of the commanderies of Zhangye, Jiuquan, and Longxi. Spanning the modern-day provinces of Gansu, Inner Mongolia, and Qinghai, these areas are similar in that they occupied strategic communication nodes that enabled control of movement along the Hexi Corridor and worked to prevent further Xiongnu encroachments. For instance, Western Han administrators sought to control Qiang tribal footholds in the Xining Valley of eastern Qinghai Province in an effort to curtail expansion of Xiongnu alliances in the northwest, in particular along the frontier extending along Zhangye, Jiuquan, and Wuwei (see Figure 3.1). Beyond concerns with securing border defenses, Han agents found reliable sources of water in these valleys and the potential for irrigated agriculture in an otherwise arid zone. Han migrants from different parts of the interior moved to these three valleys and established settler communities, as shown by significant population increases from 100 BCE to 2 CE (Bielenstein 1947).

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The Juyan District (Zhangye Commandery) Juyan was an important fortified city near the modern-day border of Gansu and Inner Mongolia. Established in 103 BCE, the walled headquarters was founded as a military post and served to prevent contact between the Xiongnu and the Qiang tribe, for fear of a tribal alliance against the Han. Of great importance was the control of a geographic corridor connecting new territories along the Hexi Corridor with the southern end of the Guanglu Wall in Mongolia (Xu 2002). Although today the region is dry and dotted with salt pans, the valley was a fertile marsh plain during the Han. Edsen-Gol was also a connector necessary to secure a north/south gap between two separate wall sections. In addition to the large fortified city of Juyan (Khara-koto), a square town that measures 380 by 450 meters, Swedish and Chinese archaeologists have also documented smaller square garrison towns distributed along old river channels flowing south from Juyan lake into the oasis (see Figure 3.2).2 These defense installations spanned a distance of three hundred kilometers from north to south along the Edsen-Gol River and their remains appear to corroborate textual references to the construction of fortifications and garrisons beginning in 102 BCE. Thirty years later, presumably after the military stabilized this valley by driving out former non-Han occupants in 72 BCE, Juyan was consolidated as a district under the civil jurisdiction of Zhangye Commandery. The remains of unfortified settlement clusters distributed along perennial streams and canals appear to verify accounts of Han immigration into Juyan. Following consolidation into civil administration and direct governance, the Juyan region and its inhabitants continued to face Xiongnu raids for two centuries. Two campaigns were launched to fight off Xiongnu in 73 and 163 CE. Xining Valley (Jincheng and Longxi Commanderies) To the southwest of the Hexi Corridor and across the Nanling Mountain range is the well-watered plain of Qinghai (see Figure 3.1), a highland zone that delineated the western front of Han expansion. During the Western Han, the Qiang people, a semi-nomadic group and political dependents of the Xiongnu, also occupied this basin. Archaeologists have identified a Qiang presence in the basin based on a mortuary complex consisting of horse gear, which they refer to as the Kayue culture. According to the Hanshu (Book of Han), Han Wudi

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deployed troops to eastern Qinghai in 121 BCE to create a buffer zone against Xiongnu invasions. Situated between the loess plateau, agrarian heartland of central China, and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the Huangshui River Valley was a strategic communication corridor flowing eastward to connect with the Yellow River. From 111 to 81 BCE, Han immigrants began to settle in the Qinghai plain. During the initial fifty-year period of consolidation, eastern Qinghai was a frontier region well outside the defenses of the Han wall. Imperial presence was limited to one military station. Following imperial defeat of tribal groups in 61 BCE, the area was incorporated into the Jincheng Commandery. At the urging of the commander in charge, military colonists were sent out, with an estimated population of 10,281 men (de Crespigny 1984, 64) (Table 3.1). To further stabilize the Qinghai, the Han accorded tribal groups the status of dependent states while promoting a program of Han immigration. The plateau, however, was retaken by the Qiang in the first decade of the first century CE, and local rebellions persisted until 36 CE. Though these rebellions led the imperial court to consider abandoning the upper reaches of Huangshui Valley (Xining) altogether, the Han subsequently changed its course and sought to tighten control by incorporating Jincheng into the Longxi Commandery and strengthening its fortification network. This policy of direct governance and a campaign for resettlement appear to have resulted in greater instability. Imperial census-taking in 2 CE and 140 CE, in particular, reveal widescale abandonment of the frontier, where the population declined from four hundred thousand to fifty thousand in the Longxi and Jincheng Commanderies (de Crespigny 1984, 72). This abandonment of the frontier highlights the challenges faced by settlers in crafting permanent livelihoods. Farmsteads in the Oasis: Defining Border Localities The course of frontier rule—moving from a policy of indirect governance from 121 to 61 BCE to increasingly direct rule and active immigration after 61 BCE until 36 CE, which was followed by a century of depopulation—has not been examined against the archaeological record. Did Han migrants settle in the Xining region only after the valley came under imperial territorial jurisdiction? Did migration and settlement expand and decline in tandem with Han administrative presence and retreat? If so, one would expect settlers to live in close proximity to the border work of imperial installations and centers. Of these two frontier zones, Juyan is the most extensively surveyed border

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Table 3.1. Population Estimates for Two Imperial Frontier Regions from 61 BCE, 2 CE, and 140 CE

Population Estimates Juyan*

130–72 BCE

Commandant 4,733

72 BCE–2 CE

Zhangye Vassal State 16,952 Commandery 42,992

Longxi

61 BCE

10,281

2 CE

400,000

140 CE

50,000

* Census data for Juyan (Chang 2007, 123–28) and Longxi (de Crespigny 1984, 64 and 72).

area. The military commandant city (Khara-koto) is an imposing fortified city sitting atop a mesa that overlooks the undulating plain twenty meters below. The city, a walled town spanning 380 meters by 450 meters in a north-south alignment, houses the administrative offices of the chief commandant and residential wards of civilians and military families.3 Below the mesa, the plain is defended by seven walled fortresses (hou guan), the subordinate military units placed under the jurisdiction of Juyan Commandant, each of which houses the headquarters of a sub-commandant. Outside the military fortress, the settlement system is characterized by a distribution of fort towns, square-walled settlements with internal residential wards built with mud bricks. These forts were occupied by military personnel, convict laborers, and military colonists. The equidistant spacing of forts (see forts 84 and 710 in Figure 3.2), each being established 10 to 12.5 kilometers apart (roughly three to four hours on foot or one hour on horseback) (Chang 2007, 169) in an east-west axis in an interalluvial marsh between the Ikhen-Gol and Etsina Rivers, suggests regularized control of this core region. Beacon stations, though rare, are sometimes placed on the exposed fronts of fort towns (forts 35, 68, 690, and 72), perhaps acting as signal towers for each sub-commandant areal unit. Like Khara-koto, these military installations are defined by enclosed brick walls often of considerable height. Against the open and stark horizon of

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the marsh and dunes, they appear as a line of visible and rather imposing features across the landscape. Fanning outward from these forts are habitation ruins ranging from singular houses to farmsteads comprised of either pairs of houses or clusters of four to five houses, which archaeologists associate with Han settler colonies. The remnants of canals and dam-like features abutting some of these settlements suggest that the linear configuration of household groups may reflect the settling of migrant families around irrigation features. Over 270 house ruins have been recorded, and 166 were either subject to test excavations or surface surveys from 1930 to 1935 (Sommarström and Bergman 1957, 103). These ruins are tightly clustered house groups located less than fifty meters apart (see Figures 3.2 and 3.3). Because these houses were neither enclosed by ramparts nor necessarily built with bricks, many appear as small mounded ruins partially eroded and reclaimed by dunes, contrasting the built environment of military occupations with a picture of ephemeral and marginal habitations. During the Han period, the environment of the Juyan basin was characterized by high lake levels and wet conditions that supported vegetation cover that was more extensive than it is in the current desertified landscape (Ming et al. 2015). Immigrants encountered a lush environment and chose to locate houses near patches with dense vegetation cover. Bergman noted that houses and compounds were near natural clay and sand cones known as burukhs, a sediment formation of blown sand four to five meters in height and overgrown with poplar, tamarisk, saxaul bush, and grass (Sommarström and Bergman 1957, 3). These groves were resource rich (fuel, small game, raw materials for making thatch and pottery) and also provided small topographic rises in the alluvium (Figure 3.3). While settlers lived within the purview of military towns, being as close as five hundred meters to two kilometers from the nearest fort (see fort 710 sector in Figure 3.2), their daily activities indicate movements between localities in the burukh rather than a spatial orientation toward the forts. Comparison of economic activities across house groups within the area administered by forts 31 and 710 shows the role of immediate, highly localized scales of interaction. Occupants of houses and tatis took care of their general subsistence needs, as indicated by the recovery of net sinkers, spindle whorls, and domestic pottery (Figure 3.4). More specialized forms of craft work did not appear to be exclusively located in the fort towns. Of the seventy-five house groups located along the north-south extension from forts 710 and 31, evidence of metalworking at five settlements indicates independent craft working by migrant families

Figure 3.3. Juyan landscape and site maps. Site plan of A8 Muderbeljin shows excavations of the fort interior with administrative tower in the northwest corner and extramural settlements classified as tati (redrawn from Figure 13, Sommarström 1954). Fort and beacon station ruins documented by Bergman in the Swedish expedition. Settler houses (redrawn from Figure 44, Sommarström 1954) are possibly associated with mounds in the background of fort structure. CC BY-NC-ND. Photo: Sven Hedin, 1933–35, Image No. 1034.0004, 1034.0007, 1034.1253. National Museums of World Culture Ethnography Museum, Sweden, http://collections.smvk.se/carlotta-em/web/ object/2066640, http://collections.smvk.se/carlotta-em/web/object/2066637, http:// collections.smvk.se/carlotta-em/web/object/2077064. Produced by Alice Yao.

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(Figure 3.2, labeled “c”). Although slag was only present in the satellite sites ringing the fort (704–6), possibly in association with more intensive metal processing there, the discard of bronze lumps and casting debris in several settler house compounds demonstrates that individuals also undertook repair of agricultural and hunting tools. The spatial distribution of metalworking sites also suggests the formation of social connections between groups of settler families. Sites with metal debris are located within each branch of this frontier unit. Because the distribution of metal tools was state controlled and metal agricultural implements were likely valued possessions of settlers, access to tool repair services was critical to stabilizing community livelihoods. Organization of localized craftspeople suggests a degree of economic coordination in the border work process, one oriented toward the development of social networks outside the forts. The process of settling the burukhs also entailed a shift in consumption and

Figure 3.4. Distribution of artifact types at commandant town, forts, houses, and farmsteads. Bars represent the average number of artifacts per site for each settlement type. Artifact inventories were available for forty-five sites. Produced by Alice Yao.

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discard habits. Based on documents recovered from forts A8 and 84, population estimates indicate 153 servicemen lived in one fort along with families of military and civilians, officers, and support staff such as cooks (Chang 2007, 113). Based on detailed tallies from twenty-eight households, households comprised small families averaging around four persons (3.8), a figure that was lower than the five-person average (4.87) in the interior of the empire (128). These comparisons indicate forts were distinguished both by a higher density and diversity of residents. Archaeological materials recovered from middens highlight differences in discard activity and consumption patterns between fort and settler inhabitants from 81 BCE to 25 CE (Sommarström and Bergman 1957, 47). Excavations of a fortified watch house in the northwest corner of fort A8 yielded bamboo records and “stationary” equipment (see Figure 3.4). Administrative artifacts, including used wooden stationary tablets and postal boxes for sending sealed letters, are only present at the fort and commandant town and are absent from house and tati contexts. Not only were the lives of fort residents structured by institutional activities, but the use of postal equipment also highlights an orientation toward life and news from the outside. Domestic waste excavated from the military towns and settler houses also reveals contrastive attitudes and negotiations of border life. Most of the domestic refuse represented at fort A8 consisted of bamboo and wooden utensils: chopsticks, ladles, spatulas, serving trays, dishes, bowls, and lacquered cups (see Figure 3.4). The midden consisted primarily of portable and less fragile wooden implements, akin to military mess kits, an assemblage that was absent from the middens of houses and tatis. The average amount of domestic and agricultural (large and small metal tools) materials discarded was also much higher in fort and citadel contexts (Figure 3.5). This higher concentration of waste may reflect differences in the density and size of occupations. Forts, as mentioned earlier, hosted upward of 150 residents, and households were comprised of four persons on average. However, the low discard activity in burukh households may also be attributed to a more intensive pattern of reuse and recycling occurring in settler communities. Among agricultural implements, the average number of stone querns for processing grain and stone tools discarded in forts, houses, and tatis are identical, while the average number of metal tools (iron plows and bronze arrowheads) being thrown away is strikingly higher in the forts. As mentioned earlier, metal goods are commodities supplied by state workshops in the interior. Though they could be bought and sold in town markets, their

Figure 3.5. Bronze Age and Han archaeological sites in the confluence of Huangshui and Beichuan Valleys. China Cultural Relics Bureau (1996). Produced by Alice Yao.

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circulation on the frontier was tightly controlled. The comparatively low presence of iron plows and arrows in household waste suggests that settlers repaired or recycled, rather than directly discarded, these objects as they negotiated the materiality of border work. This engagement with the use life of things is further substantiated by the deposition of coins that reveals differences in occupation durations at these sites. The kinds of Han coins documented at house clusters suggest a rather extended period of occupation in the burukhs. Whereas the imperial coins excavated from fort A8 were primarily from the Western Han and early Eastern Han, a wider range of coins minted in the later Eastern Han (post 25–220 CE) have been recovered from houses and tatis. In particular, the recovery of rimless wuzhu coins, which lack a raised edge along the perimeter of the central square, from a number of house compounds in the fort 710 zone suggest active burukh occupations into the first century CE. That is, low levels of discard activity over a lengthy duration of occupation cannot be attributed with ephemeral occupation histories. Because of favorable conditions for preservation, pieces of textile, including silk cloth and woven shoes, were also recovered. Articles of clothing, in particular silk brocades and shoes, have been found at forts and citadel sites in Juyan and elsewhere in the Hexi Corridor. Their frequency at the citadel in Juyan suggests, on the one hand, the presence of well-to-do individuals or possibly women occupants in addition to soldiers. On the other hand, the disposal of torn clothing and worn shoes also indicates that these things were not mended and were left behind by their owners. Shoes and clothing appear as recurring goods requested by soldiers in their letters home, presumably being hard to acquire and to replace on the frontier. Despite their limited availability and value, these items were nevertheless treated as disposable things for those posted temporarily on the borders. By contrast, their absence from houses and tati contexts highlights a different habit of disposal from the occupants of the forts. Their implied reuse, especially together with the reworking of metal tools, at burukh sites suggests a varied approach to prolonging the use life of things, one that is oriented at extending the temporality of border space. In contrast to the Juyan frontier, the Longxi Commandery (modern-day Xin­ing city) was governed directly by the state, and settlement patterns in the Beichuan Valley appear consistent with the civil administrative structure of interior provinces. Along the Beichuan tributaries feeding into the major

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Huangshui Valley, archaeologists have excavated two major Han period cemeteries, and survey work has recovered clusters of Han settlements. Unlike at Juyan, there are few military fortifications here. Ninety-eight sites have been identified along a 150-kilometer stretch of the Beichuan Valley (Figure 3.5). An overwhelming majority of sites in this surveyed area are associated with Neolithic and Bronze Age periods and have a material assemblage identified with the Kayue and Qijia cultures, while only six sites have a Han component (Zhongguo 1996). Bronze Age site locations differ most prominently from Han patterns in their distribution across a variety of ecological zones. Kayue and Qijia sites are located on the main river channel terraces as well as the piedmonts and dissected valleys of subsidiary tributaries (Figure 3.5; marked by circles). This wide-ranging occupation of valley and highland zones may reflect the pastoral economies of the region and settlement in proximity to seasonal pastures. By contrast, Han sites are located uniquely in the two main river valleys and are spaced evenly at a distance of thirty kilometers. The establishment of these sites at the confluence of tributaries feeding into the Beichuan Valley suggests a focus on settling and occupying prime arable locations. Moreover, their equidistant spacing indicates a structured distribution of settler communities, a pattern that has been similarly documented for directly incorporated territories along the northeast frontier (Chen and Shelach 2014). Han settlements divide into three different size orders. Two small villages along the Huangshui River measure 2,400 to 2,600 square meters. Medium sites range between 6,000 square meters and 1.8 hectares. Two large Han settlements each occupying six to seven hectares are situated at the midpoint of Beichuan Valley, near Changning. All of these settlements were built over earlier Bronze Age sites, suggesting either reoccupation of pastoral localities or cohabitation rather than creation of new immigrant towns on virgin ground. Domestic Han pottery is evident at all six sites, which, together with the discovery of architectural elements such as roof tiles made from clay molds, alludes to communities undertaking different kinds of craft work as part of the frontier economy. The manufacture of ceramic roof tiles shows a commitment not only to the establishment of permanent structures but also to the making of frontier dwellings in the likeness of homes that immigrants were familiar with in the interior, perhaps in an effort to impart a sense of permanence by shaping localities of familiarity. Since these settlements are neither walled nor near forts, the remains of architectural debris are likely unrelated to military and official residences. Because these settlements have only been subject to surface survey, we do not

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know their founding dates and the duration of their occupation (e.g., in the early Western Han or Eastern Han). Nor do we know their intensity of occupation under periods of consolidation versus incorporation. One can tentatively infer that settlers here crafted a sense of permanence by imagining a homescape through the vernacular architecture of the interior. Ancestral Commemorations and Productions of Frontier Time To fully comprehend the process of place making by settlers on the frontier, the study of cemetery sites in local contexts is crucial. Settler migrants, unlike officials and soldiers, were not granted the privilege of returning their dead to their ancestral places for burial. The proper treatment of the dead was central to Confucian tenets concerning filial piety and the veneration of ancestors. To deprive the deceased of proper mourning and rites of passage was to risk the wrath of menacing spirits in place of realizing cooperative ancestors/ protectors of descendant livelihoods. Engaging with the practice of death rites on the frontier thus highlights the immediacy of the settler condition. Beyond making the space of the frontier amenable for cultivation and basic sustenance or security, settlers confronted the potential undoing wrought by the loss of kin—a reality that was probably a recurrent physical concern on the frontier. How people mourned the deceased builds on an understanding of the affective relations binding settlers to space. More importantly, it points to the ways in which settlers contemplated permanence as part of a future life to be established collectively with the ancestors. To this end, the second part of the analysis turns to the mortuary record of Han immigrants. As a start, the absence of formal cemeteries in the Juyan area highlights the fear and danger surrounding death and burying the deceased on the frontier. Only one cemetery site has been recovered in the Edsen-Gol basin (site 768), and the cemetery is located at the far southern end of the administrative zone under fort 730 (see Figure 3.2). In general, if stationed soldiers died on the frontier before the end of their assignment, their bodies were repatriated at a later time, while those of Han immigrants were buried near their settlements. Archaeologists have noted at the border near Maomu (a fort south of Juyan) that coffins were placed outside at the border of gravel desert waiting for future retrieval (Sommarström and Bergman 1957, 152). It is possible that the ephemeral nature of cemeteries in Edsen-Gol reflects the workings of this imperial practice.

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Whether Juyan occupants returned their dead to the empire’s interior cannot be verified, but the difficulty of making the return journey was expressed in the material culture created by fort inhabitants. Excavated assemblages from fort and beacon tower sites reveal a class of talismanic items consisting of wooden pegs painted with human faces (see Figure 3.4). In central China, such pegs belonged to the mortuary material assemblage, acting as talismanic objects to separate the world of the living from the dead. Drawn on the surface of the pegs were crudely painted characters with an occasional inscription on the back. Because the pegs have one sharpened end, they were probably pushed into the ground. It is unclear why these objects were widespread at military outposts or what their intended purpose might have been in non-funerary contexts. One possibility is that these tablets functioned as a media for communicating with celestial authority and allowing people to enact sacrificial rituals to ancestors (back home) in an appeal for their own protection. The inability of returning to one’s homeland heightened individual fears of becoming a restive dead on the frontier, a shared sentiment among dispatched troops that, I suggest, helps account for why such talismanic artifacts were more prevalent within the military forts. These talismanic tablets have not been documented at any of the house cluster settlements in Juyan, suggesting settlers did not undertake these sacrificial rites in local settings. If settlers intended to inhabit the frontier permanently, burying the deceased nearby would have been a means to settle and reproduce this space imaginatively. It may be that most families buried the deceased near house clusters. As mentioned, only one cemetery site (768) has been found in the Etsin-Gol (Heihe) basin, and it is associated with a network of house clusters at the far southern end of the administrative zone under fort 730. It is also unclear how many interments there are at the site. Bergman only notes that site 768 was an extensive burial ground (Sommarström and Bergman 1957, 124). Fortunately, Juyan census documents help provide demographic information that gives a glimpse into the biological profile of immigrants, possibly over the course of generations as discussed toward the end of this section. In striking contrast to Juyan, the archaeological record of the Han period in the Beichuan Valley leading to the Longxi Commandery shows extensive settler mortuary activity, in particular at a number of large cemetery sites (see Figure 3.5; marked as solid squares). These sites tend to cluster near the provincial seat in Xining and are located on higher river terraces overlooking the valley floor. Most interesting is that two of the well-documented cemeteries,

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Table 3.2. Shangsunjia Cemetery. Periodization of Interments by Han Imperial Reign Dates

Period I

Zhaodi–mid Xuandi (87–49 BCE)

12

Period II

Xuandi–Wang Mang (49 BCE–AD 9)

31

Period III

Post 23 CE

24

Period IV

Early–Eastern Han (23–100 CE)

19

Period V

Late E. Han (100–200 CE)

63

Shangsunjia and Taojia, were established on earlier Bronze Age cemetery grounds associated with the nomadic pastoral Kayue complex (Qinghai 1993, 2015) (see Figure 3.5). The cemetery of Shangsunjia contains 264 Kayue-style graves, and the site was in use as early as the late second millennium BCE (Qinghai 1993, 218). Of the other 182 interments containing Han objects (Table 3.2), thirty-nine graves are identified as belonging to the Western Han period, while sixty-four are dated to the early Eastern Han to Jin period (265–420 CE). By the Eastern Han period, it appears that rich Xiongnu-style graves also begin to occupy and share in this multi-ethnic cemetery. Among the Western Han period graves are non-­Han-style burials that followed a different burial protocol consisting of secondary interments, animal sacrificial offerings, and “steppe” ornaments (Psarras 2015). The sharing of cemetery space and the mixing of Han and local material objects in the funerary repertoire suggest a degree of interaction between settlers and pacified local subjects. Of the thirty-three graves associated with Western Han periods (periods I and II), ten are dated to the early phase (pre-50 BCE), the period of initial Han immigration (111–82 BCE) and prior to the establishment of direct Han rule in 61 BCE. Most of these early burials contain a simple array of material offerings, including pottery vessels, Han bronze coins, and animal offerings of pig or dog. Dating to the period of 87 to 49 BCE, the Han settler couple in grave 135 were placed together in a timber-plank casket and interred in a small earthen pit that could be reached via a ramped passageway (Figure 3.6; Qinghai 1993). Because the couple did not die at the same time, the entryway allowed for later interments inside the same tomb. Mourners conducted food sacrifices and

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offerings common among funerary customs practiced in interior China. Inside the tomb, an array of culinary vessels necessary for cooking (clay stove and bronze pot) and dining (jars and plates) were placed adjacent to the deceased couple along with the remains of a dog. The absence of ornaments and jeweled adornments, together with the modest quantity and range of food vessels, suggests that this was a settler family of modest means. Despite being a family of commoner status, the descendants’ attention to immortalizing marital relations through funerary representations highlights the importance of linking family and land together. Two of the fifty graves from the early phase are distinguished by steppe-style pottery consisting of a single or double loop handle and a red sandy paste that is distinct from the typical domestic gray ware pottery of the Han interior. The shared use of the Shangsunjia cemetery is interesting in that it suggests closer interactions between early settlers with tribal groups such as those identified with the Kayue complex. What is perhaps most interesting about the history of burial activity is the

Figure 3.6. Settler tombs of the Western and Eastern Han periods. Redrawn from figure 2 (Qinghai 2007 and 2015) and figures 18 and 41 (Qinghai and Qinghai 1993). Produced by Alice Yao.

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Table 3.3. Gender Ratios for Shangsunjia and Taojia Cemeteries in Xining, Qinghai

W. Han Shangsunjia (182 Han Male 15 : Female 10 graves)

E. Han Male 17 : Female 15

7–14 (1: ?) 15–24 (2:1) 25–34 (5:3) 35–53 (4:4) 55+ (3:2) Taojia (378 Han graves)

1 indeterminate infant

Male 175 : Female 167 3–14 (6:1)* 15–24 (15:25) 25–34 (44:45) 35–53 (92:66) 55+ (3:11)

* Twenty-one individuals could not be sexed.

continuous rate of interments throughout the Western to Eastern Han period specifically involving family or household units. The Shangsunjia cemetery saw an increase in settler funerary activity during the first two centuries CE (see Table 3.2: periods III–IV), in particular when direct imperial control was ostensibly weakened in the Qinghai region. Taojia, a cemetery site located ten kilometers south of Shangsunjia (see Figure 3.6), is similarly characterized by an expansion in tomb construction by settlers during the Eastern Han period (Table 3.3) (Qinghai 2015). Grave M1, a single-chambered brick tomb dating to the early Eastern Han period (9–50 CE), was similar in its funerary structure to earlier settler graves at Shangsunjia. It was a modestly furnished husband-wife grave comprised of a male adult (older than forty years of age) and a female adult (between thirty-five and forty years of age) interred together inside a wooden casket (see Figure 3.6). Placed inside the casket was an assortment of miniaturized clay figurines and models depicting household contents belonging to a couple who had lived to

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their prime. These figurines feature an agrarian lifeway where the inclusion of clay models of a granary and a well and a wood-carved oxen figure prominently as sources of settler wealth (see Figure 3.6, shaded objects). In addition to the typical culinary equipment associated with Han food preparation and dining (kitchen stove, jars, ladles, and plates), the inclusion of a clay model depicting a freestanding commode adds an element of realism to the material comforts enjoyed within the abode (Qinghai 2015). These depictions of a good home life, whether actual or idealized, show the kinds of sacrifices made to fulfill ancestral obligations. However, as media of expression, they underscore the critical importance of domesticity in the production of settler space. This ideal of domesticity was not only imaginary but actively pursued as part of border work internal to settler societies. Reconstruction of gender ratios from Taojia, for instance, highlights how settlers may have deliberately worked out marital relations to develop a sense of social and physical permanence. Bioarchaeological studies of skeletal remains from Taojia indicate that the age and sex profile of the community mirrors a normative biological population. One hundred seventy-five individuals were identified as male and 167 as females, showing a fairly balanced gender ratio (Table 3.3). Seven individuals were infants (under three years of age), twenty-eight were subadults (three to fourteen years of age), forty were young adults (fifteen to twenty-four years of age), eighty-nine were adults (twenty-five to thirty-four years of age), and 158 were older adults (thirty-five to fifty-four years of age). The mortality pattern indicates Han settlers lived well into adulthood (Zhang 2013, 326). Similar to practices at Shangsunjia, most of the older individuals (aged thirty-five to fifty-three) included males and females buried jointly as husband and wife, highlighting an effort by living communities to convey and maintain an image of lasting consanguine ties. The practice of joint spousal entombments is consistent with the balanced gender ratios noted across adult cohort groups at Taojia (twenty-five to thirty-four years of age) (see Table 3.3). It appears that mourners accorded both female and male kin proper rites of mourning. By contrast, among young adults (fifteen to thirty-four years of age), the striking skew toward females indicates a higher mortality rate that may be associated with childbirth. The reconstruction of gender ratios from Juyan administrative documents further highlights how settlers may have deliberately arranged domesticity and marital relations on the frontier to build a sense of social and physical cohesion. In particular, interesting parallels in the demographic profile of Juyan

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communities may explain skewed gender ratios in the Qinghai settler cemeteries. For a civilian population numbering between 6,016 and 6,072 individuals, Chang estimates, based on a tally of biographical backgrounds for individual settlers, that 85 percent of the adult population in Juyan was registered as married. Married households furthermore consisted of both nuclear families and extended families, suggesting multiple generations had established “roots” in Juyan, approximating the model of frontier civilians envisioned by Chao Cuo. The strikingly high presence of young females (younger than ten years of age) in Juyan households—outnumbering males by 20 percent—suggests settler communities may have been directly involved in the management of gender ratios. This pattern is the inverse of provinces in interior China, and Chang suggests this inversion of gender ratio can perhaps be attributed to Han migrants refraining from the practice of infanticide (2007, 127). More compellingly, administrative documents indicate that young females were married at an earlier age (as young as twelve) than males (older than twenty years of age) in Juyan. If Han migrants were encouraged to form households at an early age, these skewed gender ratios may reflect Chao Cuo’s policy taking effect as well as evidence for imperial interventions in shaping and managing sexual relations of migrants. This concern with sustaining a pool of marriageable partners reveals a process of border work occurring internally within settler communities. It also shows the importance of affinal relations in negotiating temporal horizons beyond individual lifetimes. Maintaining the number of marriageable women not only discouraged sons from leaving the community to seek wives back in the interior but, more vitally, also produced—in theory, at least—a line of descendants to worship the patriline. This strategy stimulated the production of generational time and the development of local identities. Han migrants’ concern with establishing a history of locality is especially palpable in the continuing reuse of burial vaults and the elaboration of grave sites to affirm corporate identities. By the middle Eastern Han period (100 CE), earthen shaft burials with modest inclusions gave way to large, multi-chambered, vaulted tombs housing successive generations of families. Grave M8 at Shangsunjia is a four-chambered brick tomb whose size and interiors approximate that of an actual house (see Figure 3.6). Twelve individuals were buried inside this tomb, most likely as husband-wife burial pairs (Qinghai 1993, 68). As a result of extensive looting, only two of these couple burials remain in situ, being tucked away in the eastern and western chambers. While the kinds of ceramic vessels are consistent with

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ware forms from earlier periods, the range and quantity of vessel types surpass those included in earlier settler graves. Three clay cooking stoves are placed in the central chamber, in addition to three to five sets of each ceramic ware type (outlined in black). In addition, a variety of animals besides dog (e.g., mutton and oxen) were offered as sacrifices to the deceased. Together, these grave goods represent a convivial scene arranged around a domestic meal. Along with the recovery of agate and jade ornaments, the wealth of offerings indicates a settler family of elevated economic status with an ability to divert private funds toward funerary expenditure. The reuse of tombs is also evidenced by the construction of large vaulted tombs at Taojia after 100 CE. Grave M5 is a multi-chambered brick tomb with a domed roof with fourteen individuals interred at different times over the course of this period (see Figure 3.6). Based on the range and dating of ceramic styles included in the tomb assemblage, archaeologists have proposed a long use span from 50 to 150 CE, during which the tomb was reopened for the addition of deceased affines possibly over four successive generations. At least three pairs of husband-wife burials—two couples in the central chamber and one couple in the rear chamber—have been found (Qinghai 2007). Each deceased husband-wife pair was interred together in a single coffin. Like the chambered tombs at Shangsunjia, the interior of M5 also mimics the comfortable abode of a well-to-do frontier family, being equipped with a miniature kitchen and dining vessels. More than a place for ancestral commemoration, this investment in funerary tomb art may well have functioned to enable the experience of borders as an empathic space. Both the physical revisiting of tomb sites and the imagining of the cemeteries as an inclusive “home” fostered a sense of belonging for migrant settlers. In juxtaposition with imperial narrations of nomadic assault that describe the impermanence and flux of Longxi as a border region, the longue durée view of cemetery building reveals localization as a dimension of border-work process. Discussion A comparison of imperial historical accounts and history from the ground up in the northwest reveals inconsistencies in Han expansionism. It elucidates how the course of conquest, consolidation, and collapse is sometimes offset rather than clearly documented by the settler record. Specifically, the documented expansion in burial activity into the Eastern Han complicates textual

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documentation of political upheaval in the Longxi Commandery. As mentioned earlier, the region fell out of imperial control after 36 CE, and census documents note a dramatic decline in the local population (see Table 3.1) (Twitchett and Loewe 1986). The mortuary record from Shangsunjia and Taojia, however, contradicts this account since it is during the first century CE that large wealthy settler burials undergo costly expansions and show an escalation in funerary activity (Table 3.2). The funerary record thus charts greater social wealth and mobility among frontier citizenry during a period of weak governance and imperial contraction. If Chao Cuo’s imperial strategy proved prescient and effective, then it is possible that these settlers represent the model of subjects who achieved an affinity for, rather than fear of, the frontier. Even when the state could no longer defend and serve as a guarantor of the frontier, these communities stayed and reaffirmed their rootedness. Rather than expressing a longing for the homeland in the interior, they sought greater appeal to local ancestors by cementing the presence of lineage burial grounds. These findings show how migrants did not carry out their lives in a marginalized state as has been assumed for laborers and convicts conscripted to open up tracts of land for cultivation. Far from being passive subjects, settlers were actively involved in the creation of border regions. Han migrants who ventured out to the frontier included both unmarried able-bodied men and women and married couples who appear to have lived on the frontier into the prime of their lives. Analytically, their presence in the archaeological record can be documented but in locations away from the main infrastructures of imperial administration. Their sense of mobility in the space and time of the frontier, as I have tried to show in Juyan and Xining, drew on the mutual support of household groups and the elaboration of consanguine relations. In these attempts to familiarize and domesticate the frontier landscape, I suggest settlers crafted experiences opposite from the ennui and alienation expressed by expeditionary soldiers. In contrast to a view of the border from the metropole, the perspective of settlers highlights the critical role of affect and sentiment in the production of borders. Although newly acquired territories can be developed with irrigation and roads, I have tried to argue for locality as an object of empirical observation that is not coterminous with town or ward in the administrative spatial hierarchy. That is, from an institutional perspective, the development and organization of frontiers may impart land with value-added benefits to the state, which are necessary to pursue imperial growth and political fortunes. Those

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endowments of land give only a partial account of settlers’ complex relationship to borderness, however. For migrants, the experience of border life was grounded in an empathic space that afforded the potential of economic and temporal mobility.4 This account of border work, then, begins not with the contours of mappable boundaries but with the conceptualization of locality. Although locality certainly shares meanings similarly conveyed by landscapes, as exemplified by the transformation of burukhs into distinctive places, it is not, however, another synonym for place making. In the context of settler colonialism, the analytic prompts archaeologists to address how the local emerged as a powerful political subjectivity within empires and how its social and historical formation produces distinctive territorial practices. The embedding of the biosocial into the Xining valley imparted more than a sense of belonging for Han migrants; it provided the grounds on which settlers could articulate and modify their status from newcomers to that of locals. This may partially explain why, following the contraction of the Han state in the first century CE, settlers stayed on in the oases and deserts, carrying on after the collapse of empire and possibly exceeding Chao Cuo’s expectations. Conclusion I have used the Han frontier to illustrate the border as an indeterminate construct, one that stretches both conventional spatial epistemologies and archaeological approaches. Part of the challenge is attempting to capture variability in the kinds of border work and borderness that confronted those actually experiencing and living in this space. This was an effort to return to and heed Chao Cuo’s foresight that it is not just the physical body of geography that matters but also a particular kind of subject body. Instead of grounding archaeological analysis in a macro-scale approach to borders (i.e., bound by the Great Wall), my focus on micro-scale movements and less prominent sites juxtaposes a very different kind of border experience and the internal micro politics involving what Han texts referred to as civilians or non-institutional actors. By returning these individuals to frontier landscapes, the archaeology of frontiers casts a different and important light on settlers as imperial agents, showing that strategies for territorial incorporation did not rest solely on patron-client relations or military force. Finally, this examination of settler archaeology intervenes in ongoing

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discussions about colonialism under the Han. Historians have questioned and debated whether European-based models of colonialism are appropriate for non-Western, non-capitalist settings such as the Han. Since terms like empire and colony lack a linguistic and discursive equivalent in ancient China, treating the Han as a colonial power risks smuggling in anachronisms that also misconstrue the structures of power in ancient empires (Nylan 2008; Puett 2015). The archaeological record opens new gaps in this debate by showing the lasting presence of Han settlers in formerly tribal occupied territories and the personal commitments that actually did the work of securing borders, interestingly in the form of homescapes. To set the study of colonialism aside on epistemic grounds risks portraying the Han as a kind of benign empire, one seemingly at odds with its ambition and scale (Fiskesjö 2017). Notes 1. My use of locality also draws from bodies of work on emplacement and “homescape,” which have offered a productive way of reframing migrant and diasporic relationships to space. These concepts crucially attend to interaction of tactical/ physical as well as intimate nature in the colonial landscape (Sunseri 2014). 2. Excavations at the major forts have recovered troves of administrative bamboo strips pertaining to both military and civil administration and legal systems of the Han. 3. The three different population entries for Juyan represent tallies for civilian (administered by the military), vassal (semi-independent barbarian), and civil jurisdictions. 4. Khara-koto, also known as the Black Fort, is enclosed in two ramparts. Based on wall architecture and brick size, the outer wall probably dates to the post-Tangut period and is not part of the original Han fortification. The inner enclosure, which was likely of Han construction, is much smaller. Soundings inside the internal wall showed reoccupation of the city during the Yuan (twelfth century CE), corroborating Marco Polo’s account in The Travels. Basal deposits include Han era artifacts, including bamboo strip administrative texts.

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Chapter Four

Inka Provinces of the Kallawaya and Yampara Imperial Power, Regional Political Developments, and Elite Competition

Sonia Alconini

Empires and Imperial Domination Strategies Empires were among the most multifaceted political organizations in the ancient world and were unmatched in their territorial extent, sociopolitical complexity, and ethnolinguistic diversity. Empires were hierarchically organized both in the core and the provinces and were characterized by marked levels of resource extraction. They were often supported by standing armies and developed effective transportation and recording systems, supplemented by the use of a lingua franca to ease communication (Doyle 1986; Alcock 1989; Woolf 1992a; Alcock et al. 2001). Often, empires reached subcontinental scales, engulfing vast territories and populations. Empires took advantage not only of the rich variety of resources and ecologies within their realm, but also of the diversity of cultural traditions, languages, and ways of life that they encountered. Simultaneously, empires often developed effective imperial programs based on shared beliefs and practices that promoted cultural cohesion. Empires were champions in the international arena, sponsoring thriving trading corridors that channeled the flow of resources from within and beyond their frontiers. Empires also had cosmopolitan capitals conceived of as the axis mundi that often served as models of urban development in the far-flung provinces (Schreiber 1992; Barfield 2001). Despite these commonalities, there is a wide variety of imperial formations. Ancient empires were shaped by distinct cultural and historical circumstances, and they differed in their degree of economic integration, cultural cohesion, and the ways in which power was enacted and deployed. Depending on the levels 89

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of cohesion between the core, the provinces, and the frontier zones, empires could range from highly integrated imperial systems to more loosely articulated imperial formations (Eisenstadt 1979; Doyle 1986). Empires also varied in the intensity and manner in which ideological, economic, military, and political forms of power were implemented (Mann 1986). This not only produced different imperial configurations, but also fluctuating levels of Indigenous cooperation and resistance (Schreiber 1992; Stanish 2001). In response to this complexity, different theoretical frameworks have been developed to understand the nature of ancient empires and the ways in which imperial power was exercised. Among those stand variations of the world system and core-periphery model initially developed by Wallerstein (1976), which emphasized the role that imperial cores played in the global arena. Such imperial cores were conceived of as dynamic centers of technological and cultural innovation, whereas peripheral regions were assumed to be passive providers of valuable raw materials. Hence, the world system was understood as a power pendulum where competing centers arose and declined, and in doing so drew peripheral regions into their spheres of influence. Other approaches emphasized a network-oriented approach in which processes of territorial annexation were modeled as occurring across strategic communicational and transportation networks. Therefore, the growth of the empire was envisioned as a spatial thickening of these control networks over vast sweeps of land (Liverani 1988; Parker 2002, 2003). Other authors have differentiated primary empires— conceived as resulting from Indigenous developments—from shadow empires, which are thought to have developed in reaction to, or in symbiosis with, one or more adjacent polities (Barfield 2001). By comparison, more agency-oriented perspectives have received less attention. For example, Doyle (1986) focused on the constant negotiation of power across competing poles, demonstrating how peripheries could actually become important catalysts of imperial expansion. Using more pericentric and systemic approaches, he argued that the peripheries of those empires provide the ideal setting to understand the sources of imperialism and the mechanisms of empire making. In Doyle’s words (1986, 25), it was “not in the metropoles but in the peripheries that the sources of imperialism can be discovered.” Perhaps one of the most influential approaches in archaeology is the territorial/ hegemonic continuum (D’Altroy 1992; Parker 2003). At one end of the continuum, a territorial strategy typified a direct form of imperial control aimed to maximize resource extraction. Politically, the subdued regions were under direct rule, and

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the provinces were enclaves of large-scale production to supply the core’s needs. At the other end of the continuum was an indirect form of control based on a low control–low extraction strategy. Known as hegemonic, this strategy was characterized by minimal infrastructural investment and often involved the delegation of political authority to local elites. This resulted in low levels of economic extraction and loose political integration, although one clear advantage was the incorporation of broader territories (Luttwak 1976; Hassig 1988; D’Altroy 1992; Hassig 1992; Parker 2001). Both territorial and hegemonic strategies of control can also be arranged differently across time and space. They can be seen as separate strategies of domination that led to the formation of different kinds of empires (Hassig 1988, 1992), or as distributed along a spatial gradient considering that imperial cores witnessed more direct intervention than more distant provinces (D’Altroy 1992). Most likely, territorial and hegemonic strategies of control were not fixed forms of administration, but rather were in constant flux. In fact, recent research has shown that both strategies could easily coexist within the confines of any empire, forming a dynamic landscape with tight patches of territorial control and larger, looser patches where the empire wielded varying degree of hegemonic power (Williams and D’Altroy 1998; Parker, this volume). Therefore, whereas some regions were the pockets of direct control, other regions were minimally intervened in, a situation than could easily change depending on shifting political and military circumstances. This overview shows that scholars studying ancient empires must tease out the concrete ways in which imperial power was deployed using bottom-up and more agency-oriented perspectives. After all, power was negotiated and constantly tested and contested (Foucault 1980, 1986; Bourdieu 1989). Hence, in order to advance the study of empires and ancient imperialism, it is essential to have a systemic understanding of the ways in which the imperial heartland and the surrounding provinces were integrated, as well as the agency that competing social segments had in shaping the imperial project. In this context, native provincial elites played a fundamental role in mitigating the costs of imperial expansion and control, particularly when the empire fell short in manpower and its capacity to construct state infrastructure declined. Hence, native lords were in many cases charged with implementing the imperial project, whether as part of the new Inka state bureaucracy or as already established administrators (Covey 2006a; Morris and Covey 2006). Previously, I have argued that in the spectrum of territorial-hegemonic

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model, the mediation of intermediate elites was, in fact, central in ensuring effective imperial economic extraction with the least effort while also opening social and economic opportunities for these segments to appropriate, and even modify, the imperial project (Alconini 2008) (Figure 4.1). Taken together, the success of the imperial project depended on how effective it was in encapsulating the aspirations and goals of disparate population segments, including those from Indigenous elite factions. Along these lines, another variant of the territorial-hegemonic spectrum involves a strategy that might seemingly entail the opposite approach. That is, the investment of imperial infrastructure in provinces that did not necessarily generate tangible revenues for the state. This “over-investment” could take the form of a strategic deployment of state infrastructure, like temples or elaborate centers as symbols of the imperial power, even though the economic benefits obtained were not necessarily significant. Divorced from local socioeconomic processes, these “disembedded” imperial centers were strategic imperial nodes that served to enhance further control whenever needed, while also serving as visible state propaganda in contested landscapes (Alconini 2008; also Liverani 1979). With the Inkas, this was, for instance, the case of the Seven Cuzcos, which were replicas of the Cuzco sacred capital in different parts of the empire. Among those were Quito (Chinchaysuyu) and Inkallajata (Collasuyu), which were conceived as visible “theatres of power” (Coben 2006) as the rulers engaged in growing cycles of military conquest in the farther provinces. These are only examples of the ample repertoire of control strategies deployed by ancient empires. As discussed in this volume, there is much to be learned about the commonalities and differences of ancient empires, the different strategies of imperial domination, and the ways in which imperial institutions and practices were absorbed, deployed, and modified by competing social segments. As presented in this chapter, the use of bottom-up, agencyoriented perspectives are particularly useful, particularly when combined with multiscalar research. The Inka: The Land of the Four Quarters Tawantinsuyu (“land of the four quarters”) was a thriving Andean empire that assimilated, synthetized, and reshaped sociopolitical institutions from earlier states and societies (see also Williams et al., this volume). In more than a century (1400–1532 CE), this empire positioned itself as the single most dominant

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Figure 4.1. Territorial and hegemonic control. Alternative forms of provincial control. Produced by Sonia Alconini.

power of the Andean world. At its peak, the Inkas expanded to a subcontinental scale, encompassing a variety of ecologies and ethnicities that differed in sociopolitical complexity. They conquered powerful states along the Pacific coast, myriad chiefdom-level polities in the cold Andean highlands and intermediate valleys, and a range of tribal organizations from the eastern tropical piedmont (Murra 1980; D’Altroy 1992) (Figure 4.2). Tawantinsuyu was a thriving multiethnic empire governed by a set of royal panaca families (elite Inka dynasties) that resided in the capital of Cuzco. The imperial historical narratives describe a swift expansion attributed to the last three Inka rulers. Pachacuti (“Earth Shaker”), founder of the empire and allegedly the ninth emperor, created important state institutions, such as the decimal system, as the backbone of the imperial administration (Rowe 1946; D’Altroy 2002). After defeating the rival Chancas and seizing the power from his father, it is said that Pachacuti engaged in the consolidation of the imperial heartland, including the embellishment of Cuzco with religious monuments dedicated to the state pantheon, the construction of palaces for the royal families and the elaboration of public spaces. Along with his son Tupac Inka Yupanqui, he vanquished a set of kingdoms from the Sacred Valley in order to consolidate power in the imperial core (Bauer and Covey 2002; Covey 2006a). After a series of military campaigns, ideologically legitimized as a divine mandate from the

Figure 4.2. Map of the Inka Empire showing the Four Quarters and the ethnic diversity within its realm. It also shows the frontier regions compared in this study. Produced by Sonia Alconini.

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Inti sun god, Pachacuti’s descendants incorporated sizable territories, developed massive agricultural estates, and constructed road networks and supplementary storage facilities across vast territories (D’Altroy 2002). However, recent archaeological research in the Cuzco basin and the more distant regions of the Collasuyu have revealed that the rise of the Inka empire was earlier and more complex than originally described in the official narratives (Covey 2015; Marsh et al. 2017; Pärssinen and Siiriäinen 1997; see also Overholtzer, this volume, for a parallel case for the Aztec Empire). Although conquest and expansion were often achieved through the deployment of military force, coercion, and diplomatic efforts to culturally integrate conquered peoples were also vital. The control of the provinces was often delegated to relatives of the paramount ruler, or to members from supporting panaca royal families. Yet privileged native lords of different ethnic origins (“Inkas-by-privilege”) and mid-level administrators played a critical role in consolidating imperial power. In order to solidify their ties with the governing elite, they were often granted wives from the royal panaca families from Cuzco and aqllawasi state installations (house of the chosen women). This strategy was successful in solidifying ties among the elite, whether from the provinces or the heartland (Patterson 1992). The rapidity of Inka expansion has been explained in various ways, although a dominant model is the split-inheritance system (Conrad 1981; Conrad and Demarest 1984). According to this system, each new ruler inherited the office to rule from his father the Sapa Inka, although the resources—tributaries and sizable estates—remained under the control of the deceased ruler and his family. This is manifested in the fact that by the end of the imperial era, most of the land in the heartland belonged to the most prestigious royal panacas and not the ruler. Confronted with the need to rebuild a resource base, each new monarch engaged in ever-growing cycles of territorial expansion. This in turn resulted in harsh cycles of alliances and competition over land and tributaries among the royal families and the state (Garcilaso de la Vega 1988 [1609]). Inka Imperial Institutions: Appropriations and Transformations It is also likely that imperial expansion was greatly facilitated by its predecessors (see also Overholtzer in this volume). As with other empires, the Inka appropriated and recycled earlier sociopolitical institutions from its forerunners in innovative ways. Similarly, the extant infrastructure built by earlier empires

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like Wari and Tiwanaku, which included roads, transportation corridors, and ceremonial centers, became assets in the swift Inka imperial expansion (also Williams et al., this volume). Even though these early political organizations declined at least two centuries earlier, part of the state infrastructure—including major religious centers—were strategically appropriated by the Inkas (Eeckhout and López-Hurtado 2018; Yaeger and López Bejarano 2018). Cunningly portraying themselves as the guardians of earlier cultural traditions, the Inka expanded over most of the Andean world thanks to the effective transfer of such modified institutions and practices. Based on traditional reciprocal labor obligations (ayni) and asymmetric forms of redistribution between the regional lords and their subjects (mit’a), the Inka rulers intensified the extraction of resources while astutely positioning themselves on top of the social hierarchy. Utilizing the idiom of reciprocity, these transformed institutions enabled the massive extraction of resources through taxed labor. This also facilitated the appropriation of vast expanses of land and the myriad of resources it contained. This strategy also eased the large-scale construction of infrastructure projects in the provinces, such as fortifications, roads, and administrative centers, which were aimed to support the imperial economy. At the end of each construction cycle or along a carefully orchestrated religious calendar, lavish celebrations were conducted in provincial installations. There, the imperial representatives redistributed valuable gifts, such as textiles and metal adornments, to trusted allies to cement their allegiance (Bray 2003). These ceremonies communicated Inka values and ways of life, and ultimately, they aided in the progressive Inkanization of the regional elite. In the absence of a state-sponsored market economy, the resources accumulated in the more distant administrative centers were partially sent to the capital; more importantly, they served to finance the thriving provincial economies (Costin and Earle 1985; D’Altroy and Earle 1985; Earle 1994). Whenever needed, the empire also relocated entire ethnic groups as mitmaqkuna colonies in order to enlarge the regional production, whether for agriculture, mining, or specialized craft production. In other instances, entire ethnic groups were relocated as punishment or to reward them for their services (Murra 1982). Although most redistributive institutions grew out of earlier cultural practices, some, such as the yanakuna or aqllakuna service, were new imperial inventions. While yanakuna segments served the state and the royal families in a range of tasks including administration, the aqllakuna were a sisterhood of cloistered women exclusively dedicated to the production of status goods

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including textiles and chicha corn beer for the state and its temples. These chosen women spent most of their lives in specialized aqllawasi installations, and some of them received a high status. They were also granted by the ruler as wives to trusted provincial lords in an effort to solidify their ties to the empire. Although it is possible that earlier elite Wari women were involved in chicha beer production at specialized breweries, it is still unclear if they had a high status or played an active role in the Wari imperial politics as the aqllakuna did (Moseley et al. 2005; see also Williams et al. in this volume). With the Inkas, the aqllawasi emerged as a powerful imperial institution aimed at controlling women and the associated production of status goods. They were also fundamental in the construction of kinship ties and blood relations with the ruling elites. Altogether, the rise of new social classes such as the yanakuna or aqllakuna added to the increased privatization of sizable land tracts by the royal families, reveals important transformations at the end of imperial era that need to be further explained. More research is also necessary to reveal the role that competing royal panacas played in the expansion of the empire. Imperial Transformations on the Inka Frontiers Frontiers were contested spaces, and they were in constant flux (Lightfoot and Martinez 1995). As reported in the historical narratives, many regions were successfully incorporated into the Inka Empire, although there were others, such as the Chachapoya, that had to be reconquered multiple times. This was particularly the case when a sustained military presence could not be deployed. As a result, many of these frontier regions became the stages upon which competing social segments—state representatives, native elites, and resident populations— accepted, rejected, and modified Inka imperial institutions. Such intricate situations produced complex processes of inter-elite competition and ethnic friction that ultimately benefited the empire. It also crystalized into unique opportunities for regional elites—whether from imperial or native origins—to enhance their own power and wealth. In this chapter, I compare two regions of the Inka Empire in order to understand the trajectories of frontier lords and the ways in which imperial institutions were deployed, adapted, and transformed by competing social segments. This study also highlights the entangled nature of imperial and colonial encounters and how distant provinces and frontier regions were the catalysts of broader imperial transformations. I will show how these entanglements often

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resulted in the unexpected combination and appropriation of cultural practices, creating in the process new social identities and practices (Dietler 2010). The first region is located on the southeastern frontier in the Yampara territory; the second is situated in the Central Andes to the east of the Titicaca Basin once inhabited by the Kallawaya (see Figure 4.1). In order to examine these transformations, I will assess (1) the nature of the competing elites in these frontier regions; (2) the changes in the Indigenous settlement patterns after the imperial arrival; (3) the circulation of status goods; (4) the use of feasting as a legitimation strategy; (5) the scale of the regional staple economy; and (6) the nature of the imperial road network. This comparison is based on extensive pedestrian surveys and excavations conducted in the past years. I supplement this data with analyses of cultural assemblages, architecture, and ethnohistoric data. The Southeastern Inka Frontier The outer limits of this frontier segment had a set of defensive fortifications, many of which were located on strategic passes and communicational intersections of the steep Cordillera Oriental Mountains. Considering these characteristics, this frontier segment took the form of a soft military perimeter that aimed to deter the intermittent invasions of the belligerent Guaraní tribes from the eastern tropics (Alconini 2016, 2018). Within the borders were a set of small administrative centers such as Oroncota, which were strategically linked by the imperial road. This chapter focuses on the Oroncota Valley, adjacent to the Pilcomayo River (currently in Bolivia) in order to understand the kinds of relations that the Indigenous elite maintained with the Inka empire. The different lines of evidence are discussed below. Yampara Elites This frontier region was inhabited by a number of ethnic groups that maintained varying forms of affiliation with western Aymara-speaking highland polities and eastern Arawak-speaking tribes of the tropical lowlands. This produced a spatial gradient of ethnic groups sharing cultural traditions, languages, and ways of life. At least three competing elite segments can be identified. The first were the tribal Arawak-related leaders like the Payzuno and Chane, who were central in the interregional frontier exchange networks. The second elite

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segment were the native Yampara lords, who shared a set of cultural traditions with Arawak-related populations and who bolstered their status thanks to their privileged alliance with the empire. The third segment was formed by intruding Guaraní tribal leaders from the eastern tropical lowlands (Alconini 2016). With the Inka conquest, most of the western territories were annexed, in the process pushing the Guaraní tribes eastward. As a result, the Yampara were encroached at the two fronts: to the west were the Inkas, and to the east, the Guaraní. This situation enhanced existing interethnic rivalries and tested the stability of the empire in this frontier segment. Indeed, ethnohistoric accounts report how the Yampara lords strengthened their alliances with the Inkas in order to form a common defensive block against the intruding Guaraní. This was the case, for example, of Francisco Aymoro, who received from the ruler Huayna Capac a large contingent of foreign mitmaqkuna warriors to populate the frontier region. In exchange, he distributed land and resources to the newly established military colonies while he administered part of the frontier installations. In doing so, he gained a privileged status and imperial recognition (AGI, Charcas 44, ff. 156,160v; see Julien 1995, 105; Barragán Romano 1994). Because of their service in containing this volatile frontier zone on behalf of the empire, the Indigenous Yampara warriors also acquired the title of “Soldiers of the Inka” (Espinoza Soriano 2006 [1600]). Yampara Settlement Changes An intensive pedestrian survey revealed that the Inka arrival did not change significantly the existing settlement patterns. Instead, earlier settlement trends were enhanced and expanded. In the Oroncota Valley, most of the small sites were on the Pucara Plateau, whereas the few large sites were located on the valley floor as a strategy to maximize the use of fertile land. This trend started earlier in the Classic Yampara period and was enhanced during the Inka era. Instead of promoting radical settlement transformations as the state did in other regions, the Inkas adapted to and expanded existing settlement preferences. In this context, the main Oroncota center was established on the Pucara Plateau in between two existing settlement congregations, perhaps to optimize political control. It was supplemented by auxiliary facilities including a defensive installation on the eastern flank of the plateau, and a support center on the valley floor (Inkarry Moqo) that oversaw the agricultural production. Although relatively small, the main Oroncota building complex followed fine architectural

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Figure 4.3. Inka period settlement pattern in the Oroncota valley in comparison with the earlier Classic Yampara period. The graph also shows the fine architectural style of the Oroncota building complex. Produced by Sonia Alconini.

canons, which are common in prestigious buildings of the imperial core. It was constructed with cut stones in the pillowed style, and in different sections of the building, body-size wall niches depicted elegant double and triple jambs (Alconini 2004, 2016) (Figure 4.3). Circulation of Status Goods in Yampara Distant regions, particularly those at the margins, were often an important economic nexus for the imperial heartland (see also Boozer and Düring in

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this volume). In order to encourage trade and vertical alliances, the Inka sponsored the production of status goods in many provinces. In the southeastern Inka frontier, however, there is little evidence of specialized craft production and the state did not underwrite the exchange of valuable goods. In the Oroncota Valley, the few Inka ceramics or metal goods were found in imperial installations or elite residences. Nevertheless, their frequency was low, indicating that there is insufficient evidence to suggest a thriving Inka prestige-goods economy. As revealed in the excavations of Yoroma (an elite local Yampara center of the valley floor), the residents enjoyed relatively horizontal forms of exchange before the Inka took over. The fact that most imported vessels were found inside burial cists suggests that they were used primarily as mortuary paraphernalia. In the Inka period, imported materials appear to have shifted in function, becoming markers of individual status and wealth (see Figure 4.4). Such goods occur in association with Indigenous elite residences, a situation not previously documented. This suggests that emerging regional lords thrived thanks to their alliances with the empire and that they purposefully redirected exchange networks for their own benefit. In addition, the specialized production of lithic materials continued under the supervision of the Yampara lords at the site, despite the fact that the Inka center of Inkarry Moqo was in close proximity (Alconini 2010, 2016). This situation contrasts with other regions such as the Mantaro Valley in Central

Figure 4.4. Imported ceramic styles in the Huruquilla and Yura styles found in the Yampara region. Produced by Sonia Alconini.

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Peru, where the Inkas progressively inserted Inka materials at the expense of regionally acquired imported goods in order to enhance their presence. This strategy also served in Mantaro as a leveling mechanism to minimize local social difference (Costin and Earle 1989; D’Altroy 1992). Redistributive Feasting in Yampara Commensal feasting and celebrations were important imperial strategies of political annexation and acculturation (Pollock 2015; see also S. T. Smith, this volume). In ancient states and empires such as dynastic Egypt and the Aztecs, such commensal events served to build alliances, underscore social difference, and justify taxation for religious and political ends (Dietler and Hayden 2001; Bray 2003). These events also helped to impart the values and religious ideologies of the governing elite. In the case of the Inka Empire, such commensal celebrations were conducted according to a carefully orchestrated ritual calendar in Cuzco, the capital. Although in a smaller scale, similar rituals were conducted in the plazas and kallanka halls of the provincial centers. During these events, chicha corn beer was lavishly distributed in fine vessels decorated in the imperial styles (Murra 1980; Morris and Thompson 1985). They served to underscore imperial power, as iconic material symbols such as elaborate serving vessels, small aryballoids (globular vessels with narrow necks), and plates were used in public. In provincial and frontier situations, these celebrations also served to facilitate diplomacy and political negotiations. In the southeastern frontier region, the main Inka center of Oroncota was the likely venue of such celebrations. Although Inka serving wares were nearly absent at this site, decorated local Yampara serving wares were used to dispense chicha beer and food (Alconini 2016). In a similar fashion, the fortification of Cuzcotuyo at the frontier edge sponsored diplomatic celebrations that utilized serving wares, although in the local tropical styles. Even though this situation might reflect an absence of accessible state workshops that could produce Inka wares, the presence of fine state architecture in Oroncota suggests that at some point, they had access to specialized laborers. Therefore, it is likely that the use of local serving vessels in state-sponsored celebrations signals a deliberate inclusion of Indigenous materials to ease cultural integration or to empower local food-giving patrons as state representatives.

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Scale of the Staple Economy in Yampara A staple economy is an important condition for the development of a sustainable state economic system (D’Altroy and Earle 1985; Costin and Earle 1989; D’Altroy 1992; see also Boozer and Düring, this volume). For the Inka, staplebased finance provided the resources to fund a range of state activities in the vast provincial regions. Depending on how the surplus generated was invested, these resources could also be converted into political capital. In the southeastern frontier region, most of the agrarian production took place on the lower alluvial floor along the Pilcomayo River. Although the alluvium zone was extremely fertile, it was relatively limited in size. There, the Inka made no effort to construct hydraulic systems, canals, or terraces to expand production, as they did in so many other annexed regions. Consequently, the Inka facilities in this region included a restricted number of storage facilities. A similar situation was documented for the Cuzcotuyo fortification (Table 4.1). Altogether, these data suggest that agricultural production was mainly used for local state requirements (Alconini 2016). Roads and Networks of Integration in Yampara Whether imperial expansion is gradual and uniform or sporadic and disjointed, it is greatly facilitated by efficient communication corridors (Hassig 1991; Earle 2009; Hitcher 2012; see also Williams et al., this volume). The Inkas are

Table 4.1. Storage Capacity Comparison of Several Regions during the Inka Empire

Region

No Storehouses

Source

Mantaro Valley

1,992

D’Altroy and Earle 1992

Cotapachi, Cochabamba

2,491

Gyarmati and Varga 1999

Huanuco Pampa

497

Morris 1982, Morris and Thompson 1985

Willka Waman

700

Gasparini and Margolis 1980

Oroncota, Chuquisaca

82

Alconini 2016

Cuzcotuyo, Chuquisaca

27

Alconini 2016

Kallawaya region (eastern Andes)

1,500

Alconini, this volume

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well known for establishing a complex road network (the Qhapac Ñan) that linked the capital Cuzco with several provincial centers. These roads were often expanded over existing communicational corridors. They were supplemented by tampu (inn) resting stations and warehouses that supplied the army and the imperial emissaries with food, clothing, and other necessities (Hyslop 1984). In the frontier margins of this region, a set of informal routes connected the defensive nodes with each other. In the Oroncota Valley, a communication corridor linked the Pucara Plateau with other imperial facilities. This communication corridor ran around the Pucara and was marked by rock-art sites located at critical passes. Most rock-art sites were decorated with local motifs, suggesting that this route predates the Inka era. This road led to the upper portion of the plateau and to the rest of the support-state installations on the valley bottom. It is likely that this route had ritual purposes. In fact, oral history recorded in the region narrates how the local hero Inkarry resisted the Inkas in the Pucara, and later the Spaniards, for which he was decapitated and his body parts mutilated. It is said that his head is buried somewhere on the Pucara and that his body will grow back in order to one day return to life. Interestingly, two of the Inka installations are known as Inkarry and Inkarry Moqo, in honor of this pan-Andean hero. Therefore, although the plateau clearly has a defensive role as a natural fortification (Cobo 1993 [1582–1587]), it was also a sacred mountain that came to be associated with the mythical hero Inkarry. The Eastern Central Frontier of Kallawaya This frontier segment is located to the east of the Titicaca Basin, in a region of marked altitudinal variability (see Figure 4.2). It is comprised of the cold upper Andean Puna Plateau that is suitable for pastoralism. To the east extend the steep mountain flanks that form a chain of narrow valleys. Beyond are the lower tropical piedmont and Yunga. As a result, this region has a variety of resources produced in the various ecological zones. It also forms a natural corridor that leads to Apolo, Moxos, and the upper Amazon. Kallawaya Elites Before the Inkas, this region was inhabited by the Indigenous Yunga populations, perhaps of Arawak-Puquina origins. Interspersed were a set of highland

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colonies of Aymara affiliation such as the Omasuyus. These colonies were established to facilitate the transfer of valuable resources to the Titicaca basin. At the arrival of the Inka, these highland outposts were expelled, and the Inkas struck a successful alliance with the local Yunga-Kallawaya. Given that the region had alluvial gold and was optimal for the production of corn and coca, the empire invested heavily in the development of infrastructure, including the construction of extensive agrarian terraces and canals. It also prompted the influx of foreign mitmaqkuna colonists, who were transplanted from distant regions to create productive enclaves for the empire. In this process, the local YungaKallawaya, known to be skilled traveling shamans, herbal healers, and traders, became instrumental in expanding the exchange networks across the tropics on behalf of the state (Saignes 1984; Meyers 2002). Indigenous leaders such as Ari Capacquiqui and Ayabaya were ordered by the Inka rulers Tupac Inka Yupanqui and Huayna Capac to open a road that penetrated deep into the forest in order to facilitate trade and military conquest. As a result, the Kallawaya lords were granted a privileged status (Meyers 2002, 100). In a drawing of Guamán Poma de Ayala made in the sixteenth century (Alconini 2011, 1980 [1613]), the Kallawayas are depicted as carriers of the royal litter, an honor reserved for only trusted ethnicities (Figure 4.5). Kallawaya Settlement Changes The Inka imperial presence greatly impacted the local settlement systems. With the influx of agrarian colonies (mitmaqkuna), there was a substantial increase in the number of transient residences and shelters (phullus) distributed along the agrarian terraces of the temperate Quechua mountain flanks. On the upper Puna, an area with extensive pastures and water reservoirs, there was also an increase and enlargement of the camelid corrals. One of the most important imperial transformations of this once-agropastoral economy was the separation of plant agriculture and camelid pastoralism, which was now in the hands of specialized ethnic groups. Despite the proliferation of small sites, the largest settlement congregations took the form of protected citadels that were a continuation of earlier settlement forms (Figure 4.6). By comparison, the few Inka centers were small and placed atop local settlements along the imperial road. Considering that the most important congregation of warehouses were in the Indigenous Yunga-Kallawaya settlements, it is likely that the regional elite oversaw their administration (Alconini 2011).

Figure 4.5. Drawing from Guamán Poma de Ayala depicting the Kallawaya as trusted royal litter bearers. The text describes how the “Callauayas” transported the ruler Tupac Inka Yupanqui and his coya queen. Image available at https://es.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Medicina_tradicional_andina#/media/File:Kallawayas.png.

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Figure 4.6. Inka period settlement distribution in the Kallawaya region, in comparison with the earlier period. Produced by Sonia Alconini.

Circulation of Status Goods in Kallawaya Substantial amounts of Inka status goods flowed into the Kallawaya region, although they were concentrated in a few Inka installations only. Most of the population continued using crude Yunga-style local pottery. By comparison, the residents of the few Inka imperial facilities enjoyed access to fine polychrome imperial pottery. Some of the Inka styles included the Urcosuyo Inka polychrome and Taraco Inka polychrome variants decorated with zoomorphic and phytomorphic motifs. They were both manufactured locally and imported. Considering the similar chemical signatures revealed by the p-XRF analysis, some of these elaborate ceramics were produced in the state workshop of Milliraya in the Titicaca basin (Alconini 2013). This state-sponsored workshop produced imperial pottery in the Inka Taraco and Urcosuyo polychrome styles that were later distributed to the southern Collasuyu quarter and the Cuzco region (Spurling 1992) (Figure 4.7). In addition to having privileged access to these ceramics, some of the Kaata Pata Inka center residents also engaged in the small-scale refinement of metals.

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Figure 4.7. Example of Urcosuyo Inka polychrome and Taraco Inka polychrome ceramic styles found in the Kallawaya region. Photos by Sonia Alconini.

Redistributive Feasting in Kallawaya At Kaata Pata, large middens clustered around the central plaza reveal that state-sponsored celebratory events occurred in the Inka provincial administrative centers of the region. There, we recovered large quantities of aryballoids and broken serving vessels used to dispense chicha beer. Along with these remains, there was a sizable amount of camelid remains. Many of the finely elaborate serving vessels were made in the Inka styles, including the Urcosuyo polychrome and Taraco polychrome styles discussed earlier (see also Alconini 2013). Whether this center was inhabited by royal Orejónes from the imperial core or by Inkanized local lords, the public display of symbolically charged materials allowed them to enhance their status while also advertising their allegiance to the empire. The Staple Economy in Kallawaya This frontier region experienced a substantial modification of the landscape as seen in the construction of an extensive system of farming terraces and canals on the mountain flanks, which no doubt served to increase the scale of agricultural production. Along these farming platforms, circular stone constructions (phullus) were utilized for storage and as transient residences. Around 2,290 phullus

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Figure 4.8. The Kallawaya region, storage capacity. The shows the concentration of storage units in different areas. Produced by Sonia Alconini.

have been documented, although I conservatively estimate that only two thirds were used as warehouses (1,500 storage units) (Figure 4.8). This massive scale of production and storage far exceeded the local requirements. It is likely that a portion was transferred to the inner provinces while the rest remained in the frontier region to finance the eastward imperial expansion (Alconini 2011). Roads and Networks of Integration in Kallawaya The system of roads in the Kallawaya region was extensive. It crossed diverse ecologies along the altitudinal spectrum and connected the intermountain Andean valleys with the eastern tropical lowlands. Expanding over earlier trading routes that once thrived in the Tiwanaku era, the Inka established a set of surveillance outposts along the road to control the range of resources flowing across. This was supplemented with large tampu facilities, such as the

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one in Maukallajta in the lower Camata Valley. Despite the rugged topography, remains of protection lateral walls, terraces, and canals, are still present along the road. Until recently, extensive llama caravans crossed the region, facilitating the exchange of valuable resources such as coca leaves, minerals, incense, and pigments across the environmental gradient. Discussion and Conclusions A comparison between two distant frontier regions reveals important aspects of the Inka political economy and the role that Indigenous elite played in the implementation of the imperial project. To summarize, we can identify six defining characteristics of regional development in the Yampara region: (1) a limited expansion of the local economy that could be utilized to supply the state’s regional needs; (2) an intensification of existing settlement trends; (3) a reorientation of prevailing exchange networks in order to benefit the regional elites; (4) a near absence of a prestige economy based on imperial goods; (5) the use of local serving vessels in state-sponsored celebrations; and (6) the presence of state corridors. The colonial narratives suggest that the Yampara were valuable allies and imperial warriors who manned and defended the imperial frontier in this region. As a result, they were esteemed frontier soldiers and privileged imperial allies. All these characteristics suggest the development of a relatively autonomous and independent elite in this frontier segment. After the arrival of the Inka, these frontier lords cunningly negotiated their social position and retained their power base. This in turn translated into an enlargement of their status and wealth, and as a consequence, the solidification of local support. Cross-culturally, the rise of relatively independent and autonomous imperial elites often relates to the development of regions, colonies, and vassal states that maintained loose ties with their imperial heartlands. If transplanted from different regions, these colonies were more likely established long-term, developing, diversified subsistence economies to respond to the emerging local requirements (Steffen 1980; Paynter 1985; see also Boozer, Düring, and Yao, this volume). Although part of the surplus might have been for export, most of the resources were utilized locally to foster the regional economies. Because of these conditions, the nascent elite developed a strong local support. This in turn produced complex processes of cultural hybridization and colonial entanglements. As in the southeastern frontier, imperial emissaries decided to adopt Indigenous ceramic assemblages as part of the festivities conducted at the Inka installations.

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I posit that this simultaneous use of fine imperial architecture and local serving wares is an example of the complex negotiations that took place in these distant locales. If frontier zones were places of encounter following White’s concept of the “middle ground,” it is likely that they were used by competing social segments as spaces to adjust their cultural and political differences creatively, producing in the process new meanings and social relations (White 1991; Malkin 2002). In this scenario, it is feasible that this ambiguous and unexpected use of local and imperial materials and symbols in public celebrations provided emerging Inkanized Indigenous lords with the opportunity to display their status and role in the burgeoning social order. The imperial emissaries might have also advertised their acquiescence to locally valued symbols as means to rally native support. In comparison, in the Kallawaya frontier we can reconstruct the development of more dependent and conservative elites, whose power was bolstered thanks to direct imperial support. The native Kallawaya leaders were inserted into the imperial bureaucracy as middlemen, and they played a key role in administering and developing economic production on behalf of the empire. In doing so, they enjoyed access to valuable imperial materials while engaging in transborder trade. This is evidenced in (1) the significant change in the settlement structure, tied to the influx of specialized mitmaqkuna producers; (2) the substantial modification of the landscape with agrarian terraces and llama corrals to maximize agropastoral production; (3) the significant investment in a staple economy destined for export; (4) the privileged use of fine Inka pottery to advertise status and imperial affiliation; (5) the participation in commensal celebrations with elaborate Inka serving vessels; and (6) the establishment of imperial roads to ease frontier trade. The rise of dependent and conservative elites is cross-culturally expected in situations where the empire has strategic interests in the frontier regions. Although part of the revenues was used locally, a sizable proportion was shipped to the heartland or to other critical regions (Steffen 1980; Paynter 1985). As a result, the elite developed strong ties with the imperial heartland in order to maintain their privileged status. They were charged with administering the production and extraction of resources on behalf of the empire, and in turn, they benefited from the privileged access to status imperial materials. Because of this situation, it is common that such elite factions were often conservative, using public events to advertise their imperial affiliation (Smith 2003b). The increase of mixed styles in the ceramics and architecture also reveals broader

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efforts of competing social segments to adopt and modify imperial and local materials and values for their own ends. The nuanced nature of both strategies—whether to develop direct ties with the heartland or to broaden their power base locally—could only be revealed by using multiple lines of evidence in order to tease out the complexities of the imperial entanglements. Using a territorial-hegemonic approach would only have obscured the multifaceted ways in which economic, political, social, ideological, and military forms of power were intertwined. We would have erroneously assumed a more indirect form of control in the Yampara region, considering that the administration was delegated to powerful native lords, even though there was an overt investment in state architecture that reproduced the heartland canons. Likewise, in the Kallawaya region, we would have assumed a more direct and territorial control considering the marked levels of economic extraction and the presence of state infrastructure like terraces and storage facilities. However, the actual Inka presence was limited to few locales, which were, in fact, inhabited by imperial representatives, whether from the core of from local origins. They were charged with disseminating the imperial project to a broader Indigenous Yunga population. This comparative study also reveals important aspects of the Inka imperial machinery and the ways in which state institutions and practices were actively deployed and transformed by competing social segments from the extant provinces and frontiers. This was expressed in at least three ways. The first was redistributive feasting, a key imperial strategy that fomented elite alliance and the progressive Inkanization of the native elite and their supporters. In the southeastern frontier, this institution served for external diplomacy, although local serving vessels were utilized in these highly charged celebratory events. It is possible that this reflects an absence of state-sponsored pottery workshops, but it is also likely that this strategy reflects a concerted imperial effort to create a sense of cultural integration through the active manipulation of local symbols. These celebratory events might also have created the conditions for emerging Inkanized lords to advance their own agendas in their own terms. Second, the Indigenous elites, whether of Yampara or Kallawaya origin, played a fundamental role in implementing and modifying the imperial project. Both of these elite groups received a privileged imperial status, although their duties varied. The Yampara were incorporated as valuable frontier soldiers, famous for their skilled use of poisoned arrows, whereas the Kallawaya were important traveling shamans and frontier traders. The alliance that

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each elite faction struck with the empire provided them with opportunities to advance their own aspirations. The Yampara received state support in order to strengthen the frontier defense against the invading Guaraní, whereas the Kallawaya gained control of their land, which was once dotted by intruding highland colonies. As a result, they developed different elite aggrandizing strategies, whether their power stemmed from imperial patronage or from direct regional support. Third, imperial entanglements are complex, multidirectional, and often come with unexpected consequences. This is illustrated in the manner in which portable goods and non-portable infrastructure were used, manipulated, and appropriated. On the Yampara frontier, the fine construction of the state facilities that followed the strictest imperial canons was matched with the limited use of imperial pottery and status materials. The opposite occurred in the Kallawaya frontier, where state infrastructure was constructed in the more popular intermediate style, even though the residents enjoyed conspicuous access to fine polychrome Inka pottery and related status objects. This apparent mismatch between imperial architecture, portable materials, and associated practices reveals the multifarious forms of Indigenous-imperial entanglements, the different forms of state colonization, and the complex interface between the imperial propaganda and the actual economic outcomes. If Inkanization entailed the acculturation of the Indigenous elite based on the imperial values, the outcome was unpredictable and often varied depending upon existing native cultural traditions, political agendas, and the levels of control exercised by the state. Although many institutions served to create a sense of cultural cohesion among the elite, there were also state regulations in place to ensure the maintenance of ethnic difference. Individuals were severely punished if they abandoned their traditional clothing, a strategy to maintain ethnic distinctions (Cobo 1993 [1582–1587], 206; Oghburn 2008). Although this might have eased administration considering that ethnic groups had different forms of specialization, it also deepened existing interethnic rivalries. Therefore, Inkanization as a programmatic endeavor was targeted exclusively to selected elite factions. Hence, it is likely that it was very different from Romanization or Egyptianization efforts in their respective empires (see Boozer, this volume, for a wider discussion). Finally, to move beyond dichotomous direct/indirect, territorial/hegemonic, or core/periphery models, this study also reveals that by using multiscalar bottom-up research that favors pericentric and agency oriented perspectives,

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we can actually gain a more nuanced understanding of the mechanics of ancient empires. After all, the imperial project was a collective endeavor, where provincial lords, imperial representatives, and Indigenous populations had competing interests and intensions, and where power imbalances were actively negotiated, contested, and reshaped. As the Inka Empire expanded, conquering myriad political organizations and cultural traditions, it also transformed itself in the process. Acknowledgments This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the National Geographic Society over the past years. I wish to thank those many colleagues and friends in the United States and Bolivia who made possible this research. I benefited enormously from the discussions in Santa Fe, which allowed me to think about things in different ways.

Chapter Five

Agents of Empire Imperial Agendas and Provincial Realities in Roman Egypt

Anna L. Boozer

Introduction An empire is a grand world made from humble components. No single person or political body can fully command and control the life course of empires. Instead, a diverse range of imperial agents—metropolitans, political and military leaders, priests, farmers, women, and other individuals—make empires. These agents contribute to a long chain of mundane activities such as migration, private enterprise, and agricultural endeavors, which help to create the massive entities that we know as empires. The diffuse nature of empire building entails that imperial participants from the top, bottom, and in between made and remade the empire. For this reason, empires always have been and always will remain diverse and dynamic entities. This chapter addresses the variegated nature of ancient empires through examining the people who made Rome’s borderlands in Egypt’s Eastern and Western Deserts (Figure 5.1). Deserts are ideal laboratories for exploring agentive diversity because of the way that scholars have studied them in the past. Unlike other so-called natural boundaries such as rivers and mountains, deserts were once viewed as negative voids or transitional spaces. In recent decades, scholars have begun to explore the role of deserts more thoroughly, looking for similar patterns within imperial developments. Mario Liverani, for example, identified changes in land use, irrigation techniques, trade networks, and transportation animals as typical exemplars of Roman intervention in deserts (2003, xv). While Liverani emphasized the similarities of these desert regions by comparing imperial repertoires, these regions also manifest great variability. A closer look at the imperial agents who executed these repertoires demonstrates 115

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Figure 5.1. Map of Roman Egypt with key sites. Produced by M. Mathews (CC-BY).

how diverse local experiences develop within empires, even within borderlands in similar environments. It is to be expected that imperial repertoires fluctuated considerably in their nature and intensity (D’Altroy 1992). Despite this expectation, archaeologists (and historians) often lose much of this inherent variability by seeking out common themes, such as Liverani did for deserts under Roman rule. An emphasis upon themes and typologies, while useful for macro-scale comparisons, also encourages archaeologists to use comparative data to “fill-in” missing data from other regions and time periods without due consideration. There are perils that come from transposing data from one region to another. This common archaeological and historical practice conflates data and smoothes over

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differences across—and within—empires. I address this issue by exploring how imperial agents adapted imperial repertoires within two desert borderlands in close proximity to one another. This comparison illustrates the variability that could occur even within seemingly similar imperial arenas. Another reason why archaeologists smooth over regional data is because the archaeological record may not dramatically reveal the ways in which imperial systems altered preexisting political, economic, and social configurations (Berdan 1996; Parker 2003). How then do archaeologists remain mindful of diversity while dealing with these evidentiary lacunae? I address this second issue by exploring the more elusive impacts that imperial interactions created, namely changes in agricultural products, construction methods, and performance across landscapes. While these changes can be accessed through archaeological data, past methodological and theoretical approaches have not always allowed them to be seen. Finally, I explore the longue durée of imperial development in order to understand how the Roman Empire built upon past imperial repertoires, adapted itself to changing circumstances, and finally gave way to subsequent imperial formations. The long history of imperial formation and reformation demonstrates how agents acclimated to each region and took part in the perpetual series of adjustments that imperial integration required. Models of Roman Imperialism The Roman Empire is the paradigmatic ancient empire. Rome’s imperial afterlife exemplifies the steady hold that it has had upon subsequent imperial formations and ambitions. Byzantine and Ottoman imperial formations built upon Roman repertoires, reforging them to suite their own needs. More recent imperial formations, such as British, Spanish, and fascist Italian, self-consciously grounded the indisputability of their own rule in the existence of Rome rather than reworking specific repertoires. The imagined Rome of these later empires, in turn, shaped subsequent academic study of Rome. For example, scholars such as Theodor Mommsen often cast Roman imperialism as a reluctant last step used to deal with threats imposed by unruly neighbors. This formulation mirrored how the British Empire portrayed its own colonial endeavors (although there was a division between what the nineteenth century publicists were saying and what the actual policymakers and military men were saying). Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

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which was originally published between 1776 and 1788, inaugurated the modern era of academic reflection upon Roman imperialism. Gibbon’s reliance upon primary sources was revolutionary, and yet his theories that Rome succumbed to barbarians due to a decline in civic virtues and the rise of Christianity now appears dated and erroneous (Brown 1997 [1971]; Wickham 2005). In more recent years, Edward Luttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (1976) influenced generations of scholars, mostly outside of Roman studies, to explore the territorial/hegemonic dichotomy (e.g., Hassig 1988; D’Altroy 1992; Parker 2001, 2003; Alconini 2008). Luttwak suggested that the Roman army shifted from a strategy of “forward defense” to “defense-in-depth” during the fourth century; instead of attacking hostile outsiders before they breached Roman borders, Rome allowed incursions into Roman territory before neutralizing the threat. Many Roman historians have noted that Luttwak’s characterization of “defense-in-depth” is incompatible with Roman imperial ideology, their strategic planning capabilities, and the evidence from contemporary Roman historians such as Ammianus Marcellinus (Whittaker 1994). Luttwak is a political scientist who has consulted for various departments in the United States military and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He is not a trained Roman historian, which is surely partially responsible for the weaknesses in his argument. Dated though Haverfield, Gibbons, and Luttwak may be, their influence still finds its way into current studies of Roman imperialism (e.g., Freeman 1996). In particular, scholars have overstated Roman strategic planning capabilities and homogeneities among agents. For example, Mattern’s 1999 book Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate exploited documentary sources to argue that elite values and ideologies governed Roman imperialism, although she did not suppose that these values persisted into late antiquity. Within this Roman ethos, Mattern suggested we find imperial strategy and even grand strategy (Mattern 1999, 81–82). Monolithic theories also echo in arguments by scholars who describe a systematic “processes of annexation” (Freeman 1996) as if there were a series of codified steps emanating from the core, which ultimately led to full annexation by Rome. Academic concepts such as Romanization also underscore the role of Rome in bringing “civilization” to conquered territories, in much the same way as the British saw themselves carrying out the “white man’s burden.” Historically, scholars used the concept of Romanization to describe the process through which local peoples adopted Roman social and political identities (e.g., Haverfield 1905). Romanization has also given birth to spin-off concepts such as

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Hellenization, Assyrianization, Egyptianization, and Inkanization (see S. T. Smith and Alconini, this volume). David Mattingly, among others, has carefully deconstructed Romanization, arguing that it is a theoretically weak concept that does little to describe on-the-ground complexities (Mattingly 2002, 2011). The term often serves as descriptive shorthand rather than a robust analysis of the complex dynamics of imperial interaction on the local level. Nonetheless, Romanization persists as a dominant concept in scholarly articles and textbooks (Millett 1990a, 1990b; Woolf 1992b; Terrenato 1998; Fentress 2000; Churchin 2004; Oltean 2007; Yiftach-Firanko 2009). These more recent formulations of Romanization are more nuanced than they were in the early twentieth century; they recognize that individuals from different social and economic strata appropriated Roman goods and practices differently. In spite of such progress, empirical evidence demonstrates the mismatch between this homogenizing theory and ones that foreground the intricacy and multidirectionality of imperial encounters, such as the term entanglement, which we use in this volume (for an extended discussion, see S. T. Smith, this volume; see also Thomas 1991). Entanglement better addresses the way that Roman statecraft built upon a preexisting substratum of rule in the Greek world; it rejects an us/them dichotomy in favor of a shared, intertwined engagement between peoples and between peoples and things (Thomas 1991; Dietler 2010; Khatchadourian 2016). Indeed, in each of Rome’s provinces, there were complex stratigraphies of social, political, and economic influences that played out in the material and social realms. Roman Egypt illustrates these complexities with its multilayered history of foreign conquest, which included the Kushite, Assyrian, Achaemenid Persian, Ptolemaic, and finally Roman Empires. Each of these imperial formations left an imprint in their wake for subsequent empires to address and rework. The concept of Romanization is insufficient for addressing how agents interwove these various imperial formations into their daily lives and material culture. It also fails to address how imperial agents themselves adapted to local conditions, which I argue is of critical importance when assessing how imperial formations imprint themselves upon provinces. These concepts drawn from the study of Rome—reluctant imperialism, Romanization, and grand strategy—have influenced academic perspectives on numerous other ancient empires. These perspectives have led scholars working in other regions to suppose that the imperial elite had substantial measures of control over their holdings and that it is possible to understand imperialism

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from a macro-scale perspective. For this reason, I argue that it is critical to reexamine our assumptions about the Roman Empire not simply in order to better understand the Roman Empire itself, but also to rethink Rome’s outsized influence upon the study of other empires. I further suggest that this reexamination of Rome must carefully consider the agents who executed imperial orders, because they are the ones who actualized imperial demands. Intermediate agents, termed “intermediate elite” by Elson and Covey (2006), served as a critical link between the monarch and the local populace. These intermediate agents included military leaders, the local elite, priests, and so on. An exploration of these agents fosters a more dynamic discussion of imperial arrangements than Luttwak and others have suggested. This agent-centered approach questions the empirical value of grand strategy arguments because it subverts the notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing imperial core. It also demonstrates that shorthand concepts (e.g., Romanization) provide inadequate explorations of on-the-ground realities. Baring the conspicuous exceptions of Caesar in Gaul and Trajan in Dacia, no Roman committee or emperor ever sat down with a map to plot a land grab in the territorial way that we associate with the imperialist nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Beard 2015, 163). Even these special cases did not neatly correspond to the aspirations of the imperial elite residing in the capital. In sum, we must release rigid notions of imperial planning and design in favor of a more fluid, on-the-ground dynamic. Imperialism was not a closed system; internal and external influences shaped the formation and reformation of each empire over its life history. A closer look at the chain of agents who made the empire elucidates this fluidity. Agents of Empire States and empires are administered through a hierarchical decision-making process. Those agents at the higher levels “tend to be concerned with policy, while those in the lower echelons are ordinarily involved with more specific decision-making activities” (Spencer 1990, 10–12). An empire’s centralized decision-making structure is manifest through the appearance of common repertoires that bind the empire together and promote the incorporation of groups with diverse social identities and materialities. This is why different regions within empires may look similar when examined on the macro scale. From the fourth century BCE until the third century CE, Roman foreign policy was decided by wealthy men who were largely indistinguishable from

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the class of men—for they were all men—that composed our extant collections of Greek and Latin literature (Mattern 1999, 2). These decision makers did not have training in the specialized military strategic thought that we associate with imperial grand strategy today. Roman emperors, senators, and imperial governors rarely (if ever) had dedicated military training or even regional expertise (Birley 1957; Mattern 1999, 16–18); they relied on the field army commanders who had these skills. The elite made many decisions about senior military posts on the basis of moral qualities and eloquence rather than knowledge or skill (Saller 1982, 95–98, 101–3). Roman agents learned through on-the-job training, which was molded by local peoples, places, and experiences (Harris 2016, 209). They were thus permitted great latitude, a benefit that derived in part from the design and execution of Roman foreign policy. Imperial agents included an “intermediate elite” (Elson and Covey 2006) consisting of the military and political agents who represented Rome, as well as locals who benefited from Roman rule. The self-interests of these local agents often, but not always, complemented imperial demands. While agents within the imperial core certainly sent directives to local areas, it was up to these intermediate agents to adapt these commands to on-the-ground realities. When adapting to local conditions, imperial agents relied heavily upon the provincial elite for guidance. This local cooperation enabled the Roman Empire to create remarkably small bureaucratic and military systems to consolidate their holdings. Clifford Ando put this small bureaucracy in terms that any academic can understand; the Roman Empire was able to hold together a population of fifty million people that stretched from England to Mesopotamia using an administration smaller than that of a modern American research university (Ando 2000; likewise, the British Empire seems to have been run by a staff of only about four thousand people; Greene 2000). Sometimes regional adaptations reverberated back to the core, resulting in broad and strategic change. In other instances, these ad hoc decisions were locally specific, and agents did not communicate regional minutiae back to supervisors in Rome. In short, Roman imperial agents were forced to adapt themselves to local conditions in order to execute their orders, and only some of these adaptations returned to the core. Imperial agents did not simply impose their control over local societies, but rather “tunneled their way into them” by learning about local customs and material conditions (Darwin 2012, 10). The adaptations made by these agents, both imperial and local, helped to generate the variability that we detect within empires.

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Imperial agents in both the core and in regional areas were themselves changed by the very nature of what was required for a successful imperial encounter (Parker 2009). Although imperial agents may have followed an overarching ideology and deployed common imperial repertoires, they had to adjust and apply them in a dynamic fashion. Equipment, institutions, supplies, materials, methods, and values had to be adapted to suit each local area. Furthermore, the lack of detailed, timely information and sophisticated concepts of military strategy suggests that while decisions about borderlands may have been logical, they were not part of a grand strategy in the manner that Luttwak and others have discussed. Although scholars cannot help but attempt to create order out of historic events, we must accept that ad hoc decisions took on a more significant role than we have previously allowed. Imperial repertoires must be situated within local societies and among agents at all levels in order to understand state strategies, local participation, and long-term impacts. In the following case studies, I suggest that the local conditions of each desert frontier fractured the monolithic idea of Roman imperialism (cf. Luttwak 1976). Instead of desert borderlands serving as an example of Roman grand strategy, as Liverani suggested, we find that imperial agents adapted imperial repertoires to each local area, combining different ranges of formal control with zones of influence or informal domination. The repertoires that imperial agents selected for each region betray similar agendas set by elites in the capital, but local conditions influenced how intermediate agents shaped these repertoires on the ground. In particular, I examine how agents adapted repertoires relating to landscapes, resettlement, trade networks, and military intervention. I based this list loosely upon the one that Mario Liverani developed (2003) in order to illustrate the nuances gained when exploring the roles of imperial agents in shaping imperial repertoires. I also take a longue durée approach to these repertoires in order to underscore the important role of past empires in shaping subsequent ones. Case Study: The Oasis Magna The first case study focuses upon Egypt’s Great Oasis—Oasis Magna—which lies in the Sahara, west of the Nile (Figure 5.2). There are no insurmountable barriers leading to the Great Oasis, although the desert is hyper arid, with only the oases to provide vital sources of water. Rome co-opted this area soon after its conquest of Egypt; it was “inherited” from their Ptolemaic predecessors

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Figure 5.2. Map of the Great Oasis with key sites. Produced by M. Mathews (CC-BY).

without the need for military action. This region, consisting of the Dakhleh Oasis and the Khargeh Oasis, served as an established Roman border region. It was closely linked with the Small Oasis, consisting of Bahariya and Farafra, as well as administrative areas in the Nile Valley, namely Thebes. Prestige and staple agricultural goods, trade monitoring, and creating a buffer zone offer potential reasons for elites residing in the capital to wish to develop this area. As such, resettlement, land use, trade networks, and military intervention are among the imperial repertoires most evident in the Great Oasis. Archaeological remains within the Western Desert have been well preserved, a result of the lack of development on top of most sites and the anaerobic conditions typically found in arid environments. Today, looting, adventure tourism, and ambitious population resettlement and agriculture schemes initiated under former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak threaten the continued preservation of these sites. Modern research in the Western Desert began with regional surveys conducted over the past forty years (Churcher and Mills 1995; Ikram and Rossi 2004; Ikram 2005; Rossi and Ikram 2013). These surveys revealed a substantial settled population during the Roman period that rivaled later concentrations of occupation until the 1970s, at which point modern occupational

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densities overtook ancient ones. These surveys also revealed a range of site types: agricultural settlements, towns, cities, temples, cemeteries, and fortresses. The distribution of fortresses is unequal between the two oases of the Great Oasis. The Khargeh Oasis contains fortresses along its length (north-south) and particularly near the capital, Hibis. By contrast, the Dakhleh Oasis contains fewer fortresses, which are distributed across its width (east-west). Recent evidence suggests that the agricultural development of the Great Oasis may have been primarily for local consumption, while the agriculture of the Small Oasis (Farafra, Bahariya) may have been developed primarily for the exploitation of prestige agricultural goods. Nascent evidence suggests that Dakhleh and Khargeh particularly focused upon agricultural staples. For example, documentary sources suggest that mundane agricultural goods from Dakhleh were traded to the Small Oasis, which was turned over to cotton production (Bagnall 2008b). Regardless of the organizational scheme, it is clear that Roman imperial policy in the Western Desert turned to resource extraction employing a staple and wealth finance system (cf. D’Altroy and Earle 1985; S. T. Smith 1995). The Roman investment in the agricultural development of a peripheral area mirrors a common pattern among numerous ancient empires (Liverani 1988; Wilkinson 1995; Ur 2009; Attema 2018; Colburn 2018; Morandi Bonacossi 2018, also Düring, Yao, Alconini, and Williams et. al., this volume). Most of the economic benefit that Rome received directly from the Great Oasis manifested itself through taxation, while intermediate agents profited from local economic exchanges, and poorer peoples benefited from access to expanded agricultural land. Improvements to irrigation systems can be found in both oases. Qanats, which were introduced under Persian rule, appear to have been expanded in the Roman period in order to reclaim yet more fertile land from the desert (Chauveau 2001; Wuttman, Gonon, and Thiers 2000; Wuttman 2001; Schacht 2003; Stiros 2006; Youssef 2012; de Angeli 2013). Local peoples surely introduced Roman agents to this technology. These imperial agents, in turn, invested in expanding the qanats in order to meet imperial goals of resource extraction. The agricultural potential of Dakhleh and Khargeh was not simply expanded under Roman rule; new crops were also introduced. Cotton in particular was introduced to Egypt for the first time in approximately the second century CE (Wild 1997; Chauveau 2005; Bagnall 2008b; Gradel, Letellier-Willemin, and Tallet 2012). Cotton was more suited to cultivation in the oases than in the Nile Valley. The only sources for cotton prior to its introduction in Egypt were Nubia

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and India. While there are many advantages of cotton over linen and wool, the Roman elite in the capital did not demand this product when Rome took over the oases. Local landholders may have introduced cotton because they were acting in their own self-interest within the advantageous conditions created by Roman rule. This investment in agricultural resources required the resettlement of new peoples to the oases. We find that a massive population increase occurred in the centuries after Roman rule, along with the official designation of some settlements as cities. Trimithis (the Roman occupational horizon at Amheida) was declared a city sometime before ca. 300 CE. Along with Mut, Trimithis was one of two official cities located within Dakhleh (Bagnall and Ruffini 2012, 46–47). Two ostraca, found during the first season of excavation at Amheida, firmly establish its identity as Trimithis (Bagnall and Ruffini 2004). Another city, Mut, was continuously occupied until the present day (Hope 2005, 2008). In addition to the cities of Trimithis and Mut, towns (Kellis), agricultural settlements (Ain el-Gedida), and dispersed farm houses (like those near Amheida) also appeared (on Kellis, see Bagnall 2008a; Hope 2016; on Ain el-Gedida, see Aravecchia 2012, 2018; on the so-called columbarium farm houses, see Mills 1993; Boozer 2019). The increased agricultural capacity of the Great Oasis cannot be explained without exploring the role of the local elite. These elite were co-opted to work for the empire. Local elites profited from Roman rule through increased access to imports and potentially from the taxes and tolls placed upon on the caravans that moved through the region. The use of cotton, linen, and other textiles as prestige exports suggests an elite or imperial interest in international exchange (compare to Tyson 2014, 490–92). The exploitation of marginal land has also been shown to be advantageous for less wealthy individuals living within the Roman Empire (Harris 2018; compare to Yao, this volume). In this manner, local economic changes may have catered to the interests of the local agents (non-elites and intermediate elites) more directly than to those of elite agents residing in the capital. The archaeology of houses reveals the lived experiences of one of these local elite. Excavations at Trimithis exposed the house (B1) of a city councilor (decurio) named Serenos. City councilors ran local governments throughout the empire, forming a critical role in reducing imperial human resource expenditure. On the basis of his office, we can safely suggest that Serenos was a member of the local elite who was co-opted to work for the empire. His house

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demonstrates the complex entanglements that took place between Roman Mediterranean and local traditions (compare to S. T. Smith, this volume); it adapted traditional Roman Mediterranean architectural design and decorative motifs to the desert environment. The building materials were local, consisting of mud brick and sparse usage of wood. The house walls had images drawn from Greek mythology, and there is even a school room for teaching Serenos’s (or subsequent inhabitants’) children Greek, the language of the elite in Roman Egypt (Cribiore, Davoli, and Ratzan 2008; Boozer 2010; Davoli and Cribiore 2010; McFadden 2014). Portable objects such as a bronze situla, which was used to mix water with wine, fine quality lamps, and ample remains of pig bones suggest a lifestyle in line with elite Roman practice. This house demonstrates Serenos’s cosmopolitan identity; he is a powerful local man who is just as at home in the Mediterranean World as he is in Trimithis (Boozer 2007). While a casual visitor to this house might only notice the ample use of Roman Mediterranean symbols and goods, a deeper exploration reveals that the construction methods, materials, and techniques were entirely local. In sum, eliteness was refracted through Greek identities and pan-Mediterranean trade goods that might or might not have been considered to be Roman. There is a clear contrast between Serenos’s house and another, less high-status house from Trimithis (B2). House B2 also revealed a complicated interweaving of Roman Mediterranean and local oasite traditions that was differentiated by gender and age. Women continued to prepare traditional emmer wheat dishes, although durum wheat had become the dominant wheat under Ptolemaic and Roman rule (Thanheiser 2015). Women and children continued to rely upon traditional amulets, such as of Bes and Tauweret, to protect themselves during vulnerable stages of the life course. Meanwhile, the only objects in the house that can be strongly associated with a male presence included a Hellenisticstyle statuette and Greek writing. In sum, the women and children of House B2 seemed to adhere to local traditions, while men adapted to Roman Mediterranean material goods and the Greek writing system. (Boozer 2015; on empires and gender, see S. T. Smith, this volume). Generally, the excavated houses of the Dakhleh Oasis reveal a wealthy resident population at home in the Roman Mediterranean World but adapted to local conditions and traditions. The many forms this entanglement might take appear to vary according to location, social class, gender, age, and degree of imperial involvement. The tombs of Roman Dakhleh complement this impression of entanglement. For example, in el-Muzawaka, an elite cemetery site west of Trimithis, the

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Figure 5.3. A detail of the painting inside the tomb of Petosiris at Muzawaka, depicting the owner of the tomb in a Roman style, standing before a grape vine and two figures presenting offerings, one each in the Roman and Egyptian artistic styles (CC-BY).

tomb of Petosiris has a decorative program that interweaves Egyptian, Greek, and Roman funerary traditions and iconography (Figure 5.1) (Whitehouse 1998; Riggs 2008 [2005]; Venit 2016). The tomb owner is portrayed in a naturalistic pose, wearing Roman Mediterranean-style clothing. Nearby, a priest with an offering table is shown wearing traditional priestly clothing but following Roman Mediterranean norms of depicting human figures. A local god is shown to the right of the priest following Egyptian rules of bodily representation. Petosiris, the tomb owner, would have been a wealthy individual who probably resided at Trimithis. His name and tomb suggest possible Egyptian ethnic affinities but he seems to be at home in both Egyptian and Roman worlds. Such complexities in domestic and funerary contexts demonstrate the inadequacy of Romanization as an explanatory concept. Temples from the first centuries of Roman rule in the Dakhleh Oasis reveal Roman investment in traditional Egyptian religious practice (Figure 5.4) (Kaper 1997, 1998; Kaper and Davoli 2006; Kaper 2010). Dakhleh temples correspond to a regional program of design and decoration, replete with gods who were

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Figure 5.4. A relief adorning the main gate of the temple at Deir el-Haggar, depicting Amun Min, Sekhmet, and the Roman emperor Domitian as pharaoh (CC-BY).

significant to local peoples. Roman emperors dedicated these temples, but local priests, who acted on behalf of the empire, were responsible for the design and execution (on Dakhleh Temples, see Kaper 1997, 1998). Included in the iconography are images of the emperor, such as Domitian, represented as pharaoh and performing the rites of the temple in traditional Egyptian fashion, offering a multivalent vision of the ties between the capital and local sacred power, one that left room for contradictory imperial and local interpretations. The settled peoples in the Great Oasis were not alone in this harsh environment. They shared this space with nomadic peoples, known by Rome as the Blemmyes. The Blemmyes adapted their relationship to Rome over time. Sometimes it was beneficial for them to serve as agents of empire, but not always (compare to Elson and Covey 2006). Both local people and Rome itself remained fearful of the Blemmyes because of their shifting allegiances. The Blemmyes seem to have been responsible for sporadic raids against cities and caravans, although the reported calamities may have been overblown

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or misattributed (Boozer 2013). In addition to these nomadic peoples, there were numerous criminals, taxation escapees, and other groups of peoples who slipped across borders through small desert trails leading to the oases rather than pass through the Roman border control installations that were placed along the Nile cataracts (Boozer 2013) in similar arrangements to the fortresses installed during pharaonic times. The presence of these other groups who lived close to and traveled through the oases likely catalyzed the need for the Roman Empire to develop this region as a buffer zone of settled communities with fortresses guarding established routes to the Nile Valley. At least three fortresses were introduced in Dakhleh and at least ten were constructed in Khargeh (Ikram and Rossi 2004; on geography and the Notitia Dignitatum, see Worp 1994). These fortresses were multifunctional. In addition to their military role, they served as a form of border control for monitoring the transportation of goods and peoples into and out of their province. Taxes on goods were also applied. The ideological value of these fortresses as symbols of a perpetual Roman presence is also notable (Boozer 2013; see also S. T. Smith, this volume). Indeed, these mud-brick constructions, while imposing from a distance, were rarely soundly built. This construction method itself shows how imperial agents adapted to local practice. Mud-brick construction, although seemingly swift and simple, is not straightforward. It requires know-how and experience to build and maintain structures effectively. It is possible that the Roman army recruited local peoples to do this labor in line with their own larger architectural plans and goals. For reasons yet unknown to contemporary scholars, there was a pervasive abandonment of oasis sites in the late fourth century CE. Presumably this abandonment occurred because the economic viability of this Roman system declined. Historically, the establishment of cities in the Sahara are inherently unstable and tend to collapse when broad networks (imperial, state) can no longer sustain them (see papers in Mattingly and Sterry, 2020). After the network collapses, cities tend to break apart into smaller, more ecologically sustainable settlements. In the case of Trimithis, it seems that most inhabitants moved to Al Qasr, a Roman military establishment a few miles away, to the countryside, or even further away. Al Qasr was continuously inhabited until the modern era and is the only clear archaeological trace of this relocation. Mut, a possible exception to this pattern of resettlement, is an enigma, since most of the ancient remains are covered by modern buildings. The cause of this fourthcentury collapse of large settlements is unclear, but it may have been a result

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of an increase in Blemmyan attacks on caravans paired with Roman reluctance to continue its military protection of the area. Such pressures upon successful trade may have caused a decline in the market for the aforementioned cash crops. Additionally, climate change may also be considered as a potential factor. The end of the so-called Roman Warm Period (Malanima 2009, 81), which probably occurred in the third century, may have changed conditions in the Western Desert to be less favorable to agricultural exploitation. The political disintegration of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, while problematized by many contemporary scholars, appears to play out in this particular local area and may also be considered. More research is required in order to corroborate these conjectures. Case Study: The Eastern Desert The Eastern Desert is an arid zone between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea to the east (Figure 5.5). The harsh climate of the Eastern Desert is somewhat similar to the Western Desert, but the topography, geography, and natural resources are very different. The environment of the Eastern Desert was even more marginal than that of the Western Desert; life depended almost entirely upon the importation of water and food stuffs. The water was obtained from crucial wells placed in the wadis (van der Veen 1998, 2004; Cappers 2006; Cappers et al. 2013). The first three centuries of Roman rule also left behind archaeological data different from the Western Desert. Instead of a preponderance of agricultural towns and villages, the dominant sites are imperial installations that were established by the army. Desert fortifications, roads, water supplies, food provisions, mines, and ports were all supervised by the praefectus montis Berenicidis, who held the rank of equestrian military officer (Bagnall, Bülow-Jacobsen, and Cuvigny 2001). These installations were designed to protect water resources, house seasonally resident workers and their families, and facilitate trade. Yearround sedentary occupation could be found in some of the large Red Sea ports, although even these populations were in constant flux; they rose and fell with the monsoon season, which also dictated trade patterns in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Trans-desert travel between various Red Sea ports and their termini on the Nile would have peaked between mid-late October and mid-late February and again between mid-late June and August/September. There were three to four quiet months each year without activity. The Red Sea emporia still

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Figure 5.5. Map of Eastern Desert Roman roads with Dios indicated. Printed with permission of Cambridge University Press from Singles in the Ancient World, edited by S. R. Huebner and C. Laes, figure 3.4, page 67.

would have required supplies year-round, and there is some suggestion that the mines operated perennially (Sidebotham 2003, 88; Gates-Foster, 2012, 736; also Casson 1989, 283–91: Periplus Maris Erithraei 14, 39, 49, 56). The chronology of a Roman presence in the Eastern Desert was also somewhat different from the Great Oasis. The Roman army and associated workers arrived shortly after the annexation of Egypt and then abandoned their investments in the mid-third century CE, although there was a brief and less intense later reinvestment. Archaeological remains within the Eastern Desert have been well preserved due to the lack of development on top of them. Due to modern inroads into the region, these sites are now being threatened. Modern research in the Eastern Desert began, as in the Great Oasis, with regional surveys that prioritized large-scale archaeological remains (Prickett 1979; Sidebotham and Zitterkopf 1995; Wright 2003; Sidebotham 2006). Subsequent excavation has focused upon

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Roman fortifications known as praesidia, port cities, roadways, and imperial mining installations. These remains are prominent, but they also influence our perspective of the Eastern Desert as a landscape heavily shaped by Roman military intervention. The obscure and ephemeral remains of the native inhabitants of the Eastern Desert, who were nomadic and semi-nomadic, have been explored in less detail, but they provide a counter narrative to the prevailing Roman perspective (Barnard and Duistermaat 2012). Despite this caveat, it is clear that the Roman army played a significant role in the Eastern Desert (Cuvigny 2003). The military’s role in shaping the Eastern Desert was more significant than for the Western Desert. The reasons for the army’s presence—valuable commodities, a harsh environment, and untrustworthy local inhabitants—may have been the same for both regions, but the scale and roles of the military investment were entirely different (Barnard and Duistermaat 2012). This disparity showcases the adaptability of the Roman imperial agents and repertoires. The Roman presence in the Eastern Desert can be explained by the Red Sea ports and by the minerals and stones present within the desert itself (Meyer 1995; Harrell and Sidebotham 2004; Harrell and Osman 2006; Tratsaert 2012). Elites in the capital, including the emperor himself, were interested in acquiring valuable resources within and connected to the Eastern Desert (Sidebotham 1986). Mining operations at Mons Claudianus and Mons Porphyrites, among others, intensified in the early first century CE. Mons Claudianus consisted of a quarrying site, a garrison, and living quarters for civilians and quarry workers (Meyer 1995; Meyer et al. 2000, 2003; Tratsaert 2012). The Red Sea ports, such as Berenike Troglodytica, provided access to East African and Indian goods, which in turn had to be transported overland to the Nile Valley (Sidebotham 2011). Roman imperial policy in the Eastern Desert focused upon resource extraction employing a wealth finance system (D’Altroy and Earle 1985; S. T. Smith 1995). There were no staples to be had here. Although there are no known signature storage systems such as the Inka had (Alconini, this volume), the construction of a road, the Via Nova Hadriana, serves as a visible material testimony of the state’s investment in the mobilization and control of valuable commodities. In this sense, the Eastern Desert does not follow the same transformations that Liverani identified among other Roman desert borderlands (2003). It does, however, follow my modified list of repertoires, which includes resettlement, land use, trade networks, and military interventions. One of the chief differences between the Eastern and Western Deserts can be

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found in the value of the extracted goods. The Red Sea provided access to luxuries such as pepper, pearls, and beads from India and further east (Peacock and Williams 2007; Sidebotham, Hense and Nouwens 2008; Sidebotham and Zych 2010; De Romanis and Maiuro 2015). Berenike and Myos Hormos were the primary ports for receiving these goods and then sending them on to the Nile Valley (Peacock and Blue 2005; Sidebotham 2011). A mid-second century CE papyrus provides us with a snapshot of the sorts of goods that were transported from southern India to Egypt and then, presumably, on to Rome. The cargo included over one hundred pairs of elephant tusks, boxes of oils and spices, and probably pepper. The total worth of the cargo was more than six million sesterces (Rathbone 2000). That amount would buy a rather gracious estate in a posh district of Rome. The value of these goods necessitated a swift and secure route back to Rome. The army provided both the infrastructure and the manpower to ensure its safe and prompt delivery. During this same period, the Roman military established substantial mining installations in order to supply building stones for imperial projects across the Mediterranean. The distinctive purple stone (known as porphyry) from Mons Porphyrites (the Mountain of Porphyry) was especially prized because its unique color held senatorial and royal connotations in the Roman world. Stone from Mons Claudianus (the Mountain of Claudius, named after the emperor who first sponsored work there) was also significant. The 2,500-mile journey from Mons Claudianus to Rome demonstrated the enormous investment of labor, finance, and difficulty that Rome’s elite could—and would—undergo for architectural elements. Mons Claudianus supplied a gray granite (granodiorite) that graced no lesser buildings than the Pantheon and the Baths of Caracalla in Rome (Marder and Jones 2015). The provisioning of food and drink for workers at these mining sites was a considerable issue. A letter, written on papyrus, underscores the problem: a large column was ready to be sent to Rome, but there was not enough fodder for the pack animals to carry it to the Nile for water transport (Peña 1989); more supplies were needed, and the army had to supply them. In this context, the military role of the army became conflated with the economic arm of the empire. In short, the army became both merchants and guards. Ad hoc requests such as this one must have been the norm for imperial intervention in the Eastern Desert. Although the Roman military transitioned into a multifaceted defense force during Augustus’s reign, I know of no other examples where the military was as involved with such mundane needs as in the Eastern Desert.

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These Eastern Desert trade and stone items were valuable, and nomadic Blemmyes were untrustworthy. Soldiers were not impervious to attacks, and they were increasingly threatened by raids from nomadic groups (Cuvigny 2003). For this reason, the Roman army constructed fortifications along the routes between Berenike, Myos Hormos, and the Red Sea. These praesidia guarded the route, and specialized fortifications known as hydreumata protected access to wells. These wells were the only water sources which supplied all the seasonal and settled workers of the Eastern Desert. They were essential to survival, thereby necessitating their own guards. The relationship between individuals and communities linked to the empire and the desert dwellers seems to have been highly variegated. Some soldiers of the imperial army collaborated with desert nomads in the praesidium in order to adapt to the local environment (Cuvigny 2000). On other occasions, there were violent clashes, pillaging, and reprisals against the Roman army by the desert peoples (De Romanis 2003, 117); it’s not hard to imagine that cutting off access to water through the construction of hydreumata provoked these nomadic peoples. The physical performance of quarrying and transporting stone also may have violated symbolic relationships between these nomadic peoples and the landscape. The army was responsible for the construction, maintenance, and manning of these structures during the first and second centuries CE (Maxfield 1996, 2000). Most of the building materials that the army used were locally available cobbles and boulders. There are some examples of mud brick being used, such as the fort at Abu Sha’r and some of the praesidia on the Abu Sha’r/Mons Porphyrites-Nile road at Deir al-Atrash and at al-Heita (Sidebotham, Zitterkopf, and Riley 1991; Sidebotham, Hense, and Nouwens 2008, 249). Exceptions to the use of local materials was more common in the form of fired brick, since it was waterproof and could be used for the many hydraulic installations that could be found throughout the desert. These fired bricks were probably imported from the Nile Valley (Sidebotham, Hense, and Nouwens 2008, 249). In all cases, these construction materials and techniques contain a hidden history of knowledge transfer from local to imperial agents. Deserts are not intuitive environments, and Roman agents must have depended upon local guidance. The military also constructed and maintained roads. In 137 CE, the aforementioned Via Nova Hadriana was constructed along the coast to connect Berenike to Antinopolis, north of Koptos. This roadway was the last major imperial project in the region and may have been necessary to provide a safe transportation route away from the desert interior that was plagued by hostile nomads (Boatwright

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2000; Sidebotham, Zitterkopf, and Helms 2000). While road building was a common concern across the empire, imperial agents had to adapt their construction techniques to local terrain and materials. The Via Nova Hadriana was a far cry from the image of a typical Roman road. It was a cleared surface with no traces of paving or other treatment. Cairns constructed out of desert rubble marked its course (Sidebotham 2006; see also Murray 1925; Meredith 1953). We know less about the life and death of non-military agents in the Eastern Desert. Eastern Desert domestic archaeology is still in its infancy. At present, it seems that most of the houses from Berenike on the Red Sea coast were built out of materials available nearby, such as unshaped cobbles and small boulders, along with mud mortar. The sparse availability of water entailed that mud-brick architecture, which was the norm across most of the Nile Valley and the Western Desert, was rare. Exceptions include the fort at Abu Sha’r and some of the praesidia on the Abu Sha’r/Mons Porphyrites-Nile road at Deir al-Atrash and at al-Heita (Sidebotham, Hense, and Nouwens 2008, 249–50). Late Roman constructions (late fourth to fifth centuries CE) were built out of “softball- to basketball-sized” coral heads, which were reinforced with wooden beams (Sidebotham, Hense, and Nouwens 2008, 250). Some of the earlier houses appear to have had multiple stories, but the exterior walls do not seem to have been able to sustain heavy loads of more than one story. Roofs, like the flat roofs found elsewhere in Egypt, were constructed of palm beams, mats, and mud. Belongings were stored in wall niches on shelves. These niches were constructed of sparse amounts of imported wood as well as locally available materials (Sidebotham, Hense, and Nouwens 2008, 250). Late Roman houses often had commercial areas on the ground floor with living spaces above on the upper floor(s) (Sidebotham, Hense, and Nouwens 2008, 244–46). Like the fortresses, it seems that the cosmopolitan population who lived here had to adapt their construction techniques to local conditions. The formal necropolis associated with Berenike appears to have two types of internments. First, there are graves made of coral-head walls in which bodies were interred in highly decorated wooden coffins. These coffins were remarkably expensive items constructed out of scarce materials and transported across a long distance to reach their final destinations. The other burials at this necropolis were simple holes cut into the ground, known as cist graves. Two of them were excavated, and they revealed a two-year-old girl in one and an adolescent in another. The girl had been wrapped in a shroud, and there were beads to accompany her to the afterlife. The adolescent had no grave goods.

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Ring-cairn tombs have also been found in the vicinity of Berenike, which also used material from coral reefs for their construction. Most of these tombs were extensively robbed (Sidebotham 2011, 263). This evidence of life and death in the Eastern Desert cannot be explained adequately by a process of Romanization. Indeed, it seems there were complex entanglements between Nile Valley, nomadic, Greek, Roman, and additional foreign influences. The most well-known structure from Berenike is a temple dedicated to Sarapis. Sarapis was a god, fabricated by the Ptolemies, who combined attributes of Osiris, Apis, and other deities. He was intended to unite the native and Greek populations of Egypt but was more popular among the Greeks and the military than among Indigenous Egyptians. Sarapis became important to mystery cults in later periods. The Sarapis Temple at Berenike was located on the most elevated point on the site. It appears to have been constructed in the second century BCE, under Ptolemaic rule, and was in use until at least the late second century CE, thanks to Roman reinvestments. The Sarapis Temple was made out of locally available white gypsum/anhydrite ashlars, which were held together using wooden clamps—an unusual construction method in Egypt. Although pagan beliefs seem to have lasted for a long time at Berenike, a large church from the fifth century CE attests to the development of Christianity during the late resurgence of the town (Sidebotham 2011, 60). The Roman presence in the Eastern Desert declined precipitously in the midthird century, which was a period of political and economic breakdown across the empire, as well as the end of the aforementioned Roman Warm Period. The military had other pressing tasks to attend to during the turbulent Third Century Crisis, and the nomadic peoples appear to have caused increasing frequency of disruptions. New priorities took attention, and new trade routes that bypassed the Eastern Desert were forged. With the withdrawal of the Roman army, the praesidia, mines, and ports withered away. There is evidence of a Late Roman renaissance at Berenike from the late fourth to fifth centuries CE, although it was less intense than earlier periods. Population numbers may have fluctuated between five hundred and one thousand people at this time (Sidebotham 2011, 68). The full suite of Roman investments in the region never returned. Discussion: Comparing the Eastern and Western Deserts A comparison between Roman interventions in the Eastern and Western Deserts reveals some remarkable disparities between these two arid regions

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(Tables 5.1–3). It also returns us to the three goals that I set out in the introduction, to demonstrate that we cannot “fill-in” missing data from one region to another, that we must examine more subtle changes in the archaeological record, and that an exploration of the longue durée of imperial development has value. I address these goals by examining the ways in which agents adapted imperial repertoires to local circumstances—landscapes, resettlement, trade networks, and military emplacements. I embed these repertoires in a longue durée perspective on the changes that imperial agents made over time and on the basis of pre-Roman imperial formations. Table 5.1. Egypt’s Western and Eastern Deserts under Roman Rule

Western Desert

Eastern Desert

Increase

Small Increase

New Cities

Big Increase

No

New Towns

Big Increase

Increase

New Roads

No

Yes

New Temples

Increase

Small Increase

New Crops

Yes

No

Intensification

Yes

No

Agricultural Investment (e.g., Qanats)

Yes

No

Mines

Possible Small Mining

Yes, Heavy

Yes

Yes, Heavy

Activities

Small Role

Heavy Role

New Forts, Structures

Increase

Big Increase

Resettlement Landscape

Trade Networks Military Intervention

Table 5.2. Roman Imperial Aims in Egypt’s Western and Eastern Deserts

Resource Extraction Western Yes Eastern

Yes

Buffer Zone

Border Control

Yes

Yes

?

Yes

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Table 5.3. Local Conditions in Egypt’s Western and Eastern Deserts under Roman Rule

Staple Goods

Wealth Goods

Stable Environment

External Threats

Western

Yes

Yes

Somewhat

Yes

Eastern

No

Yes

No

Yes

Landscapes The environments of the Eastern and Western Desert are differently suited for permanent settlement. The Western Desert oases could support a substantial sedentary population. Here, Roman rule prompted the development of large cities, towns, and agricultural settlements. New and enhanced temples dotted the landscape as reminders of Roman investment in traditional Egyptian religious and festival practice. Roman agents expanded irrigation systems, such as the qanats that were introduced to the Great Oasis under Persian rule. These investments allowed for the expansion of agricultural production. Local agents, responding to the advantageous conditions created by Roman rule, may have introduced new crops, such as cotton, to serve their own interests. The crop was not highly valued by elites residing in the capital and so it was surely for more localized markets. The role of imperial agents is most visible in the form of fortress construction, while the other changes appear to have been steered by the local elite who were co-opted by the empire. Alongside these enhancements of agricultural productivity, the phenomenological qualities of the landscape changed; it was reshaped with the growth of new settlements, temples, fortresses, and agricultural fields. These physical changes resulted in changing habits of movement and perception. We cannot detect all of these perceptual changes archaeologically, but we can interpret them through the material residues left behind. By contrast, the Eastern Desert could not readily support large sedentary populations with ease since almost all water and food had to be brought in. In addition to these environmental constraints, the habitation of Eastern Desert port sites responded to the monsoon seasons. The waxing and waning of settlements in the Eastern Desert thus diverged from the relatively stable boom of permanent occupation in the Western Desert. The Eastern Desert received new

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temples, rededications of old ones, and profound investment in infrastructure. The role of Roman agents is highly visible in this Eastern Desert infrastructure. These agents adopted local know-how for the construction of mud-brick fortresses, baked-brick water installations, coral-constructed houses, and a major roadway. It is most likely that Roman agents also learned about safe travel routes and water sources from locals. The archaeologically invisible residues of imperialism in the Eastern Desert include the performance of bodies moving across desert spaces, often transporting enormous cargoes of stone and other costly goods. The scars left by imperial mining also shaped local perspectives of imperial encounters; their landscape was forever changed by Roman resource extraction (compare to Bowman and Wilson 2013, Williams et al., this volume). Resettlement Roman rule catalyzed demographic changes in both regions. In the Western Desert, these demographic changes are visible in the form of a massive population boom that occurred along with Roman annexation. Investments in agriculture, including the introduction of new cash crops, allowed for this expansion. By contrast, the Eastern Desert experienced seasonal and episodic occupation. This resettled population depended upon seasonal accessibility by sea and the demands for intrinsic imperial goods in the form of stone and other minerals. The Roman army was required to support this population, and this military demographic also waxed and waned in accordance with the season. The populations of both areas were the result of local contributions to larger imperial markets, either directly or indirectly. Populations from both regions collapsed with the dissolution of Roman rule, but the Eastern Desert decline was earlier and more decisive than that of the Western Desert. This earlier, more substantial, collapse was a consequence of the complex logistics and complete dependence that the population had upon the Roman army. Trade Networks Both the Eastern and the Western Deserts provided access to trade goods within and beyond their borders. These valuable economic resources necessitated military involvement in both regions in order to protect and monitor caravans and collect taxes. The relative value and type of trade goods were unequal between these two regions. The Western Desert produced both wealth and staple goods.

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Meanwhile, the Eastern Desert only produced wealth goods, but these were substantially more valuable than what we have detected archaeologically and papyrologically from the Western Desert. In both cases, the military held key roles in trade, but it was more intensive and responsive in the Eastern Desert. Military The Roman army was, at this stage of the empire, not simply a military arm. It was also responsible for construction, supply running, and border control. The material and demographic presence of the army also served as ideological symbols of a perpetual Roman presence. The military controlled everything in the Eastern Desert, from the food and water supplies, to road construction and maintenance, to managing mines and ports. The archaeological footprint of this imperial investment is clear in the form of the praesidia, hydreumata, roads, and so on. Documentary evidence corroborates this archaeological impression (Maxfield 1996, 2000; Bagnall, Bülow-Jacobsen, and Cuvigny 2001). By contrast, there was a relatively light military imprint in the Great Oasis. Dakhleh has only three known military installations, while Khargeh has considerably more. There is no evidence, other than these fortresses, that the military intervened with the extraction and supply of goods or with the transportation of them across the desert. In both cases, military agents learned methods of construction and movement from local agents in order to adapt to the local environment. The Longue Durée of Imperial Adaptation Roman interventions in both regions began soon after the annexation of Egypt. Occupation was accomplished peacefully and decisively. In the Western Desert in particular, imperial agents expanded upon the preexisting repertoires established by previous empires (Egyptian, Persian, Ptolemaic). This reworking of repertoires is a crucial but often overlooked component of imperial success (see Williams et al., this volume). Over time, imperial agents modified their own repertoires, as can be detected by changes in settlement distributions, fortress configurations, and road building. These changes were situationally contingent and not entirely controlled by the empire. They also depended upon local agents and provincial circumstances. Imperial agents had to be nimble to keep up. In both regions, imperial agents adapted standard Roman constructions to local building materials and techniques signaling that they collaborated with

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local peoples. Local agents participated in the advantageous new conditions brought by Roman rule to varying degrees. Roman Mediterranean cultural objects and practices appear in the houses and tombs of Dakhleh’s inhabitants, albeit in different ways depending on social status, economic stratum, gender, and age. Even in Berenike we find evidence that wealthy locals tried to maintain traditional funerary practice at great expense. A local economy sprang up under Roman rule, demonstrating that the intermediate elite worked on behalf of both the empire and their own self-interests. Poorer peoples also seem to have benefited from enhanced agricultural conditions. These various entanglements demonstrate the specificity of the interplay between imperial and local agents. There were other agents who were not nearly so compliant. At times, local nomadic peoples seem to have collaborated with imperial agents, but they were not dependable allies; sometimes they attacked Roman holdings and caravans. These peoples, known as the Blemmyes among Romans, were of special concern. They conducted documented raids on Western Desert settlements (e.g., Hibis) and on Eastern Desert sites (e.g., the praesidia). They may have conducted additional, undocumented raids on caravans carrying trade goods from each region. The Via Nova Hadriana appears to have been constructed in order to give these peoples a wide birth. In the Western Desert, there was no other option for movement to the Nile Valley other than the existing tracks either east through Khargeh or north through the Small Oasis (Bahariya and Farafra). Archaeologically, there is no ready explanation for the swift and decisive decline in habitation in the Great Oasis during the late fourth century CE. There are no destructive layers or signs that water sources were depleted. In the absence of evidence, we must conjecture. Climate change and/or raids may have initiated the decline of both peripheral desert regions. Caravan raids, which would leave little archaeological trace, may have eventually made the Western Desert enterprise less profitable and unworthy of the effort involved in costly desert land transportation. In the Eastern Desert, imperial agents appear to have developed another path for luxury goods to the wealthy that bypassed the Red Sea ports. These ports may have experienced a troubled period in which profits declined over several years as a result of the raids that necessitated the Via Nova Hadriana. The cause of decline may have been the same between both regions, but the rate and severity differs greatly. In sum, these two case studies demonstrate the diversity inherent in imperial management, even in areas with relatively similar environmental constraints and within similar time frames. The chain of past imperial formations helped

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Roman agents gain traction in each region quickly; they learned how to adapt their own repertoires to local conditions from local agents. Imperial collapse appears to be the result of a breakdown in relations between local and imperial agents and from larger events across the empire as a whole. Subsequent empires, namely the Islamic Empire, took the place of Rome in the centuries that followed. They too built upon the gains of their predecessors, including those made by the Romans, although they never achieved the successes of Rome in these particular deserts. Conclusions I have argued that the Roman Empire was not simply the result of the planned ambitions, designs, and dictates by elites residing in the capital. Rather, it developed slowly but surely as a result of many actions by individuals at many different levels—both imperial and non-imperial—over a long period of time. These agents made numerous ad hoc decisions and adjustments that shaped the very fabric of the empire. Elites in the capital used imperial repertoires for managing territories. This is why, from a macro-scale perspective, similarities are apparent across the empire. Liverani identified such repertoires in his study of imperial deserts. What is missing from such analyses is the role of intermediate agents who adapted these repertoires to local conditions. For example, the military served a multifunctional role that included construction, engineering, supply running, border control, administration, and defense. The flexible nature of military personnel ensured that the military could—and would—adapt themselves to each new borderland. The very nature of the military adaptability entailed that these intermediate agents must learn local techniques of construction, employ local tools and peoples, and adapt themselves to local cultures, peoples, and environments. Moreover, since Roman imperial agents learned their roles on the job, they were trained within the context of local requirements. In a sense, these intermediate agents themselves became hybrid Romano-Egyptians in order to be effective imperial agents. This entanglement mirrors the adjustments that local peoples make when under imperial control. Serenos of Trimithis, for example, is a local elite who adapted himself to imperial rule (see S. T. Smith on entanglement, this volume). It was common in the ancient world for local elites to work on behalf of the new empire and to adapt to the cultural koine of their conquerors. The reverse form

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of assimilation—imperial agents adapting themselves to local conditions—has been discussed less readily in the literature on ancient empires. I argue that the we must examine the adjustments of these imperial agents in order to understand both how empires operated in practice and how imperial diversity developed. Romanization cannot explain how imperial agents acclimated to local conditions in order to thrive. Empires were in a constant state of flux, being made and remade over their life course. Empires benefited from past empires, adopting and adapting past imperial repertoires to suit their own needs. The adjustments made by imperial agents to such repertoires helps to explain how empires managed differing preconditions and changing circumstances on the local level. It also explains why it is not possible to identify a consistent borderland practice within a single empire. Even within large territories, imperial agents had to learn how local areas functioned so that they could tunnel into the existing bureaucratic systems most effectively to keep control and enact change. As the people of the Eastern and Western Deserts became a bit more Roman, so too did Roman agents become a bit more Egyptian.

Figure 6.1. Schematic outline of the territorial expansion of the Assyrian Empire through time. Produced by Bleda Düring.

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Chapter Six

The Assyrian Threshold Explaining Imperial Consolidation in the Early Assyrian Empire

Bleda S. Düring

Introduction From about 1350 BCE, the small city of Assur, a former vassal of the Mittani state, which constituted one of the four great imperial powers of the Amarna Age (along with Kassite Babylonia, New Kingdom Egypt, and the Hittites), started its remarkable transformation into the most enduring and territorially expansive empire of the ancient Near East (Figure 6.1), outcompeting its rivals and emerging as the sole imperial state in the first millennium until its ultimate demise in 612–09 BCE (Postgate 1992; Barjamovic 2013). The Assyrian Empire paved the way for successor empires, such as the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Empires, and was at the start of a chain of empires. Some scholars would not agree with this characterization and would be inclined to see the Neo-Assyrian “empire” as something separate and distinct from the Middle Assyrian “state,” mainly on the basis of the much larger territorial extent of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the larger numbers of non-Assyrian populations under the imperial yoke (Roaf 1990; Bedford 2009; Cline and Graham 2011). By contrast, I belong to a group of scholars who argue that there is a great deal of continuity in state institutions, territorial control, and imperial repertoires from the final Late Bronze Age into the Early Iron Age. In this perspective, imperialism consists primarily of a form of domination, and the size of the empire is less central. Indeed, the transformation from a small empire to the first world empire arguably took place within the Neo-Assyrian Period during the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III, from about 744 BCE (D’Agostino 2011; 2015; Kühne 2015, 60; Düring 2018a), and

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most of the crucial imperial repertoires that made this expansion possible were already in place from the Middle Assyrian Period onwards. I argue, therefore, that from a long-term historical perspective, the Assyrian Empire marks a watershed in the history of the ancient Near East. It was the first imperial state that effectively managed to cross what has been called the “Augustan threshold” in studies on the Roman Empire by Doyle (1986, 93–97) and Münkler (2005, 112–17), during which it supposedly transitioned from a system based on networks of allegiance to a more institutional and bureaucratic mode of governance. Disregarding the specifics of the Roman example and how much of the credits should be given to the emperor Augustus, this threshold consisted of the successful management of the transition from a territorial expansion fueled by military successes to a consolidated empire that generates its income from taxation and manages to effectively co-opt at least part of the dominated polities and societies it encompasses. Sinopoli describes the consolidation of empires in very similar terms: For an empire to endure beyond the reigns of individual rulers, individual personal relations between rulers and the ruled must be transcended to create an imperial system of structural connections and dependencies among diverse regions and cultural traditions. This process involves a range of constructive and destructive strategies, including the creation of new institutions, administrative structures, and ideological systems, and the disruption of previously autonomous local institutions, as imperial elite seek to strengthen political and ideological allegiances to the center and regulate the flow of resources to imperial coffers. (1994, 163) Crucially, in this argument, and from my own perspective on empire, the crux of what constitutes an empire is not its scale; they do not need to be sub­continental in their expansion. Instead, an empire is defined by a particular type of power relation in which the imperial polity develops a durable domination of diverse subaltern populations. The earliest empires, whether Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Egyptian, Chinese, Andean, or Mesoamerican, are generally states of relatively limited size of 200,000–700,000 km2 (comparable in size to modern medium-size states such as Turkey and Syria; see Taagepera 1978) rather than the subcontinental territories that are attained later. The relatively small Middle Assyrian state (ca. 140,000 km2) qualifies as imperial because from the very outset of its expansion, it developed imperial

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repertoires that served to establish a durable domination of non-Assyrian populations. In this chapter, I argue that the transition from military expansion to consolidation of imperial power occurred first in the Middle Assyrian Period. This transition is best understood by investigating developments on the ground in provincial and peripheral contexts rather than on the basis of the official propaganda emanating from the palace and its associated elites. In this chapter, I reflect on how Assyria managed this transition by focusing on the early Assyrian Empire (ca. 1350–1200 BCE), during which period the foundations of the Assyrian imperial system took shape. Existing Models of Assyrian Imperialism Ideas about Assyrian imperialism and how this state managed to successfully dominate much of the ancient Near East for some centuries have a long ancestry. We have rich sources from the Iron Age that specifically deal with the manner in which the Assyrian Empire operated (Fales 2010). The first source consists of the Bible, in which Assyria is portrayed as a ruthless oppressor that used its military advantage to root out all opposition and whose repertoire included deportation practices and the execution of prominent opponents. The second source consists of Assyrian state propaganda, displayed on orthostats in Assyrian palaces, on obelisk monuments, and in the royal annals. In these sources, Assyria is presented as legitimate in its aspirations to rule, the king is ascribed heroic characteristics, and resistance is portrayed as futile. The Neo-Assyrian orthostats, in particular, vividly portray the military supremacy of Assyria, the efforts that the Assyrian army will undertake to bring to heel those who resist, how its army executes opponents, and how it destroys towns and orchards (Ataç 2010; Parker 2015). The topos of Assyria as a state that succeeded because of its military supremacy and its ruthless oppression is one that resonates in scholarship even today. In a bold paper, Liverani compared the Assyrian Empire to a network, arguing that “the empire is not a spread of land, but a network of communications over which material goods are carried” (1988, 86). Liverani envisaged the empire as consisting of a series of Assyrian strongholds placed among essentially alien landscapes and peoples, arguing that military campaigns were primarily undertaken to support and expand this network of Assyrian settlements (see also Parker 2001 and this volume). In a very similar vein, Bernbeck (2010) has recently compared the Assyrian Empire to the United States, arguing that both

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Figure 6.2. Schematic representation of the way in which Postgate (1992), Liverani (1988), Bernbeck (2010), and Parker (2001) have conceptualized the Assyrian Empire. Produced by Bleda Düring.

are imperial systems in which military bases were instrumental in controlling alien territories (Figure 6.2). However, this comparison by Bernbeck begs the question of how it is possible that Assyrian domination over “alien territories” could last for so many centuries, when clearly American military supremacy could not achieve lasting domination in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq in recent history. Moreover, as Fales (2010) has shown, we cannot take Assyrian propaganda at face value. The Assyrian military was not invincible, and it tried as much as possible to avoid pitched battles and long and complex sieges of heavily fortified cities in favor of attacking opponents that were so inferior that many of the Assyrian campaigns can best be described as raiding and extortion missions. This nuance does not necessarily disqualify the idea that Assyrian power was clustered in nodes, possibly separated by large regions in which imperial influence might been limited, but simply suggests that the effects of military supremacy to further imperial domination might have been overstated. By contrast to these network models, Postgate (1992, now also CancikKirschbaum 2014), has argued for a territorial model of the Assyrian Empire in which the core provinces were surrounded by a ring of vassal states. The latter, in Postgate’s terminology, were “under the yoke of Assur.” By contrast, the area of Hanigalbat (the north Mesopotamian remnants of the Mittani state), was brought under direct territorial control of the Assyrians, according to Postgate, and was considered part of “the land of Assur.” Postgate argues that while

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Assyrian presence was necessarily concentrated in certain nodes, the provinces were “homogeneously administrated” (1992, 256). His model is essentially a variant of the territorial/hegemonic model first put forward by Luttwak (1976, 22), who envisaged an inner zone of territorial control surrounded by a buffer zone under hegemonic control. In the Roman case, the latter territories were eventually also brought under territorial control, which according to Luttwak was unsustainable, and it would not be difficult to argue that a similar scenario fits the final phase of Assyrian history (Liverani 2001b, 388). The territorial/ hegemonic model was subsequently further developed for Andean empires by D’Altroy (1992), who demonstrated that territorial and hegemonic strategies can coexist in a complex and dynamic mosaic and that the concentric model was not adequate in many cases. Postgate bases his concentric model on the analysis of a fairly limited corpus of textual data, and he prioritizes historical and iconographic sources from the capital and court. Further, the Assyrian Empire is typically described as a set of interlinked institutions on the basis of the same sources, and in this characterization, the focus is on matters such as provincial governance, the organization of the military, and taxation regimes (Postgate 1992; Bedford 2009; Barjamovic 2013, 142; Cancik-Kirschbaum 2014). Liverani (2017) recently described Assyria along similar lines. Clearly, this “institutionalist” description of empires, which combines seamlessly with Luttwak’s territorial/hegemonic model, is one that fits well within the paradigm of many ancient historians. The problem with the territorial model of the Assyrian Empire as advocated by Postgate and Cancik-Kirschbaum is that it does not fit the increasingly detailed evidence obtained in recent decades. New textual evidence from sites in the Upper Khabur and along the Lesser Zab has been interpreted as evidence for a much greater variability in governance than the Postgate model would allow for (Pongratz-Leisten 2011; Shibata 2012; van Soldt et al. 2013). Likewise, archaeological evidence increasingly demonstrates a highly variegated Assyrian engagement with conquered territories, some of which are profoundly transformed whereas others are little affected (Parker 2001; Szuchman 2007; Tenu 2009; Düring 2015b). It is clear from these data—further discussed below—that it is no longer possible to sustain an interpretation of the Assyrian Empire as homogeneously constituted. Since the new millennium, studies have started to appear that attempt to explain the variegated nature of the Assyrian Empire and the idiosyncratic state of affairs in particular regions (Parker 2001, 2011; Pongratz-Leisten 2011). Much work remains

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to be done, however, to map out what happened on the ground in Assyrian provinces and peripheries. Thus, the two main explanations of the Assyrian success have often emphasized either its effective military organization as a means of domination, or its ideology and institutions. Neither type of model adequately explains how the Assyrian threshold was achieved, that is, how Assyria managed to consolidate its hold over the territories it dominated by shifting from exploitative revenues—obtained through plunder, tribute, and the abduction of people to serve as workforce—toward more sustainable revenue sources—agriculture, industries, and trade that could generate a more stable source of income. Several key subsidiary questions emerge: How did Assyria manage to develop an imperial bureaucracy? In what manner did Assyria co-opt at least part of the dominated societies into the imperial system, inducing these people to produce the food, infrastructure, buildings, and craft products that the empire relied on? How did it convince people to accept the legitimacy of its supremacy? Dealing with Diversity Bradley Parker (2001, 2003) undertook the first substantial study dealing with the effects of Assyrian imperialism on the ground. To investigate what changed in the Upper Tigris region after it was incorporated into the Assyrian Empire in the Iron Age, Parker assessed textual, survey, and excavation data. His conclusions were that the effects of empire varied greatly from one area to the next and that these differences were influenced by a range of factors, including the agricultural potential of an area, the nature of the preexisting society and economy in a region prior to take over, and the strategic value of a region. In effect, Parker proposed a synthesis between territorial/­ hegemonic models and network models of empire by arguing that the Assyrian Empire was constituted by colonized areas under territorial control, which were surrounded by areas and landscapes that were either vassals or hostile to Assyria (Parker 2001, 257). Parker also argued, on the basis of his survey evidence and textual data, that the Upper Tigris region in the Neo-Assyrian Period was an ethnically diverse amalgam in which Assyrians and settlers coexisted with local groups (Parker 2001, 2003, 2006). In subsequent years, much additional research has been done at a range of sites in the Upper Tigris, such as Ziyaret Tepe, Üçtepe, Kavuşan Höyük, Giricano, Boztepe, Salat Tepe, Kenan Tepe, Gre Dimse, Müslümantepe,

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Hibemerdon, and Hakemi Use. Building on the earlier work of Parker and the new archaeological and textual data emerging from recent excavations, Timothy Matney (2010, 2016) has assembled a reconstruction of the Assyrian Empire in the Upper Tigris, arguing for a coexistence of an Assyrian-dominated urban settlement with small Assyrian agricultural colonies, probably consisting mostly of (non-Assyrian) deportees, on the one hand, and local farming and pastoral communities that were incorporated into the Assyrian economy, on the other. The reconstructions of Parker and Matney (also Wicke 2013) foreground how this Assyrian province functioned as a multiethnic society, in which the hegemony of the Assyrian state was precarious. Thus, instead of a colonial enclave under homogeneous territorial control, the region around Ziyaret Tepe/Tušhan constituted an accommodation between imperial (deportee and Assyrian) and local farming and pastoral communities, in which Assyrian power was not unequivocal or self-evident and where the local balance of power could easily shift when circumstances changed. For the Middle Assyrian Period, ca. 1350–1000 BCE, we do not have regional datasets of a comparable resolution to that of the Upper Tigris in the Neo-­Assyrian Period. However, a number of systematic investigations in the Balikh (Lyon 2000) and Lower Khabur (Morandi Bonacossi 1996, 2000, 2008), augmented with new survey data from the part of the Assyrian triangle now in Iraqi Kurdistan, various synthetic studies (Szuchman 2007; Tenu 2009) and excavation projects (Kühne 2000; D’Agostino 2009, 2011; Akkermans and Wiggermann 2015) have started to shed considerable light on the Middle Assyrian Empire at the aggregate level. Here I summarize a discussion of various regional trajectories of change in the Middle Assyrian Period that I have presented elsewhere (Düring 2018b). The regional sequences in the Assur region, the Lower Khabur, the Upper Khabur, and the Balikh differ substantially, and it appears that Assyrian imperial repertoires were far from homogeneously applied and that they had variable effects on settlement systems. 1 In some regions, such as the Assur region, there is a clear increase in population (Miglus 2011); in others, such as the Lower and Upper Khabur, the population seems more or less stable (Morandi Bonacossi 2008; Kühne 2009; Kolinski 2015), whereas in the Balikh Valley, there is a clear decrease in the population density (Lyon 2000; Kolinski 2015) (Table 6.1). In most regions, we have clear evidence for “deportees” and settlers being brought into the region, for example in the Assur region (Gilibert 2008), in the Balikh (Wiggermann 2000), and the Lower Khabur (Reculeau 2011; Postgate 2016),

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Table 6.1. Overview of the Transformations Occurring in the Four Discussed Regions under Assyrian Control in the Late Bronze Age

Demography

Lower Khabur

Upper Khabur

Balikh

Increase

Stable

Stable

Decrease

+

+

+++

++

+

+++

+++

Deportees Settlement System

Assur Region

Destructions and Abandonments New Forts New Cities

++ ++

Concentration Agriculture

++

+

++

Expansion

++

Intensification

++

++

++ ?

Dunnu Estates

++

Irrigation

++

++

?

+++

?

?

+

++

Infrastructure Major Canals Roads

+

?

++

?

+++ = Strong Evidence; ++ = Good Evidence; + = Some Evidence; ? = Evidence Not Clear

whereas in the Upper Khabur, this does not appear to have been important (D’Agostino 2015; Jakob 2015). Likewise, the changes in settlement systems are the least pronounced in the Upper Khabur. Some settlements were abandoned or destroyed, and new foundations occur, but the overwhelming pattern in this region is of continuity in settlement systems (Tenu 2009, 2015). This can be contrasted to the development of new settlements—and even a capital—in the Assur region (Gilbert 2008; Dittman 2011), the concentration of the population in a limited number of larger, probably fortified, settlements in the Lower Khabur (Morandi Boncasi 2008; Kühne 2009), and the development of a new (mainly agricultural) settlement system in the Balikh Valley (Lyon 2000; Wiggermann 2000).

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In terms of agriculture, we again see little change in the Upper Khabur, but by contrast an expansion of farming into marginal terrain in the Assur region (Mühl 2015; Morandi Bonacossi 2018), the Lower Khabur (Reculeau 2011), and the Balikh Valley (Wiggermann 2000). In the Assur hinterlands, we have evidence of intensification through the construction of irrigation systems, and the same probably occurred at some level in the Lower Khabur and the Balikh, although the evidence for this is controversial in some cases (Bagg 2000; Mühl 2015; Morandi Bonacossi 2018). The establishment of agricultural dunnu estates, which created revenues for absentee owners, occurs in the Assur region and the Balikh Valley (Düring 2015a). Finally, there is some evidence for infrastructural investments in the form of a road with waystations connecting Assur and Dur-Katlimmu (Pfälzner 1993; Morandi Bonacossi 2000; Faist 2006) and the construction of canals in the Assur region (and possibly in the Lower Khabur and the Balikh) (Bagg 2000). How can we understand this remarkable diversity in regional trajectories evident in the Middle Assyrian Empire, in which some regions are little affected by the empire and others are completely transformed (Figure 6.3)? I suggest that we should focus on means, incentives, and agents to make sense of such patterns. Means include various types of resources such as social power, manpower, skilled labor, food supplies, animal herds, property, land, water, mineral resources, and valuables that can be used to further imperial aims in any particular region. This is therefore as much about affordances as it is about power. Further, we need to ask which agents were involved as collaborators in the imperial projects, and here we can think, among others, of imperial elites, local elites, imperial or non-local migrants, and local communities. Finally, incentives consist of potential rewards of participants in the imperial agenda and might consist of economic or social benefits. I will argue that these incentives were crucial to the success of the empire. The Means of the Early Assyrian Empire In the investigation of (early) Assyrian imperialism, I think we have overestimated the power and resources available to this state. Even a brief engagement with Neo-Assyrian imagery on the palace orthostats, or the royal annals for that matter, raises the question why the topos of the invincible Assyrian army and the ruthless suppression of revolts is so prominent in the propaganda. Indeed, scholars who have read between the lines, such as, for example, Mario

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Figure 6.3. Map of the variability in Middle Assyrian repertoires of rule per region. Map produced by Tijm Lanjouw.

Fales (2008, 2010), whose work has already been mentioned, have argued that in practice, the Assyrian army was sometimes defeated, tried to avoid pitched battles and long and complex sieges, and usually selectively engaged with opponents that were much inferior in strength. Therefore, a convincing case can be made that Assyrian propaganda inverted military realities on the ground, deploying psychological warfare where actual military supremacy was fragile (Parker 2011; 2015, 289–90). On the basis of the Tell Chuera (Ḥarbe) archives, Stefan Jakob (2015) provides a striking illustration of the fragile power of the Assyrian state apparatus during the Middle Assyrian Empire. Several texts deal with the need to protect trading caravans on the route along which Tell Chuera was located. This major route appears to have been far from secure. Furthermore, these same texts mention hostile raiding expeditions that include as many as 1,500 men, probably

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originating from the Tek Tek Dağları (Mount Ḥasumu; Cancik-Kirschbaum and Hess 2016, 128–29), who raided up to the town of Tell Chuera itself (Jakob 2015, 181). On the basis of these texts, the situation seems to have been very unsettled in the Chuera region. However, as has been mentioned, in other parts of the Assyrian Empire, such as the Balikh Valley and the Lower Khabur, we have substantial evidence for what is best described as landscape and social engineering. This engineering involved the development of new farming and settlement systems, often in previously little cultivated or settled landscapes. Such developments were made possible by the investment of substantial resources and the (re)settling of thousands of non-local people, who had to be taken care of during their migration and the first year of settlement when no harvests from previous years could be consumed (Wiggermann 2000, 174–75; for the Neo-Assyrian Period, see Parker 2001, 263; Radner 2017; see also Yao, this volume). How are we to make sense of such marked differences between an administration clearly lacking resources to control the hinterland at Tell Chuera, whereas the nearby Balikh Valley was completely redeveloped? One idea would be to consider the Assyrian situation from an instrumentalist point of view: that the degree of investment was a function of a cost/benefit analysis, in which investment was largely determined by the potential rewards (Parker 2001, 252–53). For example, it would be possible to interpret the agricultural development of the Balikh Valley along these lines. Given that the region seems to have been largely abandoned by farmers, as evidenced by a hiatus in occupation at a number of excavated sites (Lyon 2000), which was most likely caused by the ravages of earlier Assyrian war expeditions, the region constituted a potentially lucrative opportunity for agricultural development and investments. In other regions, such as around Tell Chuera and in the Upper Khabur, there was no need for similar investments, given that these agricultural hinterlands were already highly productive and well populated, and these populations and their labor, craft products, and agricultural produce could simply be taxed by the new Assyrian overlords. Such a characterization of the diversity in the level of Assyrian engagement in various parts of the empire has some merits, but it falls short of adequately explaining the diversity witnessed. For example, the development of and investment in the Lower Khabur around Dur-Katlimmu, which unlike the Balikh is an extremely marginal region, would make little sense as lucrative investment. Likewise, there is good evidence that agricultural development of the east bank

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of the Tigris, around the new capital of Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, was a failure from an agricultural point of view (Reculeau 2011, 131–33, 151; Jakob 2015, 183–84). Given the marginal nature of these regions, which could only be developed through considerable investments, Kühne (2015) has argued that Assyria was engaged in a “grand project” of developing marginal regions like the Lower Khabur into urbanized regions with farming and that these cannot be understood from a cost/benefit perspective. While I agree with Kühne that a cost/benefit perspective is inadequate for understanding some of the regional developments in the Assyrian Empire, I am not convinced about his grand project perspective, which would equate to a very systematic and long-term type of development aid. I think the Assyrians were not primarily driven by ideological motives, such as “making the desert bloom,” and that their actions need to be explained in terms of short-term incentives rather than long-term grand projects (see also Boozer, this volume). Two points are especially relevant here. First, it is likely that the expectations of the productivity of agriculture at Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta and Dur-Katlimmu were more positive than the real yields. This difference could in part be the result of a dry spell at the end of the twelfth century BCE, an event that has recently been both reinstated and critiqued (Kaniewski et al. 2010; Drake 2012; Langgut, Finkelstein, and Lutz 2013; Mühl 2015; Knapp and Manning 2016). Second, I think it is too simplistic to consider the developments of regions such as those of Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta and Dur-Katlimmu only in terms of agricultural production. Both of these regions could be supplied whenever necessary with agricultural produce from the agriculturally rich bread baskets situated to their north, using cost-effective river-based transportation. It may be surmised that these geographical circumstances mitigated the impacts of bad harvests occurring every few years, as food supplies could be augmented without much trouble. Instead, it could be argued that the primary aim in both regions was to create relatively densely populated regions that were loyal to the Assyrian state, if only because all residents in the region had been given the opportunity to better their private circumstances (see also Rosenzweig 2016, 310). Such a mechanism, in which previously uncultivated regions adjacent to agriculturally rich and densely populated regions were developed, is something that can be seen in many empires (e.g., Covey 2013; Colburn 2018; Parker 2018b; Boozer this volume), and may be understood as an effort to create footholds from which the empire could dominate regions which were too densely populated or culturally distinct to fully control. Thus, the strategy would amount

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to creating parallel imperial landscapes, in which substantial resources were invested, which coexisted with older densely populated agricultural regions in which relatively little change occurred. The argument so far could be construed as a sort of “grand strategy” of the Assyrian Empire. However, there are many indications that such a grand strategy never existed and that the empire was the outcome of the cumulative actions of various groups and agents in the empire, rather than the imperial core (see also Boozer, this volume). It is to this issue—of who made empires possible—that we turn in the next section. To summarize this discussion on means: I argue that while ancient empires could not have survived if the balance sheets did not add up, the reasons for developing certain agricultural regions or building fortresses and roads, among other investments, cannot be reduced only to a cost/benefit analysis. Ideological, military, and social factors are of great importance, and in many early empires, the means available to effect changes on the ground appear to have been in limited supply and often had to be generated locally over time and under difficult conditions. The Agents of Empire A good starting point for understanding any empire is to ask the questions, Who benefited from imperial expansion? and, Who bore the burden? In the case of the Assyrian Empire, these questions have not been given much consideration. Scholars such as Postgate, Allen, and Tenu (Postgate 1979; 1992, 254; Allen 2005, 79; Tenu 2009, 227–30) have argued that the provincialized regions of Upper Mesopotamia served to secure agricultural staples for the Assyrian heartland. A second often-encountered economic explanation for Assyrian imperialism is that it served to secure and control long distance trade routes for valuable commodities (such as metals, gemstones, and textiles) (Tenu 2009, 230–31; Dodd 2013, 57). Both explanations start from the premise that the Assyrian core region stood to directly benefit from the imperial expansion, and both are problematic. First, the main economic resource of the North Mesopotamian steppe, over which Assyria expanded at this time, was agricultural produce, consisting mainly of barley and sheep. These resources could only be transported overland to the Assyrian core region at huge transportation costs, which would consume more than half of the volume transported (Clark and Haswell 1967; Bairoch 1990;

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Düring 2015a). It is clear that the staple-based finance of the Assyrian Empire, in which agricultural staples served to uphold imperial institutions, could only have worked in small regions (D’Altroy and Earle 1985). Therefore, the benefits of agricultural resources of Upper Mesopotamia, as in many other regions where transportation was land based, would have been of use mainly at the local level (the same argument applies, of course, to manpower) and over time would have promoted political fragmentation. Of course, these agricultural surpluses could be converted into valuables through industries (e.g., production of textiles), but there is relatively little evidence for such industries in the Middle Assyrian Empire. Second, the idea that Assyrian expansion served to secure long-distance trade routes is equally problematic. The Middle Assyrian Empire only controlled a small portion of long-distance routes (unlike, for example, the later Achaemenid Empire), and the historical knowledge we have of the ancient Near East clearly shows that trade flourished even at times of pronounced political fragmentation, such as the first half of the Middle Bronze Age (Larsen 1987; Stein 2005). Thus, from a point of view that privileges the economic interests of the imperial core, it is difficult to see how the annexation of Upper Mesopotamia would have been beneficial. The pertinent question therefore is, Who benefited from the annexation of Upper Mesopotamia? Or to rephrase, Which groups and agents were involved in the expansion and consolidation of Assyrian power, and how were some members of these various groups and agents co-opted into the imperial project? For the sake of simplicity, I distinguish four types of groups in this brief discussion: Assyrian elites and commoners on the one side, and non-Assyrian elites and commoners on the other. An extra dimension in this classification consisted of migration policies (both forced and voluntary), which created a local versus non-local dimension to the equation. Finally, the boundaries between these categories of people were not fixed; we have significant evidence for non-Assyrians achieving high posts in the Assyrian administration, and we have evidence for non-Assyrian groups acquiring Assyrian status over a few generations (Parker 2011; Postgate 2013, 38; Fales 2015, 199; Rosenzweig 2016, 310; Liverani 2017, 203–8). What can we say about the role of these various groups in the Assyrian imperial project? The Assyrian elite were one clear group of beneficiaries of the Assyrian expansion. Members of the elite took up the governance of the new territories (Harrak 1987, 195–205). The Assyrian expansion created tremendous

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possibilities for (junior) members of powerful elite families to develop new resources and estates and to obtain lucrative posts (see Alconini, this volume, for parallel developments in the Inka Empire). Terrenato (2014, 46) has recently described the early Roman expansion as driven by the ambitions of powerful families, who hijacked the Roman state for their own interests. While this perspective might be too extreme for the Assyrian case, one can easily see that the Assyrian expansion suited the interests of the Assyrian elites very well and would have rid the king of a lot of trouble at his court. As an example, it is remarkable that the western part of Assyrian Empire was “farmed out” to a branch of the Assyrian royal family, who set up court at Dur-Katlimmu and were addressed as kings in their own right even if nominally under the suze­ rainty of the Assyrian king (Cancik-Kirschbaum 1996; Wiggermann 2000). Assyrian farmers-colonists, who are in evidence at Tell Sabi Abyad and at Tell Chuera (among other sites), are another group of state expansion beneficiaries (Wiggermann 2000; Jakob 2009, 98; Postgate 2013, 38). These Assyrians, who settled with their families, had Assyrian names and a legal position that differed quite substantially from non-Assyrians. While they were free to decide where and how they wanted to live and had more legal protection in courts, they had to fulfill more substantial duties toward the state, such as serving in the army when requested (Postgate 1982). These settlers might have included poorer members of Assyrian society and groups that had gradually opted into an Assyrian identity (Postgate 2013, 38). In any case, given that they were free, it is plausible that they migrated to new colonies because they thought that they would benefit from doing so, either with respect to their livelihood or their social status. Among the non-Assyrians, the elites often chose to partake in the Assyrian project in order to further their own aspirations and to maintain their own positions (see also Alconini, this volume, for a parallel in the Inka Empire). A prominent case in the Middle Assyrian Period is the local dynasty of the Land of Mari centered on Tell Taban and Tell Bderi, where a minor local princely family pledged allegiance to the Assyrian crown at an opportune moment, and became an Assyrian vassal that was eventually surrounded by Assyrian provinces. Interestingly, within a few generations, the dynasty of the Land of Mari had adopted Assyrian names and funerary practices and was intermarried with the Assyrian royal family (Tenu 2009; Shibata 2015). Very similar cases existed in the Neo-Assyrian Period, during which local dynasties in Upper Mesopotamia of Aramaic or Luwian descent increasingly opted in Assyrian identities (Parker 2001, 89–94; Dodd 2013).

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The response of local non-elites to the Assyrian expansion is, of course, more difficult to assess. It is to be expected that there was a continuum from outright resistance and guerilla war tactics to collaboration and compliance. Resistance occurred in the previously discussed case of the raiders in the surroundings of Tell Chuera and is also pertinent for Aramean groups that increasingly posed a threat to Assyrian interests from about 1200 BCE onward (Szuchman 2007). By contrast, collaboration appears to occur in the Khabur Triangle, where populations continued to live largely “pre-Assyrian” lives in the Middle Assyrian Period, with little changing other than the beneficiary of their taxes (D’Agostino 2015; Jakob 2015). A treaty between the Suteans and local authorities at Tell Sabi Abyad provides us with an intriguing glimpse into the interactions between Assyrians and “natives.” This treaty stipulates that if a Sutean buys beer he should pay in cash and consume it at his tent, not at the Assyrian settlement. Further on in the same treaty, the Suteans are reminded of their allegiance to the Assyrians, even against other groups of Suteans (Wiggermann 2010, 28). A special group of non-Assyrian commoners consisted of the so-called deportees (Oded 1979). These were people of non-Assyrian descent who were resettled in another part of the empire. This happened on a scale without precedent from the Middle Assyrian Period onward (Jakob 2003; Postgate 2013). The practice of deporting people across the empire has been celebrated as a hallmark of Assyrian empire building, an effective means of breaking up potentially coherent societies that could resist Assyrian domination, creating mixed imperial societies that were dependent on Assyrian institutions for their survival, and have been considered as a resource, that could be used in the development of occupied regions and imperial projects such as the construction of a new capital (Oded 1979; Wiggermann 2000). While all these ideas are undoubtedly valid, I have some doubts about the way that the people concerned are often conceptualized. At times, deportees are portrayed as if they were slaves. I do not think we should conceive of nonAssyrian migrants in such terms. While these people are often described as unfree, it might be better to describe them as dependents who had pledged their labor to a particular person or institute but were entitled to food and care in return. There are many examples of cases in which Assyrian authorities were at pains to take care of the so-called deportees, such as after a bad harvest (Parker 2001, 88). From a practical point of view, it is difficult to see how the Assyrians could have managed to effectively police and control the large numbers of deportees during their migration to their destination and during their

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agricultural work in rural settings. For example, at Tell Sabi Abyad, the approximately four hundred siluhlu (dependent) workers, mostly bearing Hurrian names and probably coming from the Upper Khabur or even further east, were mostly living in small hamlets in the countryside (Wiggermann 2000). Given that they were living on the edge of the area controlled by the Assyrians, it would have been relatively easy to walk away from the colony, especially if they would have done so collectively. While some incidents of workers escaping did occur at Tell Sabi Abyad (Wiggermann, personal comment 2015), it does not appear to have been as great a problem as elsewhere in the ancient Near East (Liverani 1987; Heimpel 2009, 60–63; Tenney 2011, 104–18). The logical conclusion, as far as I am concerned, is that whereas the siluhlu were not free, they were treated in a manner that was more or less satisfactory to them, and some of them might even have entered into their dependent status voluntarily. Postgate (2013, 21) even mentions siluhlu as serving in the army, which indicates that they were trusted and relatively free. In any case, the deportee system would not have worked if only force was used and no benefits provided to the people in question, however meager these benefits might have been. Incentives in the Assyrian Empire What motivated the various agents and groups that opted into the imperial project? While it is to be expected that the incentives were diverse, I think we can distinguish two main categories of incentives: economic and social. Economic incentives would have consisted of (perceived) opportunities to better one’s life in one way or another. For Assyrian elites, multiple opportunities would have arisen in the wake of the Assyrian expansion for obtaining lucrative estates and posts, and local elites could equally have benefited from opting into the Assyrian system, as they would have been able to reap at least part of the benefits of local administration and taxation as part of the Assyrian state apparatus. For non-elite Assyrian settlers, it is likely that colonization would have significantly boosted their opportunities for obtaining a good livelihood—for example through grants of land, or the ability to set up workshops or trade in new markets—in a system that was stacked in their favor. For nonAssyrian dependent migrants, or deportees, being part of a colonization would probably have provided opportunities to a better life, in which hard work was rewarded with sufficient food and basic resources and the opportunity to start a family. Finally, for the local non-elite population, the benefits of opting into

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the Assyrian system would have varied considerably, with some paying taxes and pledging their allegiance, while others resisted and plundered farms and villages. That this latter aspect should be taken seriously is suggested not only by the Tell Chuera texts, but also by the fact that living in fortified centers or keeping one’s agricultural surpluses there, was the norm in the Lower Khabur and probably in the Balikh (Morandi Bonacossi 2000, 2008; Klinkenberg and Lanjouw 2015) Social incentives would have consisted of the opportunity to increase one’s position in society. From the beginning of the Middle Assyrian there appears to be what I would like to call a “culture of empire” in Assyria, in which the conquest, domination, and reengineering of conquered territories and societies was regarded as justified and even natural (also Parker 2011). This culture of empire is something different from state propaganda and its ideological justification. It manifests itself as a cultural framework that would have operated at a less discursive (or subconscious) level, and it structured social interaction between Assyrians and others. At the core of this culture of empire is a distinction between an Assyrian “high” culture on the one hand and vernacular traditions on the other, which was culturally elaborated. This normative distinction contributed enormously to the legitimation of the empire and was a powerful propagandistic tool. The association between an empire, a cultural idiom, and concepts of civilization, is, of course, well known from many empires, such as, for example, Urartu, Rome, and the Inka (Zimansky 1995; Mattingly 2011; Alconini, this volume). In administrative and legal documents, being Assyrian was a clearly demarcated status that entitled the person in question to certain rights and entailed obligations that set them apart from non-Assyrians (Postgate 2013, 12–27). In the newly conquered territories in the west, Assyrians were usually free men, and non-Assyrians were often serfs (Wiggermann 2000, 174). As has already been mentioned, the Assyrian status included both elites and commoners, and the latter included both poorer members of Assyrian society and groups that had gradually opted into an Assyrian identity. The fact that this opting in occurs suggests that being Assyrian was considered a desirable status in contemporary imperial society. Thus, by taking part in a colonization, marginal members of Assyrian society in the heartland could have bettered not simply their economic situation but also their social standing. With the emergence of the Middle Assyrian Empire, we can also document the spread of a particular type of material culture. This includes Middle

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Assyrian pottery (Pfälzner 1997; D’Agostino 2008; Tenu 2013; D’Agostino 2015; Duistermaat 2015), house forms (Bartl and Bonatz 2013; Akkermans and Wiggermann 2015), and burial traditions (Sauvage 2005; D’Agostino 2008; Tenu 2009; Bonatz 2013; Düring, Visser, and Akkermans 2015). These “Assyrian” types co-occur with vernacular ceramic repertoires, burial traditions, and house forms (Sauvage 2005; Tenu 2013; Düring, Visser, and Akkermans 2015; D’Agostino 2015; Jakob 2015). The spread of Assyrian artifacts and traditions can be most convincingly linked to the presence of Assyrian colonists across the Middle Assyrian Empire. In part, the spread of Assyrian artifacts and customs was a function of necessity, especially where empty landscapes were colonized, but it should also be explained in part by the desire of Assyrians to distinguish themselves—in how they lived, cooked, ate, buried their dead, and through the style of the artifacts that they used—and by non-Assyrians to emulate some of these practices (see S. T. Smith, this volume, for a similar dynamic in Egyptdominated Nubia). Assyrian-style artifacts and practices might have been associated with and important to Assyrian elites in particular, who occupied the key positions in the conquered lands of Hanigalbat (Harrak 1987, 195–205). Indeed, typical Assyrian material culture seems to concentrate mainly in administrative centers where the elite tended to settle (Tenu 2013; D’Agostino 2015; Jakob 2015). This does not mean that the entire elite of the Assyrian Empire consisted of people from Assyrian stock, but it does suggest that in their official capacity, they would have needed to present themselves as Assyrians. Interestingly, we have some evidence for non-Assyrian elites taking up Assyrian names and practices (Shibata 2015) and for Assyrian elites who buried themselves in decidedly non-Assyrian fashion (Wicke 2013; Düring, Visser, and Akkermans 2015). On the other hand, non-elite Assyrians demonstrably adhered to Assyrian ways in how they ate, dressed, and buried their dead (Wicke 2013; Düring, Visser, and Akkermans 2015). I think that these Assyrian practices, and the cultural ideals they embodied, would have motivated both Assyrian people, and those opting into Assyria, to contribute to the Assyrian expansion and consolidation. Conclusion In this chapter I have discussed the ways in which the Assyrian Empire has been conceptualized by previous scholars. Focusing on the Middle Assyrian Period, I have suggested that these interpretations of the empire, which describe

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it as consisting of either a concentric arrangement of a provincialized region surrounded by vassal states, or a network model, do not fit the degree of diversity in the empire that research over the past few decades has laid bare. I have briefly illustrated the diverse trajectories of change by discussing a variety of regions and how they were impacted by the expansion of Assyria in the Late Bronze Age. Faced with the large amount of diversity encountered, I have tried to address how we can best understand this variability. I have done so by discussing the means at the disposal of the Assyrian Empire; agents, or who was part of the Assyrian expansion and in what capacity; and incentives, or what motivated various actors and groups to opt into the dynamic and experimental Assyrian imperial project. To some this might seem an overly positive perspective on how the Assyrian Empire operated. I do not intend to either downplay the brutality of the Assyrian state on many occasions or the structural violence that accompanied it. For example, in the modern world, there are many (illegal) labor migrants who fulfill an important role in the economies of prosperous economies and are being badly exploited. However, for the people concerned, (illegal) labor migration is a choice made to improve their own prospects in life. Many participants in the Assyrian project might have been in a similar situation. The benefit of focusing on means, agents, and incentives, I think, is that we can start to ask how elites and commoners of various origins contributed to the (re)production of the Assyrian Empire. If we want to understand how empires were possible, I think we need to start from the bottom up and to move away from classifications that idealize the structure of empires instead of their constitution in daily life. Only in this way can we explain how this imperial system managed to cross its own Assyrian threshold. Thus, the creation of an imperial bureaucracy can only be understood as something that was facilitated by the opportunities that the consolidation of Assyrian power afforded to Assyrian elites who could obtain lucrative estates or posts in exchange for their service. The co-optation of subaltern populations can best be explained by focusing on the incentives provided by Assyria for those collaborating with Assyria. Finally, how did Assyria convince people to accept the legitimacy of its supremacy? I have argued that the possibilities for both Assyrians and non-Assyrians to improve their situation in life, and the possibility for non-Assyrians to opt into the Assyrian status,

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were instrumental, as was the creation of an Assyrian cultural idiom that naturalized and legitimized the empire. While I have only opened up a research agenda that requires a great deal of empirical research to test its validity, I would argue that the Assyrian imperial expansion probably provided attractive incentives, consisting of economic and social opportunities to people of various social classes and social backgrounds, and that this is key to understanding the Assyrian success. Note 1. Additional regional trajectories occur along the Middle Euphrates, for example, the Mari region, where a series of fortifications were apparently constructed (Tenu, Montero Fenollós, and Caramelo 2012); on the Upper Tigris region, where we see processes similar to those in the Balikh (Radner 2004); and the region between Erbil and Mosul, which might be comparable to the Upper Khabur in that there is little disruption to existing settlements and a dense network of small rural settlements (Morandi Bonacossi 2018).

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Chapter Seven

Historical Time and Imperial Formation in Aztec Mexico Lisa Overholtzer

Introduction When and how do empires begin? Analytically speaking, from what vantage point might we as archaeologists best see these imperial origins? I will return to the latter concern shortly, but the former is a seemingly straightforward question to which many might respond with reference to the consolidation of an imperial core that facilitates outward expansion. The beginning of the Aztec Empire, for example, is generally co-defined with the historically documented formation of the Aztec Triple Alliance in 1428 –1430 CE, which ended decades of endemic warfare in the Basin of Mexico and began a period of imperial expansion beyond. Of course, empire and imperial formation are historically contingent analytical constructs subject to much scholarly debate (Doyle 1986; Pagden 1995; Alcock et al. 2001), so my response above entails significant oversimplification. Still others, such as the contributors to the previous SAR volume on empire (Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue 2007), would point to the ongoing nature of imperial formations throughout their life histories, suggesting that scholarly fascination with an empire’s origins is less helpful. These are important debates, but my primary aim here is slightly different, though I hope complementary, to the work of those interested in imperial origins more broadly. Here I want to highlight how by recounting histories of imperial origins—histories that were by definition constructions and often revisionist in nature—state agents in the past engaged in imperial formation work. As archaeologists, we can read “against the grain” of archival sources, in tandem with close attention to the material record, in order to expose these revisionist histories. In short, the archaeological findings I present here pertaining to Aztec 167

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imperial formation suggest that rhetorics to characterize imperial origins and to define the empire’s antiquity were fundamental strategies of imperial state making. These efforts to use and manipulate historical time are part of what we might call Aztec imperial repertoires. The writing of the life history of empire is crucial to the initial and continual work of imperial formations themselves—that is, their ability to successfully incorporate other polities and/ or states and maintain control over them. This history or chronology writing by imperial elites might exaggerate or underestimate the empire’s origins or erase evidence for the inheritance of an earlier imperial formation, depending on need. For example, Bauer and Smit (2015; see also Covey 2018) argue that early colonial historiographies of Inka state formation exaggerate the extent of political centralization in the core when imperial expansion began; they similarly harness archaeological evidence independently of the documentary record to write an alternative history of imperial formation processes. As Trouillot (1995) argues, imperial narratives such as these may be less visible than gunfire or political campaigns, but they are no less powerful. Here we might draw insight from the recently burgeoning body of archaeological literature on memory, historical revision, and forgetting, especially as it relates to politics (Yoffee 2007; Mixter and Henry 2017; see also discussion in Overholtzer and Bolnick 2017). Histories are of course always constructed and subject to political manipulation. Gillespie (1989) demonstrated long ago how Indigenous elites in the early colonial era manipulated Aztec imperial histories to account for and make comprehensible the Spanish conquest and colonial rule. Similarly, Sinopoli (2003) reconstructed exaggerated royal rhetoric and claims to authority based on the crumbling Vijayanagara empire; she cautions archaeologists that “the most monumental constructions of a state may refer as much to memories of power as to its actual presence” (2003, 31). Hobsbawm’s (1983) term “invented traditions,” referring to traditions that are created anew, but with claims to great historical depth in order to legitimate them, has been a source of inspiration for Mills (2008). Trouillot’s concept of the silencing of the past, cited above, wherein all history writing is a power-laden selective process that necessarily silences some narratives, has been used by Mesoamerican archaeologists such as Gillespie (2008) and myself (2013). And Meskell (2003) has drawn on Adrian Forty and Suzanne Küchler’s (1999) similar idea of the “art of forgetting.” We might also relate imperial origin work to other imperial rhetorics, such as those of empirically false or tenuous claims that conquered land was previously

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unproductive or wasted. Terra nullius, a Roman legal concept meaning “land of no one” that was appropriated by modern imperial regimes to justify expansionist policies, is the most famous such formulation, but Rosenzweig (2014, 7) has demonstrated that similar narratives formed an “enterprise of erasure and expropriation” far earlier in the Assyrian empire. So too we might link the “discourses of exceptionalism” identified by Edward Said (2003, xxi), through which empires commonly claim to be different from other imperial formations. These historical narratives, through which ruling elites claim their polities are not exploitative but rather “righters of wrongs,” form part of the core work of imperial production. A similar process might be at work when imperial agents overemphasize how distinct their imperial formation is from others, including previous ones, in terms of size and scope, because such narratives serve as a reflection of their military success or might. As Stoler and McGranahan (2007, 11) aptly state, “Imperial projects are predicated on and produce epistemological claims that are powerful political ones”; citing Coronil’s contribution to the same volume, it is “the privilege of empires to make their histories appear as History.” With regard to the Aztec empire, we must remember that for the Aztecs, the very purpose of history was to explain the current social world; the past and the present formed a dialectical and dialogic relationship, and time was cyclical (Gillespie 1989). The Aztec codices themselves tell us of the rewriting of history in the pre-Hispanic era. The Códice Matritense (1907; see also Anales de Cuauhtitlan 1992) recounts that Itzcoatl, the first Aztec king, burned all historical codices after ascending to the throne so that he could write a state-sanctioned history and eliminate contradictory accounts written from the perspectives of other ethnic groups (LeónPortilla 1963). Thus, returning to the latter question above regarding analytical views of imperial origins, as archaeologists we might need to turn away from imperial history, at least briefly. As Alan Covey (2018, 254) argued in his recent analysis of Inka imperial origins, “Richly detailed histories of imperial capitals appear more comprehensive than data gleaned from mere potsherds,” but new interpretations will require “renegotiating the long-standing subordinate role of the material record.” Indeed, in this case study, Aztec imperial origin work was first glimpsed archaeologically in the detailed microhistories of subjugated households on the margins. The full picture also required zooming back out to the macro scale and returning to the often studied sacral precinct of the Aztec imperial core to provide a comparison with historical accounts. That is not to say that we should simply

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discard historiographic traditions when they are contradicted by the material record, in a reversal of the hierarchy, but rather that we maintain active tension between these lines of evidence, exploiting discrepancies between them to reveal the past imperial work of origin narrative construction. In this chapter, then, I use these multiscalar lines of evidence in order to reconstruct the complex early life history of the Aztec Empire and reveal the revisionist histories of imperial origins that were told by Aztec imperial agents to chroniclers in the early colonial period. I argue that imperial formation, often defined as the consolidation of power in the core of the Basin of Mexico that enabled expansionary campaigns beyond, must be pushed back by nearly a century to at least the mid-fourteenth century. This earlier imperial formation (likely related in part, but not limited to, the historically documented Tepanec state or empire) may have been intentionally minimized by ruling elites for political ends, perhaps as a result of dynastic change in the pre-Hispanic period or as a result of the political turmoil of the early colonial period. If so, Aztec imperialism as it is currently defined in relation to the Triple Alliance is not as “exceptional” as the documents would lead us to believe. Perhaps most importantly, I demonstrate how these histories of imperial origin, as tools of the state, might affect our ability to understand imperial formation archaeologically. Finally, this case study allows me to consider history making and the manipulation of historical time as an imperial tool or strategy, thus contributing to more recent conversations on the politics of time (e.g., Yao 2017). Aztec Imperial Histories I begin by briefly narrating the rise of the Aztec empire as it has been reconstructed from ethnohistoric documents. First, however, I offer a brief clarification on terminology. The term Aztec is used by historians and archaeologists to refer to the empire formed when power was consolidated in the Basin of Mexico by an alliance between three city-states: Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan (Figure 7.1). It also refers to the architectural and artistic styles associated with that empire. The term comes from the Nahuatl word for “people from Aztlan,” the mythical place of origin for the Nahuatl-speaking groups that settled in central Mexico. These ethnic groups included the Acolhua, the Chalca, the Mexica (the ethnic group of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec imperial capital), the Tepaneca, the Tlahuica, the Tlaxcalteca, and the Xochimilca. The term Aztec was not employed at the time of the Spanish conquest, however; Indigenous peoples used the ethnic

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Figure 7.1. Map of the Aztec Empire, showing the sites discussed in the chapter and its maximum extent, with detailed inset of the Aztec core. Independent enemy territories are shown in capital letters. Produced by Lisa Overholtzer.

group terms cited above and emphasized difference instead of unity. Early colonial documents illustrate the many distinct and conflicting historical perspectives recorded by these peoples, despite the unification of all but one (the Tlaxcalteca) under a single imperial structure upon the arrival of the Spanish. Nonetheless, modern scholars generally follow Gibson’s (1971; but see Barlow 1990) ethnohistoric justification for the usage of the term Aztec, which is also supported by archaeological evidence for the region’s shared material culture. Two distinct documentary corpuses provide insight into Aztec imperial history: first, accounts, legal records, and letters created by Spanish bureaucracy; and second, an Indigenous historiographic tradition (Carrasco 1971; Gibson 1971; Cline 1972; Gillespie 1998; Boone 2000). The latter histories—which often recount migration stories, the years of conquests, the reigns of rulers, and so on—were all recorded in written form in the colonial period by Indigenous scholars based on then-extant pre-Hispanic documents and oral histories. Using these documents, historians and archaeologists have long narrated the emergence of the Aztec empire as follows: The 12th-century decline of the Toltec state created a vacuum of political power within the Valley of Mexico. This vacuum was filled by a score of small, autonomous, internally unstable and mutually hostile political

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domains during the 13th and early 14th centuries. By the end of the 14th century, warfare had resulted in the subordination of some to others. [The Tepanec capital of] Azcapotzalco on the western side of the valley and Texcoco on the eastern side emerged as the two dominant powers. With the defeat of Texcoco in 1418, Azcapotzalco came to control almost the entire valley. However, Azcapotzalcan hegemony was short-lived. In 1430, a military force assembled by the ruler of Tenochtitlan (a client state of Azcapotzalco) and the deposed heir of Texcoco defeated Azcapotzalco. In the wake of Azcapotzalco’s defeat, the rulers of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan (representing the more accommodating nobility of Azcapotzalco) forged a military alliance, quickly consolidated their control over the Valley of Mexico, and began a series of conquests that carried them far beyond. When the Spaniards arrived less than a century later, this Triple Alliance had come to dominate most of Mesoamerica. (Brumfiel 1983, 266–67) In this history, the founding of the Triple Alliance, which consolidated the entire Basin of Mexico under a single political institution and ended the region’s endemic warfare, is defined as the establishment of a new political epoch. This is regarded as the moment of imperial formation. Because scholars often draw on Triple Alliance historical sources, events pertaining to the powerful polities that existed prior to 1430 CE are framed merely as consolidation events that led up to the formation of the Aztec empire. A small number of scholars have recently begun to empirically investigate preimperial Postclassic Basin of Mexico polities from archaeological (García Chávez 2004; 2006; De Lucia 2011; Morehart 2016; Overholtzer and De Lucia 2016) and ethnohistoric (Santamarina Novillo 2005, 2006) perspectives. This work, while limited, helps us begin to critically question Aztec imperial historical narratives and decenter Aztec imperial processes. Santamarina Novillo (2005, 2006) argues that the Tepanec polity at Azcapotzalco (see Figure 7.1) constituted an empire whose status and geographical extent was downplayed by Aztec ruler Itzcoatl after his codex burning campaign. Santamarina Novillo (2017, 12) cites the words of Tezozómoc (2001, 78), a colonial chronicler from Tenochtitlan, for how this affected historical accounts of the Tepanec empire in particular: “See, valorous Mexica, that now there is no more memory of the Tepanecs nor in the hills, their allies, now there is no more town of Azcapotzalco, that everything is now ours” (translation mine). He pieces together the scarce historical evidence remaining for

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this early period in order to reconstruct the expansionist policies of the Tepanecs, covering much of the Basin of Mexico and some cities beyond by 1428. He highlights that the subsequent Aztec imperial expansion campaigns would not have been possible without the Tepanecs. The imperial label Santamarina Novillo suggests has yet to be broadly accepted (but see M. E. Smith 2016), and some of the conquest dates (e.g., Cuauhnahuac; see M. E. Smith 1987, 41) are contested. The capital of Azcapotzalco lies beneath modern-day Mexico City, precluding much modern archaeological investigation (M. E. Smith 2016). Although his arguments have yet to be incorporated into a broader reframing of imperial origins in the Basin of Mexico, I build on his work here, as the Tepanecs figure prominently in the history of Xaltocan, having conquered it in 1395. Aztec Imperial Correlates The Aztec conquest and integration of individual polities beyond the Basin of Mexico continued after imperial formation and up to the arrival of the Spanish, and those specific dates are applied in those local contexts; however, the years 1428–1430 CE are thought to mark the boundary between imperial and pre-imperial eras more generally. They are the defining focus of investigations into the effects of Aztec formation, as seen through archaeological correlates. A brief note on historical and archaeological chronologies is also warranted here (for more detail, see M. E. Smith 1987; M. E. Smith and Doershuk 1991; Parsons, Brumfiel, and Hodge 1996; Overholtzer 2014). The Aztecs rose to power in what archaeologists call the Postclassic Period, which is subdivided into three parts: Early Postclassic (900–1150 CE), Middle Postclassic (1150–350 CE) and Late Postclassic (1350–1521 CE). The rough ceramic horizon markers for these three periods are Aztec I, II, and III Black-on-Orange, respectively (although Aztec I ceramics were not used at all sites across the Basin of Mexico). The Middle Postclassic and the first half of the Late Postclassic thus correspond to the period of endemic warfare discussed above, and Aztec imperial formation to the middle of the Late Postclassic Period. Aztec II pottery is pre-imperial, while the Aztec III ware spans pre-imperial and imperial eras. Although the Aztecs constructed some monument forms that were shared widely across Mesoamerica, such as circular temples dedicated to the wind god, Ehécatl, archaeologists and art historians generally consider certain architectural elements to be particularly diagnostic of Aztec imperial influence. For example, the double temple pyramid, which features two temples with stairways

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Figure 7.2. Colonial depiction of the double temple pyramid of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, Codex Ixtlilxochitl folio 112v, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Note tenons (plain and in decorative form of crania) on the temple to Huitzilopochtli on the right.

situated on one pyramid platform, is generally understood to be typical Aztec imperial architecture (but see Umberger and Klein 1993) (Figure 7.2). Aztec temples and occasionally noble houses were adorned with tenons, or clavos arquitectónicos, cone-shaped decorative elements that were inserted narrowside first into decorative panels (see Figure 7.2). Clavos arquitectónicos have been found in salvage excavations across modern-day Mexico City, such as at Coyoacán and at La Ciudadela, the Tenochca neighborhood of Moyotlan (Martos López and Pulido Méndez 1989; Moreno Cabrera and Meraz Moreno 2014), and they commonly appear on Aztec temple figurines. Direct Investment via Aztec-Style Architecture and Monumental Sculpture Scholars maintain that Aztec imperial sovereignty was sustained primarily by indirect methods often characterized typologically as hegemonic (Hassig 1984, 1988). Historical documents suggest that local ruling elites were allowed to

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maintain their position of power and ability to exact taxes if they cooperated and allowed another level of taxation to be placed on subjects (see M. E. Smith 1987 for a discussion of how this imperial structure affects archaeological visibility). However, Aztec scholars have long recognized geographical diversity within the empire, with an inner core of tributary provinces and outer strategic client states, each of which had distinct investments in military architecture (Berdan et al. 1996). Military officials and tax collectors were installed in select places across the empire, colonists were sent to conquered cities with particularly unruly subjects, and border garrisons were established at others (Berdan 1996, table 5.5; M. E. Smith 1996a, table 6.7). At these select sites, scholars have detected an imperial presence in the form of architecture, such as tenons (clavos) and rooftop decorative elements (almenas), and Aztec-style basalt sculpture (Umberger 1996a). A historically attested Aztec colony at Cuetlaxtlan, Veracruz, is visible in architecture as well as portable material culture (Ohnsersorgen 2006, 13). Umberger and Klein (1993; Umberger 1996a, 164) list commonly accepted Aztec-commissioned buildings in the states of Mexico (Calixtlahuaca and Malinalco), Morelos (Tepoztlan), Guerrero (Oztuma), and in Veracruz (Quauhtochco). Aztec architecture is likely also present at the unexcavated Veracruz site of Castillo de Teayo, possibly the historically known Aztec enclave of Tezapotitlan (Umberger and Klein 1993, 300). These sites demonstrate the existence of more intensive, embodied, imperial repertoires. However, these strategic places may be somewhat exceptional, as at many sites outside the Basin of Mexico that are historically attested as part of the Aztec empire, scholars have found the empire to be nearly invisible. Umberger and Klein (1993, 324) observe, “Considering the ultimate expanse of the Triple Alliance empire, diplomatic contacts, and economic networks, Aztec-inspired (art) forms are surprisingly scarce in most areas outside Central Mexico.” And Spores (1984, 63, 299, 229n40; cited in Umberger and Klein 1993) remarks of the Mixteca that there is “virtually nothing in the archaeological record to suggest political domination . . . by an external power.” The absence of architectural indices may be a result of the empire’s focus on extracting tributary resources. The Aztecs did not impose religious beliefs on commoners in conquered settings. Rather, efforts at ideological control were largely directed at a small subset of society—the lower-ranking elites on whose participation the empire depended—and were aimed at achieving elite coalition unity and thus political stability (Brumfiel 1998).

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Given that a costly investment in monumental art and architecture may not have been necessary in many conquered contexts, in order to find evidence of this “elusive” empire, many scholars have drawn on a political-economic framework that postulates significant reorganization and a shifting of labor resources in response to imperial domination. They have argued that especially in the imperial heartland, the empire may be visible not in any “obvious intrusions of foreign ideas,” but rather in economic integration and increased local production (Umberger and Klein 1993, 325; see also Hodge 1998, 200). Increased Consumption from the Imperial Center Capital-produced goods may have been more ubiquitous in the periphery as a result of, first, imperial policies to encourage economic growth, tax sales, and support capital producers; and second, elite (or commoner) conspicuous consumption (Brumfiel and Earle 1987; Hodge and Minc 1990; Hodge et al. 1992, 1993; Minc 1994; M. E. Smith and Berdan 1996; Garraty 2006; Minc 2006). Scholars continue to debate the extent to which economic shifts were a result of imperial meddling. They generally agree that Aztec strategies included promoting regional and long-distance trade, for example, by demanding the payment of taxes in non-local goods, protecting markets, and sponsoring guild merchants (M. E. Smith and Berdan 1996). Elite status-based emulation of ceramics might provide another alternative explanation for the rising popularity of Tenochtitlan-produced pottery (Brumfiel 1987; Nichols et al. 2002). Similarly, M. E. Smith (1992a, 2003) has argued that under Aztec rule, commoners benefited from increased economic commercialization and access to a more developed market system. Outside the core, scholars cite the presence of non-local Aztec-style pottery as evidence of imperial control and local elite emulation. During the Late Postclassic Period, two decorated ceramic serving wares were produced and consumed in the Basin of Mexico: Aztec III Black-on-Orange and polished redwares (Figure 7.3). Ritual ceramic objects include Texcoco molded/filleted incense burners (Figure 7.3) and “Aztec” figurines (Overholtzer 2017). These Aztec ceramics are attested at the Aztec colony of Cuetlaxtlan (Ohnersorgen 2006), in the nearby Mixtequilla area (Garraty and Stark 2002), and in northern Guerrero ( Medellín Zenil 1952; Lister 1971, 628; Cabrera Castro 1986, 193–94; M. E. Smith 1990; Umberger and Klein 1993, 299–300). However, Aztec ceramics are rare at sites in Oaxaca adjacent to the Maya highlands, where Aztec

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Figure 7.3. Aztec “imperial matter”: (a) Aztec III Black-on-Orange ware, (b) polished redware, and (c) Texcoco molded filleted incense burner and sherds from Xaltocan. Photographs by Lisa Overholtzer.

imperial officials or colonies are historically documented (Umberger and Klein 1993). The archaeological record thus clearly indicates a large degree of variability in local experiences of and strategic responses to the expanding empire at its margins (see Skoglund et al. 2006, 566). In the core, at sites like Xaltocan, the Aztec I–IV wares are stylistically local, and thus the presence of the pottery style itself does not necessarily reflect imperial influence. However, geochemical provenance analyses have allowed archaeologists to detect changes in the production locale of the Aztec III wares consumed, likely in relation to the rise of the Aztecs. There is significant evidence for increased consumption of Aztec III ceramics produced in the imperial capital, reflecting substantial market expansion and centralization in Tenochtitlan, and decreased consumption from other smaller centers, such as nearby Cuauhtitlan (Nichols et al. 2002; Hodge and Neff 2005; Nichols et al. 2009; Garraty 2013; but see Stoner 2016). Charlton et al. (2008, 265) argue that the Late Postclassic saw the rise of full-time professional Aztec III potters in the capital. These ceramic exports even reached across the boundaries of Middle Postclassic political domains, for example, at Cerro Portezuelo. Residents of this site, situated in the eastern basin formerly under Texcoco rule, consumed twice as much Aztec III Black-on-Orange from the Tenochtitlan group (some 68 percent of all

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Aztec III!), despite Texcoco’s status as a pottery producer (Garraty 2013). Nichols and colleagues (Nichols et al. 2009, 4; see also Hodge and Minc 1990) argue that Aztec III Black-on-Orange ceramics from the Tenochtitlan compositional group are so widespread across the Basin of Mexico that it must be the result of interventionist policies by Tenochtitlan to support its own potters. Increased Production and Economic Reorganization In addition to labor requirements, imperial taxes were exacted in many material forms: agricultural produce, such as maize; cotton cloth and clothing items; and raw materials such as obsidian and cacao. Thus, we would expect an increase in artifacts associated with this production under Aztec imperialism. Residents also could make a good of their choosing and pay a tax to exchange it for the one they owed to the empire (Gutiérrez 2013). Tribute lists indicate that the Aztecs demanded tribute from some provinces in a form that was not available locally—cacao, for example—in order to increase the revenue that the empire received by taxing market sales, and markets and tribute collection points were placed together to facilitate this exchange (Hicks 1987). Archaeologists have documented significant agricultural intensification in rural villages during the Late Postclassic Period. This includes terracing at the Teotihuacan Valley site of Cihuatecpan (Evans 1990, 118), at Capilco and Cuexcomate in Morelos (M. E. Smith and Price 1994), and at nearby Calixtlahuaca (M. E. Smith et al. 2013). However, M. E. Smith cautions that terracing at Capilco and Cuexcomate may have been promoted by local provincial elites before Aztec integration, and at Calixtlahuaca these projects took place across the Middle and Late Postclassic, and so the tie to Aztec imperialism is tenuous. Brumfiel (1980, 1986, 1987, 1991a, 1991b) suggested that the production of some goods and the market consumption of others—that is, a narrowing and specialization—arose in the Late Postclassic. Regional variability in which goods were produced corresponded at least in part to the distance from the capital. Commoners at rural sites like Huexotla and Xico fed urban Tenochtitlan through foodstuffs, such as maize and maguey syrup, and in turn consumed more nonlocal goods, such as salt, spindle whorls, and cloth. Non-food tribute goods were thus introduced into the market system, lowering their value and encouraging food production and greater rural market dependency for everyday necessities.

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In the more distant hinterlands, at sites in Morelos such as Xochicalco, Coatetelco, and Coatlan Viejo (near Capilco and Cuexcomate in Figure 7.1), cloth production was intensified, a burden that fell disproportionately on women (Brumfiel 1991b, 254; see also M. E. Smith 2003). At Otumba in the Teotihuacan Valley, excavations demonstrate the rise of specialized and intensive, but decentralized craft production (Charlton, Nichols, and Otis Charlton 1991; Otis Charlton 1993; Otis Charlton, Nichols, and Charlton 1993; Charlton and Otis Charlton 1994; Hodge and Smith 1994; Nichols 1994; Charlton et al. 2008; Nichols 2013). This included attached lapidary production and independent industries, such as ceramics (figurines, spindle whorls, and censers), obsidian objects (prismatic cores and blades), and cloth (cotton and maguey). These artisans benefited from the empire’s extended market and increased demand and likely produced for both tribute and market sale. These studies demonstrate the intertwined nature of the tribute and trade market systems under Aztec imperialism. Nichols (2013, 52) reminds us, “All economies were and are embedded,” and thus we expect Aztec imperialism to have had material effects in both the production and consumption of goods— that is, an overall economic reorganization within households. An Additional Challenge to the Study of Aztec Imperial Correlates Archaeological investigations of the lived experience of this “elusive” empire are made even more difficult by the fact that the material produced and consumed by Aztec imperial agents does not conform to tidy historical divisions. Scholars generally agree that the relevant culture-historical period—the Late Postclassic—as defined by ceramic seriation runs from 1350 to 1521 (Vaillant 1938; see also Tolstoy 1958; Parsons 1966; Sanders, Parsons, and Santley 1979). The Late Postclassic thus spans the pre-imperial and imperial periods, each eighty to ninety years in length. Aztec III Black-on-Orange ceramics, the Late Postclassic Period’s horizon marker, has “resisted” the production of finer chronologies based on stylistic variation or production technologies (Umberger and Klein 1993, 296). Some Aztec-type figurines appear in identical form as early as the tenth century CE, in the Early Postclassic, and continued to be used through the early colonial period (Brumfiel and Overholtzer 2009). As M. E. Smith (1987, 39; see also M. E. Smith 1992b) complained nearly thirty years ago, there is no simple way to

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determine whether changes we see in the Late Postclassic archaeological record occurred before or after imperial formation, or span both eras. The problem that M. E. Smith identified is still with us. Survey projects (Sanders, Parsons, and Santley 1979) were successful in gathering large amounts of data that enabled spatial and (albeit rough) diachronic analyses of social change without stratigraphic evidence. They were so successful, in fact, that few archaeologists subsequently developed systematic excavation projects to refine their chronologies. The 1990s did see an increase in the systematic excavations of Aztec sites, excavations of both deeply stratified and single-component sites and of household contexts, all with radiocarbon dates. However, most of these projects have not resulted in more precise chronologies for the Late Postclassic, based on ceramics or any other archaeological material. They have, however, resulted in somewhat better understandings of the spatial and chronological extent of the earlier Aztec I (Early Postclassic) and Aztec II (Middle Postclassic) Black-on-Orange ceramic types consumed in the Basin of Mexico (summarized in Hodge 1998, 204–5). Few archaeologists have constructed sufficiently refined chronologies to determine whether a given excavated context is imperial or preimperial ( M. E. Smith and Doershuk 1991; Hare and Smith 1996; Overholtzer 2013, 2015; Huster and Smith 2015). As M. E. Smith (1992b) remarked long ago, it remains tempting to simply attribute any Middle- to Late-Postclassic changes to the growth of the empire and resulting social and economic shifts. Archaeologists still often create their chronologies in the following manner: “When the date of conquest is known from native historical sources, and conquest is assumed to correlate with the introduction of Basin of Mexico pottery types into an area (usually Aztec III Black-on-Orange), then the archaeological phase containing these types is assigned the historical date as its temporal starting point” (M. E. Smith 1987, 38). Thus, we can only confidently date most of the findings for archaeological correlates discussed in the previous section to the Late Postclassic, and not when they occurred within that span of 1350–1521 CE, or whether in the imperial or pre-imperial era. It is entirely possible—and, given the findings I present here, likely—that many of the changes described above as documented archaeological correlates of the Aztec empire predate historical imperial formation dates. This imprecision also means that we have not yet been able to archaeologically reconstruct the variability we anticipate to have occurred over the history of the empire. Tribute records attest to dramatic increases in taxes exacted, for example a 900 percent increase in the Tlapa province in eastern Guerrero

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between 1486 and 1522 (Gutiérrez 2013). Thus, we might expect—but have not yet been able to examine archaeologically—multiple increases in production at the household level. Or we might see changes in consumption patterns—­ perhaps the rejection of imperial-style goods—as people changed their opinions of their imperial context in response to those tax increases. Finally, we have not been able to construct a history of Aztec imperialism that is independent from historical sources, and we have not been able to assess any changes that might have taken place in the Late Postclassic before imperial formation. This means that the Aztec empire is the defining event of the Late Postclassic Period, and the Aztec imperial historical sources stand alone in structuring the frameworks of our investigations. As Chapman and Wylie (2014, 4) lament, “The prejudices of the literate continue to favor the seeming transparency of textual records and the direct testimony of subjects.” Aztec Imperial Archaeology? New Evidence As intimated by the previous mention of terracing that likely predated Aztec rule in Morelos and nearby Calixtlahuaca, evidence of imperial correlates has sometimes been recovered in pre-imperial contexts, and this evidence ought to raise questions about our assumptions for the visibility of the Aztec empire. Umberger and Klein (1993, 298) write, “All Aztec-period ceramics are problematic when considered as markers of an imperial Aztec horizon,” because many of them have been found outside of the Basin of Mexico before imperial formation, while other Basin types never appear in conquered territories. However, they suggest that Aztec III Black-on-Orange can serve as part of a “reduced archaeological horizon” with some qualifications, because it does approximate historically documented imperial presence geographically, even if it does appear too early in some regions. M. E. Smith and Berdan (1992; also M. E. Smith 1987) determined that Aztec Black-on-Orange and Redware pottery reached Morelos long before the formation of the Aztec Triple Alliance, as did the double temple pyramid and standardized rectangular palace plan (see also Hodge 1997, 199). The double temple pyramid first appears at Tenayuca, and most of its six stages of construction are associated with Middle Postclassic Aztec II pottery (M. E. Smith 2008, 31). A double temple pyramid was constructed at Middle Postclassic Teopanzolco (Cuauhnahuac) in Morelos, long before the formation of the Aztec Triple Alliance (M. E. Smith 2008, 34). Redware pottery arrived in Veracruz as early as the Middle Postclassic (Stark 1990), and Basin of Mexico

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ceramic imports in Morelos households actually decreased under imperial rule in the middle of the Late Postclassic, after initially increasing at the beginning of the Late Postclassic (M. E. Smith 2003, 255). This could reflect either the rejection of these goods once they were associated with the Aztec empire, or decreased purchasing power once tax obligations increased. Stone tenons are present at pre-imperial sites like Middle Postclassic Tenayuca. Moreover, they are present even earlier in the Formative to Epiclassic Period Mezcala culture of Guerrero (Reyna Robles 2013). Mezcala-style stone masks and figurines were deposited in offerings at the Templo Mayor (González González 1987). Therefore, it is possible that Mezcala portable art and stone reflect Aztec antiquarianism and broader cultural revivals (Umberger 1987) rather than Aztec-developed artistic canons. And in the Late Postclassic, stone tenons were not strictly associated with Aztec imperialism, as they were present at the capital of Tlaxcallan, an enemy of the Aztecs (López Corral and Santacruz Cano 2014, 2015). Many scholars thus acknowledge a significant degree of social, cultural, and economic integration within central Mexico, even before imperial formation and even across political lines into unconquered territories thereafter (M. E. Smith and Heath-Smith 1980; Umberger and Klein 1993; Hare and Smith 1996; Umberger 1996a; Gillespie 1998). We ought to expect such patterns, M. E. Smith (1987, 49) contends, because Aztec imperial expansion was not aimed primarily at enacting cultural imperialism but rather at turning former trade partners into imperial subjects. Nevertheless, none of these projects have questioned the historical timeline of Aztec imperial formation and expansion—that is, historical narratives of imperial origins—using these material lines of evidence, and I suggest that it might be time to do so. New Evidence from Xaltocan My own recent study of precisely dated household contexts at Xaltocan provides perhaps the clearest evidence for archaeological correlates of Aztec imperialism that appear far too early for standard narratives of Aztec imperial origins. While these data could be evidence of pre-imperial change, here I will argue that instead they reflect the earliest phase of Aztec imperial formation, a phase that was intentionally minimized or distanced in historical records as part of the repertoires of rule, the work of imperial production itself. Xaltocan, located on an anthropogenic island in the northern Basin of

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Mexico, is now one of the most extensively studied Aztec sites and is the subject of numerous books and dissertations (Brumfiel 2005; Morehart 2010; De Lucia 2011; Overholtzer 2012; Rodríguez-Alegría 2016). Xaltocan was likely founded in the tenth century CE, and according to ethnohistoric documents, rose in power, eventually serving as the capital of the Otomí city-state (Nazareo de Xaltocan 1940, see Carrasco 1950; Alva Ixtlilxóchitl 1975–77 I:293, 423). After a war lasting from 1250 to 1395, Xaltocan was conquered by the Tepanec state and was said to have been abandoned at that time (Alva Ixtlilxóchitl 1975–77 II:36; Anales de Cuauhtitlan 1992, 60–61, 75). However, recent archaeological findings have called the scale of this demographic event into question and suggested that at least some inhabitants remained (Overholtzer 2013). With the defeat of the Tepanecs at Azcapotzalco and the creation of the Aztec Triple Alliance circa 1428–1430 CE, Xaltocan became part of the newly formed Aztec Empire, and in 1435 CE was said to be repopulated with multiethnic tribute payers sent by the state (Anales de Cuauhtitlan 1992, 104; Hicks 1994). There is some genetic evidence for a demographic transition sometime in the Late Postclassic (MataMíguez et al. 2012; Mata-Míguez 2016), which might reflect settlers sent by the empire. However, as I will discuss here and as I have written elsewhere (Overholtzer 2015), the ethnic shift that was detected archaeologically by Brumfiel (Brumfiel, Salcedo, and Schafer 1994) likely took place by 1350 CE, long before Aztec imperial formation. Brumfiel’s extensive survey and test pitting program (2005) identified several Late Postclassic changes that she attributed to Aztec imperialism. Comparing surface collections and survey contexts associated with Aztec II (Middle Postclassic) and Aztec III (Late Postclassic) pottery, Brumfiel and her collaborators found the following: First, slightly intensified cotton textile manufacture, with an increase from .3 to .7 small spindle whorls per 100 rim sherds (Brumfiel 2005: figure 14.5); Second, a decrease in other forms of production, such as obsidian tools, with the ubiquity of obsidian dropping from 190 pieces or 192 grams to 70 pieces or 74 grams per 100 rim sherds, and with very little evidence for local blade production (Brumfiel 2005: figure 14.4; Millhauser 2005); Third, a shift in ethnic affiliation from Otomi to Mexica, as seen in the lip plugs worn by men, reflecting either the site’s resettlement or status-driven re-affiliation (Brumfiel, Salcedo and Schafer 1994);

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Fourth, a shift in the predominant imported pottery producer from Cuauhtitlan to Tenochtitlan. Neutron activation analyses revealed that of the imported Aztec II ceramics, 83% were sourced to Cuauhtitlan and 17% to Tenochtitlan/Culhuacan, while of the imported Aztec III ceramics, only 33% were sourced to Cuauhtitlan and 67% to Tenochtitlan. (Hodge and Neff 2005) Subsequent excavations of raised fields or chinampas by Morehart (Morehart and Eisenberg 2009; Morehart 2014, 2016; Morehart and Frederick 2014) found little Aztec III pottery, indicating that this intensive agricultural system was abandoned at some point during the Late Postclassic. Morehart argues that it was a result of the Tepanec conquest in 1395 CE, which would have devastated the social networks and organization needed for maintenance. Morehart also documented a return to the diversity in maize varieties that had characterized agricultural production before the city’s agricultural intensification at the height of the Otomi city-state, presumably as intensive collective farming ended and as families started farming on their own again. In order to examine some of these changes in closer detail, I conducted extensive excavations of two house mounds located near the southeastern edge of the site. I reconstructed the histories of two households occupied between approximately 1240 and 1650 CE. The remains of one of these households—on a house mound called Structure 122 in Brumfiel’s survey—was particularly well preserved. Excavations recovered a series of stratified features, including the remains of four houses, six middens, and seventeen burials. A series of stratified middens is relevant here, three associated with Aztec II pottery and two with Aztec III pottery. I included radiocarbon dates for each of these middens in a Bayesian statistical model to produce a precise chronology of this domestic occupation (see Overholtzer 2015 for more detail). They indicate Aztec II activity in the house and exterior patio dating to the mid- and late thirteenth century (1230–1260, 1240–1270, and 1260–1310, at a 95 percent confidence interval), and Aztec III practices in the mid- and late fourteenth century (1340–1380 and 1360–1410, at a 95 percent confidence interval). While occupation here was continuous when examining radiocarbon dates for other contexts, these middens offer snapshots of specific points in time. These contexts largely mirror the findings of Brumfiel and colleagues, though they cannot speak to the shifts in agricultural production documented by Morehart. The middens containing Aztec III ceramics feature (see Table 7.1) slightly

Table 7.1. Artifact Frequencies per Hundred Rim Sherds in the Structure 122 Aztec II and Aztec III Middens

Spindle Whorl Frequency per 100 Rim Sherds

Obsidian Pieces per 100 Rim Sherds

Obsidian Weight per 100 Rim Sherds

Salt Pottery Rim Sherds per 100 Rims

Unnotched Sherd Disks per 100 Rim Sherds

Aztec II

0.49 (n=6)

0.67 (n=690)

155g (n=1599)

15.9 (n=163)

3.70 (n=38)

Aztec III

0.78 (n=2)

0.50 (n=128)

77g (n=198)

2.0 (n=5)

0.81 (n=2)

Frequencies include spindle whorls, obsidian, Texcoco fabric marked salt pottery, and sherd disks.

Figure 7.4. Neutron activation analysis data for Aztec II vs. Aztec III Black-on-Orange pottery from Structure 122 middens.

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increased evidence for textile manufacture (De Lucia and Overholtzer 2014); less obsidian use and nearly no toolmaking, less production of either salt or goods such as fish or cloth dying that required salt, and less production that involved the use of ceramic sherds worked into circles and other shapes, possibly pottery smoothers (De Lucia and Overholtzer 2014); a shift in ethnic affiliation, seen in the change from locally made tau-shaped lip plugs to imported button-shaped lip plugs in middens and burials (Overholtzer 2015); and increased consumption of Tenochtitlan-produced Black-on-Orange ceramics, as seen in neutron activation analysis (Figure 7.4). These findings are perhaps not surprising. What is surprising is that these changes all predate Aztec imperial integration as defined historically by approximately eighty years. They even predate the site’s conquest by the Tepanecs by nearly a half century. These changes took place by 1350 CE, when Xaltocan was said to have been at its height. Note that this is the first chronologically precise household data for Aztec III occupation within the Basin of Mexico. While the sample is admittedly small, it strongly suggests that the changes that had been previously postulated to have resulted from Aztec imperialism took place in at least some households at the transition between the Middle to Late Postclassic, in the mid-fourteenth century. My excavations at Xaltocan did not recover sealed middens that can be securely dated to the Aztec imperial period, so we cannot know whether these trends continued or if the historically documented imperial integration is entirely invisible archaeologically. However, the scale of artifactual change visible in the Aztec III middens dating to the mid- to late fourteenth century matches the scale of change seen in Brumfiel’s site-level surface collections and test pit excavations for the entire Late Postclassic, suggesting that additional, significant change after 1350 is unlikely. We might relatively easily explain archaeological evidence for any one of these changes without being forced to reconsider the narrative of Aztec imperial origins presented in colonial histories. We might not be surprised by the exchange of Aztec Black-on-Orange ceramics outside the Aztec empire— consumption, after all, “revolving around the acquisition of things to confirm, display, accent, mask, and imagine who we are and who we wish to be” (Mullins 2011, 134–35). In fact, Aztec Black-on-Orange and Redware ceramics and Azteccontrolled Pachuca green obsidian have been recovered in low and moderate quantities, respectively, in enemy Aztec territory (Snow 1966; Millhauser et al. 2015). Or we might not be surprised that Xaltocan residents would decide to ally themselves with a growing power. This is the argument I made for the clear

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ethnic shift that occurred by the mid-fourteenth century (Overholtzer 2015)— that it reflected the proactive strategies of commoners. But when all these shifts in household practices are seen in concert, anticipatory strategies seem to have less explanatory power. Instead, we begin to see epistemologically distinct lines of evidence with different biases that in conjunction might support a robust, “cabled” argument (in Wylie’s [1989] terminology), for an alternative explanation involving imperial formation by the mid-fourteenth century. We might look to the few other sites with chronologically precise archaeological findings for additional support. We can with some assurance assign a pre- or post-imperial chronological context only to those excavated by M. E. Smith and colleagues. Regarding the sites of Capilco and Cuexcomate, Smith concludes: Although the small number of Temazcalli houses makes comparisons difficult, it does appear that the Temazcalli to Early Cuauhnahuac transition (at 1350) was accompanied by greater socioeconomic change than the Early to Late Cuauhnahuac (at 1430) transition. Another pattern in the data discussed above is that local processes like population growth and agricultural intensification were of far greater significance to Morelos peasants than external influences like conquest and trade. Market trade was pervasive and kept these rural farmers integrated into the larger economic sphere of the central highlands, but as an agent of change it appears to have been less influential than the more local developments. These observations reiterate the point that the Aztec empire had little direct influence on Morelos peasants. (1992a, 393) More recent excavations at Calixtlahuaca revealed that “prior to Aztec rule, households at the site were gradually shifting toward more pan-Central Mexican cultural practices” (Huster 2016, 420). In contrast to Capilco and Cuexcomate, the Aztec empire was visible, though in relatively small changes. Huster (2016, 434–36) argues that the presence of Aztec archaeological correlates is likely a result of bottom-up interactions and consumption choices rather than imperial policy or elite imposition. Variation was seen in the extent to which different households living under Aztec imperialism emulated Aztec practices, ranging from maintaining local identities to emulating some Aztec practices to perhaps representing well-integrated immigrants. Of these, the most strongly Aztec-identifying households were the wealthiest, though one of the households that maintained a strict local identity was no poorer than the households that consumed some Aztec material culture. In sum, while variable, the data for

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Morelos suggest that substantive changes began to occur at approximately 1350 CE, and these patterns increased over time with the empire’s expansion. I would reiterate that to move forward in reexamining our frameworks regarding the material correlates of Aztec imperialism, we need to understand the precise chronological context of social change, and we need to examine processes at the local level, including households and agricultural contexts. Given the generally rapid pace of imperial processes and the generally coarse-grained nature of the archaeological record, relying on Aztec imperial histories might lead us to overemphasize the scale of imperial change over pre-existing sociopolitical formations. We might unknowingly ascribe material correlates of imperialism to later and better documented imperial formations or fail to see earlier sociopolitical formations altogether. Detailed contextual excavations featuring precise chronologies allowed me to overcome this limitation and begin to question the imperial histories. However, to fully understand Aztec imperial formation archaeologically, I must return to the macro scale and to the imperial core itself. In the remainder of this chapter, I turn to existing excavation data from the ceremonial precinct of Tenochtitlan in order to look for evidence that would support a hypothesis of imperial origins in the Middle Postclassic Period that had been written out of Aztec imperial histories. That is, the simplest explanation for the presence of what is considered Aztec imperial matter at Xaltocan by the mid-fourteenth century might be that political and economic integration within the Basin of Mexico was quite advanced, already constituting what we might define as an imperial formation. This imperial formation must have predated even the events recorded historically for the Tepanecs, though it might have been related to or included this polity. Unification under the Triple Alliance might not have been a substantive change, if such a political event occurred at all (Gillespie 1998), and Aztec imperial rhetorics recorded in the early colonial era may have sought to overestimate the extent to which Aztec imperialism was exceptional or distinct from earlier sociopolitical formations. Indeed, it might be time to reconsider the origins of Aztec imperial power and the history of Aztec imperial formation. Revisiting the History of Aztec Imperial Origins If the Mexica had amassed a great deal of influence within central Mexico before the formation of the Triple Alliance, as hinted by new data from Xaltocan, we ought to see corroborating evidence in Tenochtitlan’s archaeological record.

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Such evidence would necessarily contradict the written record, which positions the Mexica as latecomers to the Basin of Mexico political scene. According to migration histories, the Mexica were one of the wandering Chichimec tribes who left Aztlan-Chicomoztoc in 820 CE. The last migratory group to arrive, having stopped and built settlements along the way, they founded Tenochtitlan in 1325 CE on an undesirable swampy piece of land. They then rose through their own efforts to become a major political power. If this were true, the Mexica would have arrived too late to have such a significant cultural and economic influence by 1350 CE. However, there is reason to suspect that Mexica occupation of Tenochtitlan began earlier (Durán 1994, 12n1; see also M. E. Smith 1992b, 66), and that this rags-to-riches story is rather propagandistic. It was likely rewritten at some point, perhaps by Itzcoatl (1427–1440 CE), who conducted the codex-burning campaign discussed earlier. While it is difficult to ascertain exactly how Mexica histories were rewritten, it is clear that this manipulation served political purposes, most often related to earlier events (those more than two or three generations earlier), and that it aligned important events with cosmologically significant calendrical dates (Umberger 1981; Gillespie 1989; Aveni and Calnek 1999). This revision of historical time finds parallels in many other imperial societies. More than three decades ago, Michalowski (1983) suggested that Sumerian rulers used genealogies as charters, manipulating kings lists for the purposes of royal legitimation (see also Henige 1974 for discussion of crosscultural manipulations of royal ancestry and descent; Zerubavel 2003). Scholars have continually revised ancient Egyptian pharaoh lists based on discrepancies between historical sources and archaeological findings of royal seals, creating, for example, a Dynasty Zero to make room for missing sovereigns pre-dating Menes (Kaiser and Dreyer 1982). Covey (2006b, 174) similarly argued that the Inka kings list was edited and shortened, resulting in the elimination of some of the “civilizing” ruler Pachakutiq’s predecessors and of later rulers who did not leave behind descendants in positions of power in the colonial era. Because of this “expunge[ing]” of “collateral and contested successions,” Covey (2006b, 193) suggests that colonial histories should not be used to provide chronological markers for archaeological research. Indeed, recent radiocarbon dates suggest that Inka imperialism has a much longer history. Ogburn and colleagues (Ogburn 2012; Marsh et al. 2017) push back the chronology of Inka imperialism at Chamical in southern Ecuador and in northwestern Mendoza, Argentina,

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arguing that we must build chronologies based on C14 and thermoluminescence dates that are complemented by historical data, not the other way around. Their arguments build on the work of scholars such as Williams and D’Altroy (1998), who found that imperial expansion in the southern Andes took place some thirty to sixty years earlier than suggested by colonial period documents. Much of the historical revision detected in these cases related to earlier phases of imperial governance, as appears to be the case for the Aztec Empire. The extent and nature of an earlier occupation of Tenochtitlan, however, remains unclear, because the capital’s archaeological chronology is poorly understood. Historical records are scarce for this early period, and the site’s original swampy location presents logistical difficulties for excavation. The clearest archaeological data available are from excavations carried out between 1991 and 1996 underneath the Metropolitan Cathedral (Matos Moctezuma 1998, 1999), which was constructed directly on top of the Aztec ceremonial precinct. A set of thirty-two circular shafts three meters in diameter was excavated under the cathedral to stabilize its foundations, reaching an impressive depth of nineteen to twenty-seven meters (presumably with the aid of pumps). These excavations revealed significantly older deposits than were reached under the adjacent Templo Mayor, which was part of the same ceremonial precinct, and elsewhere in the city. García Chávez (García Chávez, Hinojosa, and Martínez Dávila 1999; García Chávez 2006), who studied the ceramics recovered, argues that Tenochtitlan was resettled by Aztec II–using populations after a prolonged period of abandonment. In the Aztec II phase, the area underneath the cathedral was leveled using fill, and a well-developed ceremonial precinct was constructed featuring a ballcourt, a temple to the wind god Ehécatl, and an antecedent of the Temple of the Sun (Figure 7.5). This ceremonial precinct—which also included the Templo Mayor, which will be discussed separately, as its excavations were carried out differently—was continuously renovated throughout the following Aztec III period. Radiocarbon dates were not available from the cathedral excavations themselves, but García Chávez (2004; 2006, 223) divides the Aztec II and Aztec III ceramic complexes at 1430 CE using analysis of variation of radiocarbon dates from other sites. This division perhaps too conveniently corresponds to the formation of the Triple Alliance. He suggests that the ceramic change from Aztec II to Aztec III was possibly related in a direct way with expansion of the Aztec empire but does not explain why imperial formation would have been associated with the innovation of a new ceramic type.

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Figure 7.5. Aztec II and Aztec III ceremonial precincts at Tenochtitlan (after Barrera Rivera 1999, figure 8). Produced by Lisa Overholtzer.

However, a fifteenth-century horizon marker does not accord with archaeological evidence elsewhere in central Mexico. In his chronological sequence for the Teotihuacan Valley, Millon (1966) first defined Aztec II pottery as spanning 1200–1350 CE, and more recent projects have generally confirmed these dates. My own precise chronology at Xaltocan (Overholtzer 2014) indicates the use of Aztec II pottery between 1240 and 1350 CE, and Aztec III ceramics thereafter. M. E. Smith’s excavations in Morelos (M. E. Smith and Doershuk 1991; Hare and Smith 1996) similarly places the exchange of Aztec III ceramics beyond the Basin of Mexico at or before 1350 CE. At Yautepec, Aztec III ceramics appear perhaps as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century (Hare and Smith 1996), which seems very early, but is consistent with dates from Otumba (Nichols and Charlton 1996) and some other basin sites (Parsons, Brumfiel, and Hodge 1996). Thus, we would expect that pure Aztec II deposits underlying Aztec III deposits at the Tenochtitlan ceremonial precinct under the cathedral would certainly predate 1350 CE, and perhaps the fourteenth century entirely. Other scholars who acknowledge that the Tenochtitlan Aztec II deposits must predate 1350 CE write them off as not necessarily belonging to the Mexica (e.g.,

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Umberger 1996c, 86n4), despite clear evidence for stylistic and cultural continuity, thereby allowing the Aztec historical narratives of a late-arriving Mexica population to remain unchallenged. Although the building history of the Aztec Templo Mayor is not clearly defined (López Luján 2005, 52), the immediately adjacent cathedral excavations can help us interpret its remains. Like the other ceremonial precinct buildings unearthed under the cathedral, the Templo Mayor was continuously rebuilt. While only four or five amplifications were remembered at the time of the Spanish conquest, a dozen partial and complete construction stages were detected in the 1978–1989 excavations directed by Matos Moctezuma (1981). Because of the high water table and superimposed later remains, only a small glimpse into the deepest known phase (Stage I) was possible, but Stage II was fully excavated, revealing a double temple (Matos Moctezuma 1991). The pyramid’s façade was amplified three times (Stages IIa–IIc), but few datable ceramics were found in the fill between construction episodes. Archaeological evidence at the ceremonial precinct of Tlatelolco, located immediately to the north of Tenochtitlan and effectively forming a single city with it by the sixteenth century, also points to significant construction during the Aztec II era (Espejo 1944a, 1944b; see Umberger 1996b, appendix, 256–59). Two of the nine remodeling events likely occurred before the adoption of Aztec III pottery. Excavators Espejo (1944a, 1948) and Martínez del Río (1944) argued on the basis of significant similarities in form that the second phase of the Tlatelolco pyramid was contemporaneous with the second phase of Tenayuca, thought to date to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century (but see Umberger 1996b, 258, for an opposing view). Graulich (1987) proposed a significantly more ancient dating of the earlier stages of the Templo Mayor. Under the assumption that each ruler commissioned a renovation, Graulich assigned the last eight stages (IIc–VII) to known Aztec rulers from Acamapichtli (r. 1376–1395) to Motecuhzoma Xocoyotin (ruler when Cortés arrived). Tenoch, said to have reigned for fifty-one years during the travels from Aztlan to Tenochtitlan, preceded Acamapichtli, and he could be associated with the third stage. This interpretation leaves three stages presumably commissioned by unknown rulers, pushing back the monument’s timeline significantly. Graulich (1987, 127) also remarks that the imperial Aztec architectural quality seen in later phases and the artistic style seen in codices are already present in Phase II, leaving no evidence and very little time for Mexica acculturation. This, he contends, is a significant contradiction that is certainly a

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result of the constructed and rewritten nature of Mexica histories. He suggests that the Mexica elites wanted to hide the presence of an earlier Tenochtitlan in order to enable their latecomer city-founding narrative. Graulich’s textual analysis is somewhat problematic because of his reliance on historical king lists and the conjectural “one ruler-one construction phase” notion. However, it is harder to dismiss the findings of a substantial Aztec II ceremonial precinct that must predate the historical founding date for the city. García Chávez (2006) remarks that although this precinct was reduced in scale compared to the one encountered by the Spaniards, it featured the same layout, including a Templo Mayor, ballcourt, Ehécatl temple, and Temple of the Sun. Moreover, he cites personal communication with López Luján, the current Templo Mayor project director, who points out that Phase II of the Templo Mayor has architectural similarities in dimensions and form with temples at Tlatelolco and Tenayuca. The construction of all of those buildings would appear to have followed a shared, preconceived plan. García Chávez argues that these findings “present a problem of historic nature” because they evince an ability of the Mexica to “plan and carry out a work of colossal dimensions” when they are characterized by historical documents as dependent subjects of the Tepanecs at Azcapotzalco (2006, 226, translation mine). They indicate a dramatic expansion of those works with the adoption of Aztec III pottery, associated in his chronology with their liberation. He conjectures that the Mexica must have had an enormous degree of independence and political and economic power earlier than we suppose. However, his chronology places this influence at the beginning of the fifteenth century, far too late given the stratigraphic association with Aztec II pottery that elsewhere dates to the mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth centuries. This Mexica political and economic influence—significant, if not “imperial”—must have in fact been formed before 1350 CE. Historical documents do attest to some pre-Aztec Mexica conquests that were led, for example, by Acamapichtli, who reigned from 1372–1392 CE (Nazareo de Xaltocan 1940, 118f; Anales de Cuauhtitlan 1975, 66; Leyenda de los Soles 1975, 128; Berdan and Anawalt 1992, folio 2v). Scholars have previously overlooked such accounts as military propaganda, suggesting that these were in fact Tepanec conquests being appropriated by Mexica rulers in their ethnocentric sources (Santamarina Novillo 2006, 264; 2017, 17–18) and that the Mexica had simply participated as Tepanec vassals (Davies 1980, 220; see M. E. Smith 1986; 1987, 41, for discussion). The archaeological evidence in Tenochtitlan for

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this time period suggests we might reconsider their skepticism, though how we might rethink the relationship between the Mexica, the Tepanecs, and other groups in the Basin of Mexico in this early period remains unclear. Gibson (1971, 389) and Gillespie (1998) argue that the very notion of the Aztec Triple Alliance—that is, the tripartite structure for shared imperial governance as recounted in native historiographies of imperial origins—may be a colonial invention. As Gillespie relates, support for this argument is found in three sources: Cortés’s description of his encounter of the singular “Culua” (Colhua) empire, subject to the singular “Temixtitan” (Tenochtitlan); the appearance of documentary references to a “governing triumvirate” only decades later in litigation starting in the 1550s; and inconsistencies in this remembering of imperial structure and tribute obligations across the empire. Santamarina Novillo (2017, 17; see also Davies 1980) claims there is ethnohistoric mention of a strategic alliance between Azcapotzalco and two other basin polities, Colhuacan and Coatlinchan, dating to before the Tepanec empire, in what might be a pre-Aztec Triple Alliance. The role of the Mexica cities of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, clearly powerful places based on the archaeological record, however, remains unclear. Teasing apart the invented historical traditions will prove challenging, but this new evidence supports Gillespie’s (1989) conclusions that imperial Aztec histories were rewritten in order to make sense of European colonialism. Politically motivated manipulation of chronicles of imperial formation is consistent with Indigenous notions of time and history, as discussed earlier. It is entirely plausible—and more consistent with existing evidence—that central Mexico witnessed an imperial formation in the Middle Postclassic Period; that is, core consolidation in the Basin of Mexico that enabled expansionary campaigns beyond. We might label it the Aztec Empire, since at any rate, the term is a scholarly one never used by contemporaneous peoples. Or we might call it something new. This imperial formation would be far older than the fifteenth century date that imperial histories imply, even older than the late fourteenth century date cited for the formation of the Tepanec city-state or empire, and likely to the early fourteenth and perhaps even late thirteenth century. This historical discrepancy might be attributable to revisionist imperial histories that emphasized the importance and tributary rights of the Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan elites in the colonial context and that distanced themselves from earlier rule that did not feature this tripartite division. Alternatively, it is possible that one of the targets of Izcoatl’s memory work of forgetting was

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the presence of an earlier Tenochtitlan dynasty, from which he did not claim descent. It is possible that this rewriting served to minimize the strength of preTriple Alliance imperial forces and thereby to erase an earlier empire. Aveni and Calnek (1999, 90) argue that the calendrical alignment of the founding of Tenochtitlan and the conquest of the Tepanecs—that is, the beginning of Aztec imperial expansion—to the same point in the fifty-twoyear cycle reveals that those dates had been manipulated. Umberger (1981) similarly argues that the Aztec calendar was recalibrated so that the year of the Tepanec conquest began a new fifty-two-year cycle with a Year 1 Flint. Aveni and colleagues (1988, 290) add that whenever this recalibration took place, the new calendrical system was then “retroactively applied to previous historical and/or mythical events, including events predating the founding of Tenochtitlan itself.” Together, these new interpretations would imply an extraordinary revision of history of imperial origins in central Mexico. It might necessitate upending our focus on the Aztec Triple Alliance, perhaps jettisoning the use of the term in favor of the simpler Aztec Empire or something else entirely. It would require revising the history of imperial origins to the mid-fourteenth century and possibly including the Tepanecs under that umbrella term. Such a revision might allow us to move beyond limitations imposed by our current histories of Aztec expansion. For example, the double-temple pyramid is present at the highland Maya site of Cawinal, located in Guatemala (see Figure 7.1), at approximately 1350 CE (Alain Ichon, cited in Fox 1987, 228 fig. 8.14). This date is used as evidence against a central Mexican influence and as support for local innovation (Umberger and Klein 1993, 309), since it is far too early to have been related to Aztec imperial power. A significant revision of the chronology of Aztec imperialism might lead to the reevaluation of data at sites such as Cawinal. The ideas suggested here are provocative but speculative. Existing archaeological evidence is currently too scanty to completely overturn our reliance on historical chronological frameworks, but the data do suggest that the economic and cultural shifts we currently ascribe to Aztec imperialism significantly precede Aztec unification as traditionally defined, in at least some places. We urgently need chronologically and contextually precise archaeological evidence for earlier occupation in what would become the capital of the Aztec Empire. Moreover, we need extensive excavations and fine-grained chronologies from additional domestic contexts from throughout the empire.

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Discussion I have just considered evidence in the imperial capital of Tenochtitlan for the simplest, albeit perhaps most controversial, explanation of the household data from Xaltocan: that imperial origin histories were written by Aztec imperial leaders in order to erase the earliest phases of imperial formation. This imperial formation must have been significantly underway by the mid-fourteenth century, would have featured Tenochtitlan as a powerful city, and would have included much of the Basin of Mexico, including Xaltocan. To avoid being biased by these revisionist rhetorics, we might need to revise our histories of Postclassic central Mexican imperialism, expanding Aztec imperial origins back in time. The Aztec Triple Alliance, if it existed at all, would not have been as “exceptional” as its crafters would have led us to believe. Taking Said’s criticism of imperial rhetorics of exceptionality seriously, we ought to reconsider the kind of material continuities we should expect in the Aztec and other empires, and to conclude, I pose of series of questions to provoke consideration of issues that deserve some critical thought within the discipline. In contexts such as the Basin of Mexico that are economically integrated in a pre-imperial phase, and wherein there is routine circulation of objects that later come to be identified with an empire, what economic continuities do we expect? How different do we imagine the experience of ordinary people living in the Aztec empire to have been from that within other former city-states, for example in places such as Morelos where agricultural intensification had already been demanded by local rulers? How different must imperial formations be from previous institutions for us to afford them the imperial label? M. E. Smith (1987, 40) explains that the Aztec Empire can be differentiated from previous polities not by governing structure or expansionary strategies, but rather by having operated on a much larger geographic and demographic scale. But of course, such a statement is true of nearly any polity in the Basin of Mexico, depending on the historical point in time one chooses as one’s perspective, as there was a general trend of increasing centralization in the Postclassic Period. We simply choose the historical formation date for the Aztecs—those who told their stories to the Spaniards—as our anchoring point, even though in 1430, the empire’s geographical extent was not much greater than that of the preceding Tepanecs. As a field, we need to seriously consider whether it matters if the Aztec Empire is not archaeologically visible at all or did not result in significant

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changes in daily practice. Must we expect significant economic or social change in households previously subject to city-state elites when they are incorporated into a broader imperial sphere, in order to define the political formation as imperial? What are we saying about how we imagine the lived experience of a given political structure if we do or do not deem it worthy of the imperial title? In other words, must political change in the form of imperialism always be accompanied by economic and social changes that we can study archaeologically? What does it mean for an empire to be so elusive? What might a lack of change in daily practice with imperial incorporation reveal about the scope or nature of Aztec imperial rhetoric or discourses that form the basis for our interpretive frameworks? What does it mean for our discipline analytically if we grant imperial status to these elusive empires, perhaps only on the basis of historical texts that are inevitably political documents themselves? Finally, I suggest that we might alternatively raise questions about our assumptions, definitions, and understandings of the origin histories of empires in general, as I began this chapter. Where does empire begin; that is, what is the threshold of imperialism? The process of consolidating power in imperial cores is bound to be a multigenerational process that in many cases implicates previous city-states and polities that verge on imperial, such as the Tepanecs in the Aztec case. Defining a “before” and an “after” in order to witness the effects of imperialism then proves challenging, if not misguided, even before we begin to acknowledge the diachronic variability within an imperial history. As Stoler and McGranahan (2007, 8–9) insist, “Imperial formations may present themselves as fixed cartographies of rule. This volume insists that they are not. . . . Imperial formations are not steady states, but states of becoming.” They direct our attention to “the active and contingent process of their making and unmaking” (Stoler and McGranahan 2007, 8). If an empire is not static throughout its history but rather is continuously remade, then the initial making will also be a dynamic process that deserves our attention. Concerning ourselves more with the protracted process of imperial formation might lead to more productive lines of inquiry, though this will require significantly more precise chronologies than are widely constructed in archaeology today. While Stoler and McGranahan focus on the continual formation and reformation of empires across their history, here I apply their framework to pre-imperial formation processes because of the strength of the data at hand. Might the rise of an empire—the growing status and power of polities, ethnic groups, and particular capitals—have effects? Might empires be, in fact, most

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visible in terms of a greater cultural or material influence, be most visible in the strategies of people outside the empire seeing and responding to the rising status of a would-be imperial power—in a pre-imperial stage, for example— during what scholars of empire might call the core consolidation phase? To what would a pre-imperial influence owe, and what would its nature mean for the imperial formation to follow? Indeed, the greatest strength of the Xaltocan and Tenochtitlan case study presented here might be its making us wonder whether empires in the process of becoming leave significant, and perhaps even more striking, archaeological signatures.

Chapter Eight

Wari and Tiwanaku Early Imperial Repertoires in Andean South America

Patrick Ryan Williams, Donna Nash, and Sofia Chacaltana

Introduction Imperialism in the Andes is rooted in the interactions among regional polities active on the coast and highlands of Peru and Bolivia in the early first millennium CE. These regional polities included the Moche, Recuay, and Cajamarca polities of the Peruvian north coast and highlands; the Nasca, Lima, and Huarpa polities of the central Peruvian coast and highlands; and the Pukara, Taraco, and other Late Formative (1–500 CE) groups of the Titicaca Basin. While each of these polities varied greatly in scale and organization, they were critical to the development of the political concepts of integrating cultural diversity into political organizational frameworks that characterized the Andes’ earliest empires. The interactions among and between these societies resulted in the cross fertilization of ideas and the emergence of two great cities in the south-central Andean highlands by 600 CE: the cities of Huari and Tiwanaku (Figure 8.1). Huari, situated in the Huamanga Basin of Ayacucho, Peru, in the Huarpa heartland, emerged as the capital of the Wari Empire, which rapidly expanded across the Andes by 600 CE. At its height, Wari stretched from the fringes of the Atacama Desert with its southern provincial capital at Cerro Baul to the Cajamarca and Huamachuco regions of northern Peru, some 1,300 kilometers away. Wari’s influence over this territory varied across geographies and sociopolitical organization of incorporated territories, following a model Schreiber (1992) has characterized as a mosaic of control. We reject globalization models to explain this variation as they fail to acknowledge the power dynamics at play, and there is clear intent by Wari state agents to establish influential centers throughout the highland Andes from south to north. The great unfinished center of Viracochapampa 199

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anchors the northern region, which became the interface with the coastal Moche polities to the west. To the southwest, Wari entered the high jungle regions of Vilcabamba and implanted settlements in the Cuzco region, the future heartland of the Inka state. Wari’s Cuzco infrastructure included its largest administrative center at Pikillacta (McEwan 2005), and a Wari settlement at Raqchi bordered the Titicaca Basin, where Wari’s largest state rival, the Tiwanaku, emerged.

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Tiwanaku is perhaps best described as an expansive colonizing state. It consolidated the southern Titicaca Basin with its capital at the site of the same name. From there it reached out across the southern Andes, forming trading relationships with regions like San Pedro de Atacama, one thousand kilometers to the south, and the Cochabamba region in the headwaters of the Amazon, three hundred kilometers east. It also colonized other areas, such as the Moquegua Valley of southern Peru, three hundred kilometers west of its capital, and locales on the north shore of Lake Titicaca, such as the Puno Bay. Tiwanaku is known for its massive temple-mound cut-stone architecture and in dryland regions for its well-preserved textiles of fine manufacture and prolific ceramic assemblage. We argue that Tiwanaku traded with other groups and colonized certain regions with citizens from its homeland in order to produce goods for export, but it did not incorporate the distant ethnic groups they traded or cohabited with in distant lands into their political realm. Both states—Wari and Tiwanaku—influenced the later and more massive Inka empire (1400–1532 CE; see Alconini, this volume), and we argue at the end of this chapter that Inka statecraft was largely drawn from Wari political and economic models, while Inka religious practice and the arts drew heavily from Tiwanaku cultural norms. We also argue that the characterization of these models of statecraft has too often been simplistically depicted, and we attempt to take a comprehensive perspective in examining the relationship between expanding Andean states and the local polities they interact with and sometimes incorporate into their political realms. The manner in which these expansive states persuaded local polities to join their political union is of critical importance in the study of early imperialism. Scholars have focused on coercive versus reward strategies in the incorporation of new territories into imperial realms. We explore mechanisms of both incorporation and isolation across several categories of evidence, from landscapes to settlements and from household economies to prestige-good exchange. We also argue that archaeologists can fall into a trap if their focus for measuring imperial hegemony relies on only one category of evidence, with a particular caution in the Andean case in regard to the use of ceramic data. Andean archaeologists have often relied on the presence of imperial pottery as the primary or only material correlate of imperial hegemony. This tends to lead to a tyranny of pottery style as a determinant of imperial influence. We demonstrate that even though ceramic exchange may have been fundamental to the imperial governance model, imperial ceramic styles are only likely

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to be found in the principal centers of governance, where patron-role feasts were likely to have taken place. We further explore other material correlates for imperial-local interaction and influence that go beyond the feasting model. In particular, we examine how agents use imperial repertoires to express, first, military and political power in the provinces; second, ideological power in the landscape; third, economic power as expressed in productive infrastructure; fourth, political economy in goods marking imperial intersections; and fifth, incorporation of local communities in imperial networks. We examine these variations in hegemony in the cases of early state expansion in the south-central Andes by Tiwanaku and Wari and the states that succeeded them. Markers of Political and Military Power on the Landscape The symbolic transformation of landscape marks one way that imperial identities are imprinted on place. It also provides a complementary perspective on imperial intentions to the ceramic-focused viewpoint espoused by the feasting model commonly employed. In this section, we examine how the establishment of provincial centers, fortifications, and defensive works reflect imperial intentions in governance in provincial settings. One way in which empires exert their influence is through the establishment of urban centers reflective of imperial identities. These provincial centers often replicate architectural forms from the urban capital and represent the attempt to impose a vision of political hegemony in provincial areas (see Boozer, this volume; S. T. Smith, this volume). They represent the imperial identity within the provincial sphere and are a manifest attempt at representing the power of the core in the periphery. The extent, distribution, scale, and complexity of administrative centers may be a telling indication of imperial intentions across the empire. Tiwanaku centers are concentrated in the Andean altiplano in the core region of the Tiwanaku capital at sites like Lukurmata, Iwawe, and Khonko Wankane. The best example of Tiwanaku urbanism outside the core region is located in the Moquegua Valley of southern Peru. Here, at least three Tiwanaku towns of several thousand inhabitants were established between 500 and 1000 CE (Goldstein 2005). Each town was composed of neighborhoods of domestic architecture surrounding large open plazas. Cemeteries were located in ravines adjacent to these domestic areas. Public architecture is rare, with a large temple at one of the three towns being the most conspicuous

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example of monumental expression. Palatial complexes evident in the center are not replicated in the provinces, and the creation of an administrative nexus is arguably minimal or absent outside of the central core of the state. However, large migrant populations from the core regions do inhabit these distant valleys in towns constructed around central plazas unlike the previous architectural patterns in the region, which are composed of small villages of a dozen houses located next to bottom valley agricultural land. Tiwanaku provincial towns are built not to interface with others but to serve the migrant populations from the Tiwanaku heartland itself. This role is manifested in their inward orientation and the lack of material remains affiliated with surrounding groups. Wari provincial centers are dispersed along the spine of the Andes, with a preference for areas between two thousand and three thousand meters above sea level. Two of these centers—Pikillakta and Viracochapampa (Figure 8.2)— built on opposite ends of the empire, were truly monumental in scope. Others were of intermediate to large size (tens of hectares or larger), such as Jincamocco, Cerro Baul, and Espiritu Pampa (Vilcabamba), and contained all the hallmarks of Wari urbanisms, whereas others are more modest, such as Pataraya and Honco Pampa. The former centers were designed to accommodate administrative activities and bring locals and imperial officials together for ritual and sociopolitical relations; whereas the smaller centers may have been served to facilitate trade or monitor resource extraction. These complexes vary across the empire and do not follow a standardized blueprint; however, they do exhibit spatial forms that likely represent Wari institutions (Nash and Williams 2005, 2009) and probably also served to materialize and communicate facets of the empire’s ideology (Nash 2017). Thus, Wari provincial centers were not merely edifices constructed to house Wari officials and colonists; they were also in and of themselves instruments for integrating locals, particularly local elites, into the empire. Unlike the Tiwanaku case, they are distributed throughout the realm of Wari highland influence in the Andes. Another way in which imperial ideology may be expressed on the landscape is through the construction of forts and citadels throughout the imperial lands, but especially in areas of contestation or on political and ethnic borderlands. The archaeology of defensive architecture is a facet of imperial projections of power and might. In borderlands and other contested landscapes, fortresses and citadels likely reflect the pragmatic concerns with defense of land, territory, and populations (see Boozer, this volume; Yao, this volume).

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Figure 8.2. Map of example Wari provincial center: Pikillacta, Cerro Baul. Courtesy Gordon McEwan, Patrick Ryan Williams.

Tiwanaku defensive architecture is practically absent in capital or province, except perhaps for the use of canals around the core of the Tiwanaku capital. While large walls and entrance portals graced the sides of temple mounds, these wall structures were more likely built for ceremonial rather than for defensive purposes. The canals or moats that surrounded the sacred precinct of Tiwanaku are just as likely to relate to the management of productive resources and as symbolic manipulations of life forces as they are practical considerations for defense (Figure 8.3). In provincial towns, there are no walls or moats surrounding communities until after the Tiwanaku state collapses. For the first time, the terminal Tiwanaku communities constructed defensive features to protect against marauding bands in the absence of a pax Tiwanaku. Even on the Wari frontier where Wari hilltop fortifications were

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Figure 8.3. Map of Tiwanaku. Courtesy John Janusek.

constructed, Tiwanaku architecture in surrounding towns is unconcerned with defense. Wari defensive works are more overt, including mountaintop redoubts replete with surrounding monumental walls on the Tiwanaku borderlands in Moquegua, as evidenced by sites such as Cerro Baul and Cerro Mejia (Williams 2001). Wari monumental regional centers, such as Pikillacta, Jincamocco, and Viracochapampa, are surrounded by high walls with guarded entrance avenues, reflecting a concern with defense as well as impressing the neighbors (see Figure 8.2; Schreiber 1992; McEwan 2005). Wari site planning also has pronounced defensive functions, with broad entrance avenues that lead to complex entry patterns into the core of the sites. Only a knowledgeable resident could navigate the complex passageways that lead to key monuments in the central core of administrative centers like Pikillacta (McEwan 2005).

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Ideological Power in the Landscape Provincial centers and military fortresses are not the only source of political statements on the imperial landscape. Religious ideology can be intertwined with political aims, but it relies on a unique set of beliefs that transcend the mundane and ties political power to supernatural power. Formal religious architecture and the propagation of religious rites through material representation is an enduring example of how empires interact with local polities. Interaction may take the form of imposition of an imperial religious ideology on a local public but may also include the incorporation of local religious practices into an imperial pantheon of beliefs (Rappaport 1999; Williams and Nash 2016). While the former has high costs and may take generations to implant, the latter can be very effective at providing a unifying religious ideology that may be transformed into political unity among diverse populaces in shorter time frames. Tiwanaku religious architecture is concentrated in the altiplano heartland and especially in the capital. Several large-scale monuments grace the capital, including the Akapana, Pumapunku, Kalasasaya and semi-subterranean temple, Kantatayita, and Mollo Kontu (Figure 8.3). Regional centers in the altiplano basin also have monumental temple architecture, consisting of sunken courts and adjacent temple mounds in locales such as Iwawe, Lukurmata, and Khonko Wankane. Outside the altiplano, monumental religious architecture has only one exemplar, the Tiwanaku temple at Omo in the Moquegua Valley (Goldstein 1993), which also consists of a lower court and upper ceremonial precinct on the top of a hill. The incorporation of Tiwanaku religious rites in temples on and around Cerro Baul (Williams and Nash 2016) do not represent Tiwanaku monumental construction, but they do represent the incorporation of elite Tiwanaku rituals within the monumental constructions of the competing Wari state. Tiwanaku thus concentrated religious architecture in the capital and heartland, and used it only sparingly in colonial settings. Wari temples are more ubiquitous throughout the Wari realm and include D-shaped temples and tiered platforms and sunken courts (Cook 2001; Nash and Williams 2005). Recent excavations around the Temple Mayor, Vegachayuq Moqo, is fleshing out the current picture of the imperial Wari religious canon (Ochatoma, Cabrera, and Mancilla 2015). Yet much like in the Inka case, the manifestation of Wari religion in the provinces was more modest in form and took preexisting local practice into account. Wari religion, in part, focused on the veneration of entities dating back to the Formative Period in Ayacucho

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(Leoni 2006), Cusco (Glowacki and Malpass 2003), and Sondondo (Schreiber 2005b). Schreiber’s work in particular suggests that Wari positioned D-shaped temples in order to co-opt local practices focused on the veneration of a local mountain by orienting sightlines and offering rituals toward these peaks (Williams and Nash 2016). Thus, the Wari may have added new features to an existing practice, such as mountain worship, as part of their expansionary strategies, effectively taking imperial ownership of local practices. On the other hand, other ritual practices seem to have spread with Wari expansion. We cannot discount the evidence of ritual that has been found in domestic compounds. Researchers have recovered evidence of ritual ceramic smashes along with other types of offerings (Cook 1984; Glowacki 2012) in Wari patio groups across the empire (Glowacki 2005). These buildings are recognizable by their relative uniformity. Evidence indicates that feasting and political gatherings took place in elite compounds, patio group compounds, and palatial residences (Moseley et al. 2005; Nash 2012). Certain features of these compounds may provide clues to understanding the Wari rituals performed in these structures (Nash 2017). The ideology underpinning these practices may have been a powerful tool for incorporating local elites (see Coben 2006; 2014 for the Inka). Religious architecture is complemented by other ritual means by which empires expressed their ideologies of divine right to rule. Marking the landscape through symbolic massive representations imprinted on the earth is another way empires inscribe their identities on the countryside. The physical act of sculpting place reinforces notions of imperial hegemony by creating an ever-visible imprimatur upon landscape space and attempts to impress the same mental image on those who inhabit it. Tiwanaku changed the lands it occupied through the carving and movement of massive stones, creating not only visually impressive buildings but also personages carved from monolithic stone. These massive stone sculptures are imbued with animism and mobility, and modern stories speak of their journeys through the landscape in primordial time. This world of stone was especially prominent in the altiplano heartland (Protzen and Nair 2013; Janusek and Williams 2016). In far-flung regions of influence outside the altiplano, Tiwanaku also cleared the patinated desert surfaces to form symbols on the earth that spoke to their connections over long distances. In the Moquegua Valley, camelid geoglyphs mark the arrival on the long roads from the altiplano to the Tiwanaku desert towns (Stanish et al. 2010). Geoglyphs were also present along Tiwanaku trade routes in northern Chile.

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Wari monolithic sculpture does not compare with that found at Tiwanaku, but examples of anthropomorphic sculpture do exist. Unfortunately, the features of these statues are eroded, and their original context is unknown (Schaedel 1948). Wari symbolic landscape modification includes visualization of sight lines toward mountain peaks (Williams and Nash 2006), as well as the carving of petroglyphs on boulders in some parts of the empire. Sites were placed or oriented in order to view particular mountains. As mentioned above, the focus on mountains may have been a widely shared practice when Wari expansion began. Evidence for an emphasis on mountains is shared by Wari and Tiwanaku but manifested in different ways. At Tiwanaku, the Akapana mound is thought to be an effigy mountain because of the canals that run through it, its tiered design, and its position relative to Mt. Kimsachata (Kolata and Sanginés 1992). Alternatively, the Wari viewed mountains through the doorways of D-shaped temples or earlier round structures (Cook 2001; Leoni 2006). At some sites, modest tiered platforms were used to stage elites in front of sacred peaks (Nash and Williams 2005). It also seems that different mountains may have represented different classes or groups within the empire as different sites, or parts of sites, are oriented toward different mountain peaks (Williams and Nash 2006, 2016). Economic Power as Expressed in Productive Infrastructure A corollary of marking identity on landscape through symbolic means is the transformation of the environment through massive productive pursuits. We assess these investments in the three broad categories practiced by the Andean states: road systems, agrarian infrastructure, and mining. Each of these productive pursuits is designed to bring new goods for use in the imperial political economy and to transport those items to their locale of implementation and use. Road systems utilized by human or camelid transport were the principal means of movement throughout each of the Andean highland states. Roads and way stations are the means of connection between distant imperial centers. The formality of roads and the infrastructure of movement are critical components to understanding the level of state control over these aspects of communication. Roads also channel the movement of goods between capital and provinces, and they may be designed to support travelers along the way and facilitate movement over rough terrain. Tiwanaku and Wari had very different strategies of investment in road infrastructure.

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Tiwanaku roads over the several hundred kilometers between capital and distant colonies or trade outposts show little formal state investment in the areas in which it has been investigated. Way stations are non-existent, though small villages to serve travelers did spring up along well-traveled paths. Formal state investment in road infrastructure from bridges to paving is not apparent along the most well-traveled of long-distance routes connecting the Pacific watershed colonies of Moquegua to the altiplano homeland (Stanish et al. 2010), for example. In contrast, Inka roads along this same route contained evidence of state infrastructure, including formal tambos, or way stations, and regional towns along the way. Yet given the quantity of lowland products found in Tiwanaku heartland contexts, movement of bulk goods was clearly a component of Tiwanaku exchange, facilitated through vast camelid caravans that crossed the altiplano on ancient informal paths. The Wari road system, in contrast, demonstrates the origin of formal way stations and investment in road infrastructure, especially along its southern route (Schreiber 1991; Williams 2009; Williams 2017). The Wari built small way stations located approximately one day’s walk apart along its principal southern highway, as recently documented between Moquegua and Arequipa. Larger groups of towns developed on the Wari road every two to three days distance and around the principal rivers that crosscut the southern desert that represented the southern extent of Wari’s realm. Large provincial centers were also connected by these same roads and tend to be located every two hundred kilometers along the principal route, or approximately a week’s travel distance. For example, from the capital of Huari traveling south, the royal Wari road likely passed through Jincamocco and Quillcapampa before arriving at Cerro Baul on the southern frontier. Wari roads are not as well preserved as later Inka routes, perhaps in part as a result of their reuse and reconstruction in later periods, but also because infrastructural investment was primarily in services along the way and not in the roadbed itself in the Wari case. Investment in productive infrastructure for agrarian or pastoral pursuits can be another indicator of imperial intentions in a region, especially as it relates to the production of bulk comestibles and food supply. Often, these investments occur at a scale not seen in a local region previously and may have been designed to produce massive surpluses that could be used to support state projects. Scale alone is not an indicator of imperial influence in agricultural pursuits, as various studies have demonstrated that small communities over long periods of time can also generate massive landscape transformation. However, imperial

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investments may be marked by rapid implementation and the use of extra-local labor resources to achieve results in abbreviated time frames. Likewise, imperial systems may implement new labor organization strategies that are reflected in the infrastructure of water distribution, land tenure, and landscape modifications. These modifications may also disrupt traditional production strategies and exchange networks. Raised-field agriculture is perhaps the best known of Tiwanaku investments in agrarian infrastructure. Raised fields are created by excavating a network of canals alongside a lake or riverbed and depositing the rich organic sediments on raised beds between the waterways. In the high alitplano environment of the Titicaca Basin, they not only provide nutrient rich soil, but also mitigate the effects of cold and frost on the crops by means of the convection effects of the waterways. The vast fields of the Pampa Koani in the valley north of the capital are argued to have been a state-sponsored intensification effort coincident with Tiwanaku expansion (Janusek and Kolata 2004). While raised fields may be constructed and utilized by local communities (Graffam 1992; Erickson 1993), the argument that this was an imperial system is based on the large scale and large surplus production that vastly exceeded the needs of a local population in the Katari Valley, where the Koani system is located. Likewise, the expansion of raised-field agriculture on the Koani Pampa is linked to the emergence of Tiwanaku as pan-regional power, and it was largely abandoned around the time Tiwanaku hegemony ended around 1100 CE (Janusek and Kolata 2004). Tiwanaku also long built canals and irrigated high riverine terraces in the western valleys of the Pacific watershed, introducing a new type of agricultural infrastructure located adjacent to Tiwanaku towns that established the first habitation of these high-desert riverine terraces (Williams 2002). Tiwanaku landscape modifications for agricultural pursuits were apparently directed by state or municipal authorities to meet the growing needs of increasing demographics in both heartland and provinces. Like Tiwanaku, Wari investment in agrarian infrastructure was also prolific and perhaps even more ubiquitous. The Wari specialized in the development of high mountain slopes with sophisticated irrigation canals that negotiated steep terrain and the massive re-sculpting of mountainous landscapes through agricultural terracing. In many places in Peru, this was the first time this irrigation technology was implemented. In the Moquegua Valley, the field system was built in a way that integrated both Wari settlements and local communities’ productive resources to be reliant on a single state-sponsored canal source (Figure 8.4;

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Williams 2006). This high mountain agrarian technology seems to have identified the ecological niche that Wari focused on in its original imperial expansion. It is an area between two thousand and three thousand meters above sea level that is ideal for the production of a wealth of crops, including maize, cucurbits, and peppers. This quichua zone is also extremely efficient in the use of water, and

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it held an adaptive advantage in times of drought. Similar Wari systems, whose labor requirements and productive capacities exceeded local communities’ capabilities and thus were likely directed by imperial colonizers (Williams 2006), are replicated around many Wari provincial centers and represent an imperial mark on the landscape. Other provincial examples of Wari investment of agriculture include in Cuzco (McEwan 2005) and Jincamocco (Schreiber 1992). Prestige goods are often created through the collection of rare materials and conversion through extensive labor inputs into desirable aesthetics. Mining and quarrying extraction of geological source material for the production of value-added objects is another area in which imperial investment in landscape infrastructure is manifested in support of the imperial economy. In particular, the extraction of stone building materials, ores for the manufacture of precious metalwork, clays for the production of ceramics, and minerals for lapidary or lithic crafts may be marked by the investment in mine infrastructure. The distribution of these commodities and finished products made from them across exchange networks that map onto political centers can be evidence of imperial authority over certain goods. Tiwanaku mining and quarrying was extensive, from the sandstone and volcanic monoliths from which they built monumental architecture in the altiplano core to extraction of minerals for metal working in silver and bronze. The Tiwanaku capital itself was reconstructed many times over based first on sandstone quarries from the Kimsachata range then later from the Andesites extracted from the Ccapia volcano. As the Tiwanaku state expanded geographically, it began to incorporate visually distinctive massive stone monoliths into the architecture of the capital, representing perhaps its hegemony over neighboring groups (Janusek and Williams 2016). The scars of those extractive endeavors are imprinted on the landscape and represent a massive effort by an imperial center to remake itself by incorporating parts of the mountains belonging to distinct communities under its influence. Likewise, some of the earliest evidence in the region for environmental contamination from extractive mining of silver ores comes from the Tiwanaku period in the area around Potosi (Abbott and Wolfe 2003). Recent excavations at Huari have revealed finely finished, cut-stone masonry (Ochatoma, Cabrera, and Mancilla 2015). This stonework, affiliated mining activity, and quarries have yet to be studied in the same way as the monumental architecture at Tiwanaku. Yet we do know that Wari utilized many mined resources. Lapidary extraction for lithic crafts was pronounced as was ore

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extraction for work in copper-arsenic bronze. Obsidian quarrying and preforming also was a marked component of Wari prestige goods exchanged throughout the empire. In terms of lapidary work, chrysacolla and sodalite were extensively utilized to make beads for necklaces and exotic figurines that made their way into Wari elite households, trade networks, and dedicatory offerings. Political Economy in Goods Marking Imperial Intersections In addition to investments in productive infrastructure and symbolic imprimatur on the landscape as evidence for imperial hegemony, the way in which imperial states built relationships with local leaders reflects imperial repertoires (see Alconini, this volume; Düring, this volume; Overholtzer, this volume; S. T. Smith, this volume). Imperial political economy, and especially the production and exchange of elite status markers, is important to assessment of imperial intentions in relation to local leaders. Not every class of status good produced is necessarily a tool of imperial hegemony, however. Likewise, variability in centralization of production may characterize different strategies in imperial states. We examine the role of elite ceramics, metalwork, lithic production, and textiles in the Andean states to ascertain the strategies in political economy employed differentially by each one. Despite the focus on feasting in Andean governance, centralized ceramic production for distribution to distant parts of Andean empires is not the norm, according to preliminary ceramic sourcing studies. While Tiwanaku, Wari, and Inka production and distribution mechanisms of ceramic wares were distinct, they shared a complex set of local and regional production and distribution strategies. Most Tiwanaku ceramics were produced in their locales of consumption. At the site of Chen Chen in the Moquegua Valley, 91 percent of the assemblage matched compositional chemistry of local clay sources (Sharratt, Golitko, and Williams 2015). The distribution of Tiwanaku ceramics was also marked by equality of access in mortuary and domestic assemblages. There is little evidence of exclusive use of decorated Tiwanaku ceramics by particular identity or economic groups, and both sexes have decorated ceramics in grave inclusions (Sharratt, Golitko, and Williams 2015). Tiwanaku ceramic production and consumption in its western province was thus marked by decentralized local production and equity in distribution and consumption of decorated ceramic vessels (Figure 8.5).

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Figure 8.5. Examples of Tiwanaku ceramics, textiles, and bronzes. Produced by Patrick Ryan Williams.

Wari elite ceramic production, on the other hand, was centralized in regional production centers. At Cerro Baul, Wari potters produced highquality Wari ceramic styles in a palace workshop that relied on a distinctive clay source (Sharratt et al. 2009; Nash 2018). The vast majority of this material was consumed in elite Wari contexts in the regional provincial center. Other Wari settlements in the region had very little access to this material, and in fact produced their own, primarily undecorated, ceramics from other local clays. In the Wari heartland, regional production centers also flourished. At Conchopata, numerous Wari imperial ceramic styles were produced from local clays, and some of them were exported to the capital city of Wari, twelve kilometers away. The Wari capital also housed a regional production center that produced elite ceramics for local urban consumption (Williams et al. 2019). Wari fineware ceramics were consumed by the urban elite and in imperial rituals (Figure 8.6). Imperial ceramic styles were not ubiquitous in domestic and mortuary contexts as was the case with Tiwanaku. Local peoples

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Figure 8.6. Examples of Wari ceramics, textiles, and bronzes. Produced by Patrick Ryan Williams.

around Wari regional centers used distinctive ceramic styles produced from discrete local clays. During the reign of Wari and Tiwanaku, the Andes experienced an “age of bronze” in which both states and local actors produced and exchanged copperbased alloys in quantities not seen before. Wari settlements are primarily associated with copper-arsenic alloys, representative of the ore sources found up and down the spine of the Andes. Tiwanaku settlements are associated with ternary copper-nickel-arsenic bronze in early years, with tin bronzes becoming predominant in later years of Tiwanaku influence (Lechtman 2003). Nickel- and tin-bearing ores are predominantly located north and south of the Andean altiplano respectively. Gold and silver objects of personal ornamentation were also prevalent, most often being formed by cold hammering. Both groups utilized metal objects as items of personal status and adornment as well as portable tools. In later Inka times, all three alloys were utilized with an adoption of the tin bronze tradition as the preferred metal of the state for elite status goods. Tiwanaku colonists in the Moquegua Valley had access to tupu (shawl pins worn by elite women) and metal knives, primarily of tin bronze origin. In contrast to Lechtman’s findings, however, a large minority of metal objects in the Tiwanaku colonies of Moquegua were of the arsenic bronze type. The density of bronze status objects in Tiwanaku houses, however, was relatively rare as

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compared to Wari residences, with an average of only one bronze implement per house (Williams 2013). Likewise, Tiwanaku tended to use metal as objects of adornment, and because the tin ores are found only in the altiplano basin, these objects were almost certainly all imported as objects of elite exchange between colony and capital. Wari metals were more ubiquitous in their Moquegua colonies than Tiwa­ naku, with an average of four to seventeen implements per house. Richer houses associated with elites from the capital had higher numbers of implements, with metalworks more skewed to items of personal adornment such as tupu pins. However, even commoner houses had higher concentrations of metal objects than their Tiwanaku counterparts in the valley. Precious metals were more rare, though coastal Wari sites contain evidence of silver and gold earspools inlaid with precious stone or shell, such as the reddish-pink spiny oyster Spondylus, purple mussel, and mother-of-pearl (Bergh 2012b). Elite Wari tombs have also contained the remains of silver and gold hammered breast plates, masks, and arm or leg bands. Inlaid mirrors and pendant figurines are also part of the Wari elite composite object repertoire (Bergh 2012b). While ceramics are often considered the primary marker of political identity, lithics are often more mobile within social strata and may be better markers of political and economic relationships between imperial actors. Certainly, monolithic stone sculpture may be used to make public statements about relationships between imperial leaders and the communities they interact with. Semi-precious stone and imported stone lapidary materials are also materials that can represent imperial relationships within households and within communities. In the Andes, these stones include a range of blue and green stones such as serpentine, chrysacolla, sodalite, and volcanic glass or obsidian, among others. Tiwanaku focused on monolithic stone carving as a primary means of expression in its capital. In the provincial setting in Moquegua, monolithic carving is nonexistent. While small quantities of obsidian are present in Tiwanaku provincial domestic contexts, it is not a strong focus of craft activity. Of eight Tiwanaku houses excavated on the slopes of Cerro Baul, only one had obsidian implements, although retouch flakes were present in small quantities in others. Obsidian sourcing studies on this material revealed it came from volcanic locales associated with Wari rather than Tiwanaku influence (Williams, Dussubieux, and Nash 2012). Although Wari monolithic sculpture has received little attention, fine sets of

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figurines made from chrysacolla demonstrate that Wari society had fine lapidary skills (Cook 1992). Other lapidary preciocities were also produced and consumed in the capital and provinces. At Cerro Baul, elite households produced colored beads from chrysacolla and sodalite in large quantities. Wari provincial households in Moquegua also utilized large amounts of imported obsidian. Elite houses had dozens of obsidian tools and even commoner houses had several imported obsidian implements (Williams, Dussubieux, and Nash 2012; Nash 2015). Textiles may have been one of the most distinctive identifying features of ethnicity in the Andes. Tiwanaku textile traditions reflect both imperial elite and institutional identities by ethnic actors within the state. Tiwanaku males wore polychrome striped tunics, loincloths, and four-pointed hats in mortuary assemblages, and women wore plain tunics accompanied by decorative garments such as llicllas, the Andean shawl (Baitzel 2016). Rodman (1992) suggests that certain Tiwanaku tunics and four-pointed hats from San Pedro de Atacama may have been trade items produced in centralized altiplano workshops. While Tiwanaku textiles follow certain patterns, there is plenty of room for localized production of Tiwanaku garments. Yet Tiwanaku garments are clearly distinguishable in provincial settings from the textiles worn by local peoples (in both San Pedro de Atacama and Moquegua), suggesting a colonial identity marked by broad classes of textile traditions. Different garment types, with distinctive decorative motifs and technologies of production, characterize Tiwanaku, San Pedro, and local Formative Moquegua textile traditions. Wari textiles are similar to the items worn in the Tiwanaku corpus (e.g., tunics and four-cornered hats). However, more can be said about Wari textiles, because many examples have survived the ravages of time, thanks to the arid coastal provinces of the empire, and because many face neck jars depict individuals of both genders wearing elaborate costumes or simple garments. Tunics were worn by men like the later Inka, for example, and known examples represent a relatively confined set of motifs, which suggests that the Wari state likely controlled the production and distribution of fine textiles (Bergh 2012a). Researchers have found artifacts related to textile production that support this supposition. Pataraya, a modest Wari outpost in the Nasca drainage, is located in a prime cotton-growing zone and had numerous small spindle whorls appropriate for spinning fine cotton fiber, which suggests that yarn rather than unfinished fiber moved through imperial networks (Edwards, Parodi, and Ocaña 2008). More spectacular is the recent find of fifty-eight women

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buried in a subterranean chamber at the site of Castillo de Huarmey. Many were wearing matching textiles, had elaborate earspools denoting their elite status, and were buried with baskets of weaving implements, which included spindle whorls made from gold, silver, and bronze (Giersz 2016). This find is particularly important because it suggests that the Inka institution devoted to creating fine textiles, the aqllawasi, may have had its foundation in the earlier practices of the Wari Empire. Incorporation of Local Communities in Imperial Networks Understanding the different ways local settlements are integrated or failed to be incorporated into state networks is key to assessing affiliation with imperial initiatives (see Parker, this volume). Integration may take the form of community leaders adopting imperial status symbols within their households or through their social networks without the use of public architecture as is seen in provincial centers. Settlement pattern shifts may also reflect new imperial production demands, even in the absence of changes in household composition or access to prestige goods by members of a community. Finally, the assumption that cultural assimilation is a necessary component of community integration needs to be addressed if we are to embrace a definition of empire as multiethnic, expansive states. One of the likeliest ways in which local communities were involved in imperial relationships was through the exchange of prestige goods. Local leaders may have obtained valuable commodities, such as special ceramics, metals, lithics, or textiles, as mentioned in the previous section. Prestige goods may not have been present in all communities under imperial influence and may have involved complex chains of production and distribution. The existence of these prestige goods within certain households or within the possession of certain individuals in a community was significant, however. Even the limited existence of prestige goods may demonstrate the ways a community was integrated in the imperial sphere of interaction, even if large numbers of the community did not have access to these goods. Tiwanaku prestige goods in provincial settings may include imported garments and textile headgear in places such as San Pedro de Atacama and Moquegua. Imported Tiwanaku ceramics make up a minority of the decorated assemblage in the Moquegua Valley, but the 5 to 8 percent of the assemblage that was imported may in some cases have been prestige gifts to prominent

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leaders (Sharratt, Golitko, and Williams 2015). Likewise, in Tiwanaku communities located within Wari economic zones, the use of Wari obsidian may represent a Wari prestige good given to draw Tiwanaku communities into the Wari economy. The use of Wari arsenic bronze pins in Tiwanaku contexts may also represent a prestige gift meant to curry favor of local Tiwanaku elites. Wari preciocities include fine tapestry textiles (Bergh 2012a), feathered garments (King 2012), ornaments of shell or metal such as the silver pectoral found with the lord of Vilcabamba (Knobloch 2016), ear spools of metal or inlaid with polished stones (Bergh 2012b), ceremonial weapons (Isbell 2016), and elaborate headdresses festooned with plumes of gold, silver, or bronze (Bergh 2012b). Many of these items may have represented regalia or insignia of office (Knobloch 2016) rather than wealth items that could be freely exchanged among elites or re-gifted to subordinates. The highest quality ceramics may also have been very limited in their distribution; however, goods of an intermediate quality, particularly ceramics, seem to have had a greater distribution. It is possible that prestige goods in the Wari Empire, like dress in the Inka Empire, were made for particular types of consumers, and the display of certain goods was dictated by sumptuary laws. In some cases, intermediaries may forge relationships between communities and imperial elites; local residents may not have direct links with imperial authorities. Even without prestige goods, if community livelihoods are significantly altered because they shift their productive activities to serve new demands of the state, archaeologists may still assess how these communities are integrated in the imperial enterprise. In the Moquegua Valley, Tiwanaku settlements were established on the plains south of the river at Chen Chen, adjacent to freshly constructed agricultural fields fed by contemporary irrigation canals created by the Tiwanaku. This settlement pattern establishing towns on the high river terraces to the south of the valley broke with the preexisting structure established by Formative farmers consisting of small villages adjacent to the river floodplain. The new Tiwanaku towns were established in strategic locations to control transit with the altiplano and to produce surplus agricultural goods for export to the homeland (Williams 2002). Wari changed settlement patterns in several regions. In Sondondo, Schreiber (1987, 1992) describes a major shift. Wari intrusion saw the valley terraced for the first time, which allowed people to move from the tuber-puna ecotone, where production relied on rainfall, to the lower grain-tuber ecotone, where

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irrigation came into use. Wari also transformed the landscape in Moquegua, but little is known about Formative Period highland groups. Wari’s irrigation technology allowed them to exploit an underutilized eco-niche in the areas between 1,800 and 3,200 meters above sea level, a prime zone for the cultivation of maize, which contributed to the diet of those living in the heartland (Finucane, Agurto, and Isbell 2006). Perhaps one of the most misunderstood aspects of imperial integration is the role of assimilation of local communities into a dominant cultural paradigm. Many archaeologists assume cultural assimilation must accompany imperial hegemony and argue the use of imperial material goods must accompany hegemonic influence. In fact, assimilation is a rarity in local-imperial interactions, and the opposite may often be true: that empires may require local communities to maintain their distinctive dress, customs, and material culture, or local communities may choose to express their own identities, even while participating in imperial politics and economies. The Tiwanaku, Wari, and Inka polities had distinctive ways of addressing the integration of local communities, but in no case was cultural assimilation the primary strategy of state expansion. Tiwanaku colonization of the Moquegua drainage reflects a strategy of basically ignoring the local population (Figure 8.4). Here, Tiwanaku formed its towns with large migrations from its altiplano heartland. These towns were contemporary with local communities that inhabited villages a couple kilometers away across the river. Tiwanaku material culture is largely absent from these contemporary villages, and the villagers who inhabit them do not demonstrate a change in lifeways adopted from Tiwanaku norms. Likewise, the Tiwanaku townsfolk have very little cultural material reflective of the local Huaracane traditions (Goldstein 2005). Pottery, lithics, domestic architecture, and textile traditions remain distinctive between the Tiwanaku and Huaracane communities and fail to reflect any cultural assimilation or even exchange of culturally significant material culture. In contrast to the Tiwanaku colonization, Wari interactions with local communities and even with Tiwanaku settlers themselves is much more significant. There is still no evidence for wholesale assimilation of local or Tiwanaku communities in the Wari communities. In fact, the cosmopolitan existence of various identity groups marks the Wari settlements in Moquegua in contrast to the puritanism of Tiwanaku towns. Huaracane settlements located downstream of the Wari colony contain small quantities of Wari ceramics and obsidian and metal goods, likely obtained through exchange (Costion 2009).

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Local Huaracane leaders may even have hosted Wari style feasting events at the site of Trapiche, complete with a Wari brewery and feasting vessels on the edge of the Huaracane cemetery (Green and Goldstein 2010). During the latter half of Wari’s settlement of Moquegua, several Tiwanaku villages were established within the irrigation system that the Wari built, and Tiwanaku religious structures were erected both alongside the Tiwanaku towns and on the monumental summit of Wari’s provincial center at Cerro Baul (Williams and Nash 2016). Even within Wari elite households, evidence of Tiwanaku-influenced objects may represent alliances formed between distinctive ethnicities, perhaps through intermarriage (Nash 2015). Thus, while assimilation was not the Wari way, Wari did incorporate distinct ethnicities into its colonial enterprises. Through the exchange of prestige goods, Wari incorporated ethnic elites into its networks of political power. These ethnic elites maintained much of their material culture and continued to identify with their ethnic groups. They were, however, inextricably connected to Wari political and economic frameworks. Tiwanaku colonies do not appear to have contained non-altiplano ethnic groups, or at least not in the numbers that were present in Wari spheres. This lack may reflect a colonizing effort of indoctrination rather than an effort to incorporate ethnic others into their political power structures. Discussion and Conclusions We have demonstrated that a variety of approaches must be undertaken in order to elucidate the nature and extent of strategies of incorporation in imperial governance models. Among those approaches, we highlight the expressions of provincial military and political power, the creation of imperial landscapes reflecting ideological power, imperial investments in productive infrastructure, the role of a variety of prestige goods, and the different ways of incorporating local communities in imperial networks as applied to the Andean states of Wari and Tiwanaku. Each polity employed strategies of coercion and reward in each of the broad areas of influence, but they did so in distinct ways. For example, Tiwanaku did not invest heavily in defensive architecture and fortifications in marking the landscape. Rather, the focus on religious architecture in core area provincial centers created an imprimatur on the landscape to convince followers of the ideological power of the state. Wari inserted provincial centers into the landscape not only in the core, but also throughout its

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realm. Religious architecture was embedded in these centers, as was the attempt to relate these centers to places of supernatural power in the landscape. In some cases, defensive works proclaimed the coercive power of the state. Wari melded militaristic and religious power in an attempt to demonstrate its influence across its realm, focusing on a few dozen provincial installments across the empire. The Inka, an expansive polity specialized in siege warfare, were masters of logistics that allowed them to concentrate forces at some points and set long blockades where they needed (Arkush 2011, 217). Instead of building defense garrisons, they had great armies formed by many nonprofessional soldiers who could be deployed for long periods. Like the Wari, Inka investment in fortifications and concern for defense reflects the potential siege warfare that played out in Andean imperial militarism. Although Inka provincial centers lasted for a relatively short period of time (from fifty to a maximum of seventy years), they were found across the empire with several truly monumental centers such as Huanuco Pampa, Pumpu, and Cochabamba. Like the Wari provincial centers, Inka administrative centers not only replicated the imperial spaces from the core where elites and officials executed their administrative functions, they also held spaces designed to articulate the empire with local groups, elites, and even deities (see Alconini, this volume). These centers controlled tribute, local labor, storage, and economic redistribution (Alconini 2008, 67). Nonetheless, in order to perform their political and economic intentions in the provinces, the Inka administration had to transform the regional sociopolitical landscape that included the construction of massive storage systems, the local settlement of colonists (mitimaes) from other regions of the empire, and the proclamation of ownership of the surrounding lands in order to intensify agricultural production to sustain their purposes, characteristics also seen in Wari provinces. Despite the rapid expansion and short-lived character of Inka provincial imperialism, the nature of both defensive and religious architecture is ubiquitous in the Inka realm, and the distribution of provincial centers of various scales permeates the Inka territory. The Inka replicated an ideological reorganization of space in each of its provincial settings based on the organization of ceques around the Inka capital, and in doing so, they rewrote the history of every region it conquered. All three states invested in productive infrastructure, from road networks to agrarian transformations to raw material extraction. Tiwanaku’s focus on raised-field agriculture and pastoral intensification in its heartland contrasts with Wari and Inka foci on mountainous canal irrigation and extensive

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highland terracing efforts that were productive in times of drought. Tiwanaku’s roads were extensive, but not intensive in terms of state infrastructure. They connected vastly different ecologies, but they did not invest heavily in urbanization along those routes. Wari roads started significant investment in network infrastructure along a principal route that also lead to urbanization of communities along those networks. It was the Inka, however, who created the most integrated system of productive infrastructure in the Andes, easily tripling the size of the Wari and Tiwanaku endeavors. Inka roads are extensive and well documented, with tambos located at every day’s travel distance and larger towns at every few days’ travel. The Qhapac Ñan is an extensive and integrated network of roads both through the highlands and along the coast, with several transverse routes connecting the main latitudinal territory. This system of transportation was designed over roads previously built by the Wari and Tiwanaku states, but it was also based on local routes. The monumentality of the Qhapac Ñan, with more than fifty thousand kilometers of recognized roads, shows the scale of the territory managed by the Inka administration, establishing in some cases a more intense interaction, and in other cases a more formalized connectivity of the pre-Hispanic Andean world. In general, roads allowed for the transit of a greater number of people and goods, creating a more globalized Andean social landscape, a pattern that was established by Wari roads and incipient urbanism centuries before. Inka governors built upon and enhanced Wari agrarian technology, taking it to new heights. Interestingly, there is not much evidence that the Inka adopted Tiwanaku raised-field agriculture to any significant scale. The Inka transformed the landscape as the Wari did by constructing agricultural terraces and hydraulic systems across the Andes, including both highland and coastal regimes (Netherly 1984; Williams 2006; Chacaltana and Cogorno 2017). Intensifying agricultural production for imperial purposes required construction of a system of terraces across the landscape incorporating Inka canons and aesthetics such as the ones built in the Colca Canyon, Moquegua, Huancavelica, and many other provinces. The Inka, like the Wari, not only designed new agricultural systems, but also dominated water sources and inserted themselves into their “intimate” symbolic landscape, controlling the flow of water, fertility, and life itself. Some of the most telling differences in how imperial reward strategies played out are reflected in the materiality of prestige goods. An interesting distinction appears, for example, in the access to imperial ceramics in the Wari and Tiwa­naku cases. Wari imperial ceramics, produced in regional centers, were

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primarily consumed by the Wari elites in those regional centers or in the capital. Other communities in the Wari sphere participated in Wari exchange networks to obtain obsidian bifaces or metal implements and adornments, but they made their own ceramics in styles that may only have been loosely affiliated with Wari canons. Tiwanaku-decorated ceramics, on the other hand, were ubiquitous in all Tiwanaku household contexts. They, too, were locally but not centrally produced, and the iconography and style of Tiwanaku ceramics were consumed broadly by Tiwanaku colonists in the provinces. On the other hand, contemporary adjacent Wari and local communities did not participate in the consumption of Tiwanaku ceramics. They did, however, use obsidian and metal objects imported from both Tiwanaku and Wari sources. Inka metallurgical tradition was based on the use of gold, silver, and copper alloys. These characteristics of Inka statecraft certainly drew heavily on Tiwanaku antecedents in tin bronze metallurgy and cut-stone masonry. The empire controlled many steps of the manufacture, production, and distribution of metals. For example, in the altiplano, it has been suggested that the Inkas monopolized the use of tin bronze (Lechtman and Macfarlene 2005). Tin bronze was a tradition initiated in the altiplano, specifically expanded by Tiwanaku metallurgists (see Dussubieux and Williams 2007). Inka metallurgical analyses from the Colesuyo and altiplano regions show that during the Inka period, state workshops produced a standardized composition of tin, which was very different from local traditions (Chacaltana 2015). Likewise, provincial Inka ceramic production embodied messages of political Inka affiliation (Costin 2011). The state might have controlled different steps of ceramic production and distribution depending on local relationships with the empire. In the provinces, state-sponsored workshops produced Inka-style ceramics, which in many cases monopolized the best clay sources (Julien 1983), as was also done by the Wari (Sharratt et al. 2009). However, local populations continued manufacturing their own ceramics and emulated imperial designs and forms (Hayashida 1995, 1998). Like the Wari, the Inka did not impose a ceramic identity on all subjects of the empire, but rather utilized imperial ceramics for explicit imperial purposes. Locally made ceramics and imperial imitations continued under both Wari and Inka regimes. Textiles were also a crucial element of the Inka political economy, as they were for Tiwanaku and Wari. In particular, the production of fine items of clothing worn by Inka royalty and gifted to high-ranking elites was tightly controlled. Sumptuary laws dictated that people in the empire would be punished

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by death if they wore clothing that misrepresented the region of origin, office, or rank. It seems that elements of one’s costume were “tailor-made” statements about one’s identity. The Inka had an institution called the aqllawasi to train young women in the techniques and iconography of Inka textiles (see Alconini, this volume). These complexes were located in all provinces, and some have been identified archaeologically (e.g., Huanuco Pampa, Pachacamac). Women in these compounds produced textiles for state use, such as those distributed as gifts or burned as offerings. Mamaconas (elite women chosen for the aqllawasi) were often given to elite men as wives, which means their valuable weaving abilities and productive labor were also distributed. Chronicles report that palaces often had many mamaconas, bestowed as a gift from the emperor, as part of a royal household (Gose 2000). This practice may be related to what we see at Castillo de Huarmey in the Wari period. In both these expansive states, the production of fine textiles was the charge of elite women, who were affiliated with palatial households as part of the political economy (Costin 1998). Settlement pattern shifts and how local communities were incorporated into imperial networks varied greatly in the cases of early Andean imperialism. Tiwanaku’s colonization efforts in the Pacific watersheds resulted in the formation of new agricultural zones and large new settlements on river terraces that had not been previously occupied. Wari’s introduction of new agrarian technologies taming the upper mountain slopes shifted settlement to the quichua zone and the interface between maize and tuber cultivation. Inka resettlement is well documented not only ethnohistorically, but also archaeologically. The expansion of terrace systems in prime maize growing areas is accompanied by forced resettlement of entire communities as well as the creation of new provincial centers and the relocation of homesteads out of defensive settlements and into the agricultural systems created by Inka engineers. In the Inka empire, the policy of mitmaq forced the resettlement of extended families or entire communities into new regions. This policy served to disrupt the relationship between communities and their land, to discourage rebellion, and to bring new labor forces to engage Inka infrastructure works. Early manifestations of the mitmaq may be present in Wari imperial practices as argued by Nash at Cerro Mejia (2017), and while Tiwanaku colonization may not follow the same state-directed pattern, community self-resettlement may be part of a folk tradition with deep roots. The establishment of new regional political centers by Inka expansion also resettled local populations as these new centers grew in economic importance, much as the Wari provincial centers did in

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their day. Finally, the expansion of agricultural terrain through public irrigation works projects encouraged the establishment of new homesteads in areas that were previously underpopulated. In the Moquegua region, for example, coastal settlements like Tambo Tacahuay and highland settlements around the provincial center of Sabaya and the road station at Camata Tambo attracted settlement concentration (Chacaltana 2015), while the expansion of the Inka agricultural systems at Camata and Botiflaca opened new lands for agrarian cultivation and encouraged new settlement at Torata Alta (Williams 2009). This expansion parallels Wari agrarian reclamations ten centuries earlier on the same landscape. The palimpsest of Wari and Inka settlement patterns are palpable in these regions. Inka interaction with local communities in coastal Colesuyo provides an interesting corollary to the direct imperial rule model, one that parallels undertheorized examples from the Wari occupations of the south coast away from the principal administrative centers. At Tacahuay, mortuary structures in the altiplano style, as well as ceramic styles, suggest that a regionally based highland elite established a foothold on the coast. They used regionally produced Inka provincial ceramics, but they buried their dead in chullpa funerary structures associated with the Lupaqa and Colla polities in the high plains. It appears that this arrangement formed as a result of highland elites taking over the coastal community at Tacahuay, perhaps with the blessing of the Inka state. This takeover may have been a result of intermarriage with local spouses and clearly illustrates that regional actors played a significant role in Inka settlement and cultural identity formation in the Inka provinces, a role that was clearly not one of assimilation (Chacaltana 2015). Assessing the strategies of imperial expansion requires a multiscalar and multivariable framework, encompassing landscape studies, a focus on prestige good economies, and settlement analyses. We must also be cognizant that different material types may be treated differentially in distinctive imperial systems. Ceramics may not play the same role in one society as in a peer or successor, as is clearly evidenced in the case of the Andean highland states. Examining imperial strategies across material indices in broad categories illuminates the ways in which ancient empires incorporated and governed diverse communities within their realm. In some instances, it is clear that certain expansive states essentially ignored neighboring communities, as was the case with Tiwanaku. In others, like the Wari, engagements with local communities were substantial but are not necessarily evident when only one material indicator

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such as ceramics is examined. The lives and afterlives of the Wari and Tiwanaku empires demonstrate that imperialism is largely played out in different ways through distinct media. Yet when taken as a whole, these media can illuminate the types of power each polity focused on. Wari seems to have largely monopolized political, economic, and military power and utilized ideological power flexibly. Tiwanaku seems to have focused heavily on ideological power, especially in its heartland, with lesser exertion of military, political, and economic power over provincial settings. The Inka case highlights how quickly a secondary imperial state can integrate a vast territory by building on the legacy of its predecessors.

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Chapter Nine

Re-modeling Empire Bradley J. Parker

Introduction The goal of this chapter is to move forward the theoretical discussion of ancient empires. However, simply speaking about theory does little to bridge the gap between theoretical concepts and archaeological data. I therefore attempt not only to frame ideas about the processes that propel imperial encounters but also connect those ideas to a model that is meant to aid researchers in conceptualizing how imperial processes might be reflected archaeologically. In short, I focus on the intersection between theory and data. That is, I focus on how theory can be applied, harnessed, or utilized to aid in the analysis of archaeological data and how such analyses can bring us closer to understanding ancient empires and imperialism. To do so, I ground what are often aloof theories by discussing the practical applications of theoretical constructs under the rubric of modeling. It is my position that constructing models out of the ideas that make up theories allows theories to be visualized and thus makes them more compatible with the empirical realities of archaeological and textual datasets. To begin this process, I step back and assess the current state of theoretical discussions of ancient empires by reviewing the main avenues through which archaeologists have conceptualized them. Clearly, the lion’s share of thought on this topic is based on precious few studies that have been repurposed for various tasks over the last several decades. This being the case, these theories have in a sense become typologized, making their practical application more rigid than was perhaps the intent of the scholars who first introduced them. This has led to a situation in which ancient empires are generally understood as manifestations of a limited number of ideal types (Yoffee 2005). However, as archaeological and historical research has progressed, the messy, heterogeneous, dynamic realities 229

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(Stek and Düring 2018) of imperial processes have become more apparent. Thus, although early attempts to model ancient empires have been very profitable, the overall trend has been to conflate the complexities of imperial systems by considering empires in terms that can be too broad to be analytically useful. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to add texture and dimension to the existing models and then combine the results with new theoretical and methodological perspectives. To do so, I begin by discussing the term at issue and enumerating the main theoretical constructs that scholars have used to approach the archaeologies of empire. I then turn to the task of re-modeling empire. The Imperial Polity Most theoretical discussions of ancient empires are built upon the implicit recognition that empires are not just big states. The fact that empires are expansive polities that often absorb and incorporate various types of polities, including state-level polities, means that empires are exponentially more complex than states (Mommsen 1980; Doyle 1986; Sinopoli 1994, 2001; Smith and Montiel 2001; Matthews 2003; Khatchadourian 2016; Liverani 2017). Imperial complexity is manifest in a variety of ways. While states are spatially restricted and are often made up of continuous blocks of homogeneous territory, empires exhibit significant spatial discontinuity (Schreiber 1992; Parker 2001; Sinopoli 2001; Covey 2006c; Smith and Schreiber 2006; Alconini 2008). The nature of imperial expansion, which seeks to incorporate exploitable human and natural resources (Postgate 1974, 1979; Liverani 1979), means not only that empires are larger than states, but more significantly, that imperial authorities may skip over whole areas that are not perceived to have economic, political, or ideological value (Schreiber 1987, 1992; Parker 2001; Sinopoli 2001). The result is that the landscape of empire is much more discontinuous than the landscape of the state. Since empires are physically larger and more diffuse than states, it follows that they are also more diverse. Although ancient states are almost invariably built around a system that often isolates and elevates a particular elite group (Baines and Yoffee 1998, 2000; Flannery 1998), empires must integrate, rather than exclude, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity (Barfield 2001; D’Altroy 2005; Parker 2011). Several chapters in the current volume provide clear evidence for this characteristic of ancient empires. For example, Boozer outlines the important roles that various agents played, sometimes unwittingly, in the

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implementation of Roman imperialism in the varying ecologies of Egypt’s eastern and western deserts, and S. T. Smith documents imperial diversity at the micro level when he states that the material remains of Egypt’s New Kingdom Empire in Nubia “reflects a complex and often subtle mix of cultural influences negotiated by Nubian and Egyptian women and men” (p. 52). Alconini summarizes this situation when she states that “empires were among the most multifaceted political organizations in the ancient world and were unmatched in their extension, complexity and diversity” (p. 89). Although many scholars have focused on ethnicity and empire (Tadmor 1978, 1991; Millward 1998; Wells 1998; Bunnens 2009; Emberling 2014b; Radner 2015), few have discussed the fact that imperial diversity is not limited to just this category. The nature of empire includes not only ethnic, but also other types of sociocultural and ecological diversity. As empires expand, they encounter various ecological zones, resource areas, political formations, cultural traditions, linguistic groups, etc. Imperial complexity is therefore at least partially a result of the fact that empires are conditioned by diversity (Barfield 2001; D’Altroy 2001). According to Barfield (2001, 29), “It is their ability to incorporate large numbers of different ethnic, regional, and religious groups that makes empires so different from tribes and locally based polities such as city-states that organize themselves on the basis of some common similarity.”1 Because imperial authorities attempt to exploit, administer, absorb, or in some cases avoid the myriad sociopolitical entities they encounter, the methods of control utilized by imperial agents must be flexible enough to deal with the diversity inherent in imperial expansion (Schreiber 1987; D’Altroy 1992; Morris 1998; Parker 2001, 2003; Jennings and Yépez Alvarez 2002; Thareani 2016). It is for this reason that the military and administrative structures that integrate otherwise heterogeneous peoples and places into a single imperial system vary considerably in their nature and intensity (Sinopoli 2001). Furthermore, everything from administrative and economic systems to the ideology and language of an empire often infiltrates existing political, economic, and social structures. This results in what I regard as a key difference between the archaeology of the state and the archaeology of empire: the archaeology of empire is a complex palimpsest of local, regional, and interregional archaeologies (Quave 2014). This palimpsest highlights the diversity of ancient empires while at the same time obscuring imperial complexities. Following Düring and Smith (this volume), it is my position that recent scholarship on ancient empires has tended to flatten ancient imperial realities, often by taking imperial bureaucracies and

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propaganda as their starting point, and tends to overlook the diversity that is both key to the imperial enterprise and specific to how that enterprise was experienced by imperial subjects. Empires do not just vary through space. They also vary through time. Based on a cross-regional examination of various ancient empires, Sinopoli (1994) has argued that empires experience three general developmental phases: expansion, consolidation, and collapse. Overholzer’s contribution to the current volume illustrates just how misleading developmental categories can be in our interpretation of imperial polities. In fact, empires may go through multiple cycles of expansion, consolidation, and collapse, and any number of such cycles may occur off-sync from one another in different regions of the same empire. Thus, while expansion is underway in one area, consolidation or collapse may be taking place in another. From a chronological point of view then, empires can be characterized as wildly dynamic polities in which fluctuation may take place in provinces, in cores, and on or beyond imperial frontiers simultaneously. Although there are clearly problems with typologies such as this that conflate imperial complexity by forcing our analyses into neat developmental categories (Yoffee 2005; Earle and Jennings 2012), Sinopoli’s categories do highlight the chronological variability of the polities we are attempting to study. In short, the archaeology and history of an empire during an expansionist phase will be very different from the archaeology and history of an empire that has passed through a consolidation phase or has suffered a collapse (Schreiber 1987, 280). In most cases, all three (or more) of these archaeological and historical signatures—signatures that are likely to be very different from each other—are superimposed in the datasets we examine.2 The key here is that variation is the norm. Empires vary in the way they manipulate space, and thus the sociopolitical landscape of empire is often diffuse and fragmented. Empires incorporate ecological, social, and cultural diversity and thus are heterogeneous polities in which varied ecological conditions, social structure, and cultural traditions may be evident and in close proximity yet still make up integral components of a single complex polity. Spatial discontinuity combined with natural and human heterogeneity dictate that imperial authorities must vary administrative systems to suit interregional, regional, and local idiosyncrasies (Schreiber 1987; D’Altroy 1992; Sinopoli 1994; D’Altroy 2002; Matthews 2003; Alcock 2005; Lightfoot 2005; Schreiber 2005a; Covey 2006c; Alconini 2008; Parker 2009; Boozer this volume). Thus, the archaeological and historical signatures of empire are likely to be regionally

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specific, and in many cases, few polity-wide patterns may exist (Sinopoli 2001). Finally, regionally specific chronological cycles that may take place within the broad developmental categories of expansion, consolidation, and collapse affect the archaeological and historical records in a variety of ways. Given the above discussion, it is no wonder that over the last several decades, archaeologists working on the Inka, Wari, Vigayanagara, Assyrian, and recently the Persian empires have offered various interpretations of how to define the term empire.3 A synthesis of the numerous views on this term that considers the issues discussed above might read something like this: Empires are expansive polities that impose various levels of control over foreign peoples and landscapes through conquest, coercion, diplomacy, and/or appeasement. Such polities construct, transform, or interconnect sociopolitical structures to create integrative systems that transcend local political, social, and ethnic boundaries in order to both incorporate and exploit the demographic, economic, geographic, political, and social diversity of annexed regions. Modes of Governance Efforts to characterize the ways in which imperial authorities attempt to control space have emphasized two broad modalities that can best be described as direct rule and indirect rule. Early studies of ancient polities often assumed what we now refer to as the “direct control” over territory to be an essential component of imperial power. It is for this reason that early scholarship on ancient empires conceived of such polities as well-integrated territorial units where imperial authorities held firm control over incorporated peoples and landscapes (Luttwak 1976; Dyson 1985; Isaac 1990; Whittaker 1994). This now completely outdated concept is rooted, first, in colonialist views of the Roman Empire, and second, in the modern ideal of the nation state. Colonialist fantasies about Rome’s centrality as a direct predecessor of Western civilization fueled these perceptions. Rome’s perceived territorial similarity to modern nation states was, of course, reinforced by the study of the Roman frontiers. The frontiers of the Roman Empire were drawn by early historians at geographic boundaries such as rivers and mountain ranges, and where such boundaries did not exist, constructions such as Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman Limes offered a material analogy for the modern border that satisfied the colonialist fantasy (van Dommelen 1997; Dietler 2005). Despite the problematic conceptual origins of the idea of direct territorial

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control, VanValkenburgh and Osborne (2015) have recently argued that we should not completely abandon it. The concept is valuable for two reasons. First, in some cases, we can decisively show that empires did hold tight control over wide areas, especially areas that form the imperial core (Bauer and Covey 2002; Covey 2006c; Morandi Bonacossi 2016; Ur and Osborne 2016). Second, and perhaps more importantly, it seems clear that in many cases, territorial control was the goal (Covey 2006c, 187). Whether it was achieved or not is, in part, what we need to figure out. If we envision imperial power as variable and in a constant state of flux, then it makes sense that in some areas, direct control was achieved, at least for a time. But if direct territorial rule was a goal that was only in some cases achieved, then how can we characterize imperial power in areas where this was not the case? The deconstruction of the territorial view of ancient empires came from two fronts. First, historians and archaeologists studying more recent empires emphasized the importance of indirect rule, often referred to as hegemonic control, in the makeup of, for example, the British, Spanish, Portuguese (Benton 2010; Burbank and Cooper 2010), and now even the American (Bernbeck 2010) empires. Second, archaeological studies of imperial frontiers have exposed the porous nature of such zones (Giersch 2001; Parker 2002; Alconini 2005; Aron 2005; Parker 2006; Sutton 2006) and in doing so have highlighted how tentative imperial control can be, even in areas considered to be fully integrated into an empire’s provincial system. Hegemony literally means “to hold influence over,” “to sway,” or “to gain control through coercive means.” Thus, indirect rule emphasizes ability to persuade or coerce without the kind of deep military and administrative entanglements characteristic of direct rule (Düring 2015; Parker 2015). Key to a definition of indirect control is the fact that such systems utilize existing political, economic, and social infrastructure. Such infrastructure is usurped by the intrusive polity, elites are coerced into cooperation or collaboration, and imperial influence is channeled along existing political, economic, social, and/or ideological pathways (see below and Mann 1986; Covey 2006c; Burbank and Cooper 2010; Kolata 2013). Direct rule and indirect rule—these, then, are the two modes of governance commonly used to characterize ancient empires. Interestingly, both are historically documented, and both appear to be important imperial repertoires (Düring 2015b). Yet these are very different, indeed nearly opposite ways to envision imperial power.

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Applications of Imperial Power Terence D’Altroy, an Andeanist working on the Inka Empire, can be credited with famously merging these two concepts in the “territorial/hegemonic continuum” (D’Altroy 1992). Arguing that both direct and indirect control are integral to imperial systems, D’Altroy envisioned the degree of influence that an empire held over the political, social, and economic spheres of its subject territories as falling on a continuum between direct territorial control on one end and indirect hegemonic control on the other. The degree of control an empire held in any one region was thus not envisioned as an either/or situation. Instead, an empire could hold different types of control in different regions. Furthermore, such regions need not be conceived of as occurring in concentric zones around an imperial core (Luttwak 1976). Almost simultaneously, another Andean scholar, Katharina Schreiber, addressed the issue of the diversity of imperial power in her study of the Wari Empire (Schreiber 1992). Schreiber suggested that the type of control imposed by an expanding empire was conditioned by the levels of complexity among the polities it attempted to incorporate. Schreiber referred to the result as the “imperial mosaic.”4 Although Schreiber did not fully explain what she meant in using this phrase, the metaphor is, at least superficially, self-explanatory. The imperial mosaic is a spatial visualization of imperial landscapes that allows for, or even mandates, a variety of modalities of imperial rule. Like a mosaic whose unique pieces together create a pattern that is only visible when viewed as a whole, the imperial mosaic emphasizes the unique ways an empire might administer a specific region while at the same time allowing that uniqueness to be an integral part of the larger polity.5 The third model that has been discussed in the literature is the so-called network empire. Although the network concept is often included in discussions of ancient empires (Parker 2001; M. L. Smith 2005; Glatz 2009; Bernbeck 2010; Sugandhi 2013), the literature on network empires is surprisingly thin. Interestingly, the concept was introduced by a prominent Near Eastern scholar—Mario Liverani—in what can only be termed an obscure article (Liverani 1984). Since then, several people have referenced it or used it, but few have taken the concept much further than Liverani’s original application. In summary, Liverani reacted against the territorial model of empire in a study of the Syrian Euphrates during the Neo-Assyrian Period. He argued that the Assyrian empire spread either by following existing communication and transportation corridors or

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by establishing new ones. Along such corridors, the empire founded road stations, towns, and provincial centers to act as network hubs that both solidified imperial presence and protected goods and personnel that traveled between centers (cf. Yao this volume). The empire was not, therefore, a spread of land. In fact, Liverani suggested that it had little or no spatial continuity. It was instead made up of a network of communication and transportation corridors that protected small pockets of directly administered territory. Furthermore, imperial expansion was manifest, not in the conquest of territory, but in the “thickening” of the imperial network (Liverani 1984, 1988; Parker 2001). Assessing the Current Models Although attempts to model ancient empires under the rubrics discussed in the previous section have been very profitable, these models contain several drawbacks that, in my opinion, have both limited their utility and impeded their application. Perhaps the greatest weakness of these (and many other theoretical constructs) is that they tend to conflate the complexities of the subject they attempt to describe. The models considered here do so in several ways. First, since these are basically big-picture models, they are too broad to capture many local idiosyncrasies. It is understandable, therefore, that archaeologists who typically work with datasets from a particular site or region, and historians who may focus on particular events or circumstances, have had trouble relating their specific findings to overarching theories about imperial practice. One solution to this problem lies precisely in what the present volume helps to accomplish: by using case studies such as those contained here as bricks to be fit within the scaffolding of big-picture models, we can concretely illustrate the idiosyncrasies of the imperial edifice. Furthermore, case studies such as these should act as a means of testing, clarifying, and refining imperial theory and the models made therefrom. It is my position that such an agenda will aid us in an understanding of both common and unique themes in the archaeology of imperial encounters. A second drawback is that all three of the models discussed above take a top-down, unidirectional approach in which change is assumed to radiate centrifugally. There is no room for local agency. Interestingly, in a recent article about the southern Levant, Tyson (2014) highlights a case in which local elites manipulated their Assyrian overlords to heighten their own wealth and status. Similar situations are described in this volume by Boozer, S. T. Smith, and Yao

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(also see Covey 2006c). The lesson here is one that was articulated already in 1986 by Doyle, who used the term pericentric to describe this phenomenon. Pericentric forces, simply put, are events or processes that occur or emanate from the periphery of an imperial polity. According to Doyle, the pericentric approach “suggests that it is not in the metropoles but in the peripheries that the sources of imperialism can be discovered” (Doyle 1986, 25). In this light, we must acknowledge that imperial dynamics are at least partially made up of reverberations that includes both centrifugal and centripetal forces. Not only is imperial action met with peripheral reaction, as in the case illustrated by Tyson, but, as Doyle showed, events and processes taking place in the periphery can also affect change in the center.6 For example, imperial expansion may reverberate in the periphery, causing reaction in neighboring polities that then ripples back to the empire. A prime Near Eastern example of this was highlighted in 1985 when Zimansky argued that the Urartian state coalesced as a direct result of Assyrian aggression. Similarly, a rebellion in a neighboring state, for example, may cause an empire to reallocate military assets or resources thus potentially shaping imperial policy or even precipitating change in the center.7 We should therefore envision the process of imperialism as a process of change. Furthermore, such change should be seen as multidirectional, in which causal events or processes can emanate from the any part of an empire or its periphery. Finally, one of the main questions that has dogged all three of the models discussed in the last section is the question of what these models are meant to measure. D’Altroy was explicit in his goals; he sought to measure the degree of control that the Inka empire held over its subject states and provinces.8 Schreiber was less clear. Her “imperial mosaic” metaphor suggests that the Wari Empire administered different areas in different ways and thus also implies that the level of imperial control varied in different parts of the empire. Liverani’s (1984, 1988) network model does not focus on the degree of control an empire held over space but rather the lack thereof. In fact, Liverani argued that the Assyrian Empire held tight territorial control only over specific corridors and presumably the sites they linked. The emphasis is therefore on what might be termed network links and network nodes. But perhaps more importantly, this model mandates the existence of “negative space” around and between these networks where imperial control was negligible or non-existent. The point of the three approaches discussed above is therefore to gauge, describe, or somehow assess the degree of control an empire held over its subject territories. This, of course, raises three important issues. First, there is no

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clear definition of what we mean when we use the term control in reference to imperial systems (Sinopoli 2001). Second, the literature is not clear on what exactly it is that imperial authorities aspire to control. And third, there is no clear discussion of how we might measure imperial control in the archaeological or historical records. To investigate these issues, I follow the important work of Michael Mann. In his book The Sources of Social Power (1986), Mann argues that societies are not unitary homogeneous phenomena but are instead made up of socially constructed overlapping webs of social power. In this study, I borrow from and build on Mann’s work by focusing on the pathways by which imperial authorities infiltrate subject societies. In neurological terminology, a pathway may be defined as a line of communication between neurons along which a nerve impulses travel. This definition closely captures the meaning I intend here. By using this term in reference to imperial power, I define pathways as the conduits through which imperial power is disseminated and Indigenous reaction is reverberated. I assert here that pathways of dissemination and reverberation can be broken down into four overarching categories: political, ideological, social, and economic (cf. Mann 1986). I further assert that it is through these pathways that various levels of control are achieved. I use this platform to address the following issues: Issue 1: A definition of “control.” Generally speaking, most scholars would agree that control can be defined as “to influence, manipulate, or direct.” This fits well with what we can observe in the archaeological and historical records. As organizations whose goal is to integrate and exploit diverse sociopolitical entities and natural landscapes, empires assert control by influencing, manipulating, or directing events and processes that take place in subject territories. Issue 2: What imperial authorities aspire to control. By looking again at the archaeological and historical records, we can now use the above definition to address the second issue. It can be conclusively shown that empires intervene in political events and processes in subject territories, and thus one pathway to control is through the influence, manipulation, or direction of political institutions, events, and processes. This type of intervention often relies on the use or the threat of force, and thus political pathways are inextricably intertwined with military power (Parker 2001, Sinopoli 2001; Parker 2015). Empires might also seek to infiltrate subject or potential subject societies through ideological means. This might be as benign as integrating local deities into an imperial pantheon or as invasive as disseminating imperial ideologies through ritual performances or religious

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propaganda or even by appropriating sacred spaces (Quave and Covey 2015; Williams and Nash 2016; Williams, Nash, and Chacaltana, this volume). Imperial integration, especially as an empire moves into a consolidation phase, also means that empires attempt to assert social control. Some forms of social control, such as limiting or filtering regional mobility, could be considered subtle and may have had little effect on the day-to-day lives of imperial subjects. But others, such as deportation and resettlement, for example, can be viewed as efforts to completely reorganize social systems. Finally, although integration is a key component of imperial systems, exploitation is equally, if not more, important. Thus, the literature on ancient empires suggests that there is widespread agreement among scholars that empires seek to influence, manipulate, or direct economic events and processes in subject territories. Issue 3: Measuring imperial control. By clearly defining the parameters of our terms and then breaking them down into specific categories, we are in a much better position to define methodologies for measuring the degree of control an empire holds over its subject territories. It is my position that measuring the degree of control can best be achieved by considering the pathways that empires use to influence, manipulate, or direct events and processes in subject territories (Figure 9.1). Viewed from this perspective, it is not too difficult to envision four pathways by which empires can assert control over subject territories: political, ideological, social, and economic. Pathways of Power Imperial authorities assert political control either through the use or threat of military force; establish ideological control by appropriating local belief systems and disseminating imperial ideologies; impose social control by coercing local elites and manipulating conquered peoples; and impose economic control through taxation, tribute, trade regulation, and the direct extraction of wealth or resources (Figure 9.1). Political Pathways Examples of empires establishing political control through military action and the subsequent annexation and administration of conquered territory are ubiquitous in the literature. In his contribution to this volume, Smith, for example, suggests that Egypt’s initial expansion into Nubia may have been motivated by its need to

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Figure 9.1. Pathways of power. Produced by Bradley J. Parker and R. Jensen.

defend against this powerful neighbor and secure its southern frontier. However, it is clear that political control was also established by other means. Alconini (this volume) argues that the Inka co-opted local Kallawaya elites, inserted them into the provincial administration, and charged them with overseeing local production on behalf of the empire. She also shows that the Inka not only used local elites to further the imperial cause, but that they did so through existing systems of power relations. The political pathway to power and the interconnectedness of military and diplomatic means of coercion are further exemplified by Alconini when she states that “although conquest and expansion were often achieved through the deployment of military force and coercion, diplomatic efforts to culturally integrate the natives were also vital” (p. 95). Ideological Pathways In their comparison of Wari and Tiwanaku expansion, Williams, Nash, and Chacaltana (this volume) show that the Tiwanaku polity did not invest heavily in state-sponsored infrastructure or the projection of military might. Instead,

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Tiwanaku elites relied on ideological pathways to draw provincial populations (and their resources) into the religious system that emanated from the state’s core in the southern Titicaca Basin. Failing to engage political, social, and some aspects of economic pathways thus limited Tiwanaku’s ability to influence, manipulate, or direct neighboring polities. This may account for why Tiwanaku lacked many of the attributes that are characteristic of ancient empires. Janusek summarizes this situation by saying that power relationships in the Tiwanaku polity “were fostered less by elite heavy-handedness then they were by negotiated local acceptance, fostered by a prestigious state culture, a compelling worldview, and a chance at worldly success or spiritual redemption” (Janusek 2008, 246). The importance of ideological pathways as a mechanism for imperial infiltration of local belief systems is also exemplified by the Wari use of “rituals of incorporation” (Williams and Nash 2016) to further their imperial goals. Williams, Nash, and Chacaltana (this volume) show that Wari imperial repertoires included, for example, taking “imperial ownership” of local religious practice by co-opting particularly important ritual spaces (such a sacred mountains). A similar phenomenon has been discussed by Covey (2006c, 192) with regard to the Inka conquest of the Titicaca region. Social Pathways Yao (this volume) highlights the fact that several prominent scholars have argued that the so-called Great Wall of China was not completed by the rulers of the Han Empire to keep nomads from raiding the Han interior but rather to keep Han civilians from fleeing to avoid their tax obligations (Lattimore 1988; Waldron 1992). Similarly, Düring (this volume) suggests that many of the changes visible in the north Syrian landscape during the Middle Assyrian Period can be attributed to social engineering in the form of mass deportation and resettlement and the development and implementation of new agricultural systems (also see Reculeau 2015). Social pathways may also include less obvious changes to the social fabric such as alliances (Liverani 2017) and diplomatic marriages (Bauer and Covey 2002; Covey 2006c; Shibata 2015). Economic Pathways Many scholars assert that perhaps the most common and pervasive characteristic of empire is that such polities are exploitative. In fact, Liverani has gone as

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far as to say that empire is “the apex of all forms of exploitation” (Liverani 1979, 297; also see Liverani 2017). The extractive nature of imperial systems has been showcased for the Assyrian Empire, the Inka Empire, and the Aztec Empire, among others.9 Although scholars of the Aztec Empire continue to debate the relationship between Aztec expansion and economic reorganization, most agree that tribute demands imposed by the Aztecs likely caused increased production and specialization in tributary societies (Brumfiel 1980, 1991b; Smith and Berdan 1996). In her contribution to the current volume, Overholtzer documents such an increase in economic specialization and hypothesizes that this may be the result of tribute demands imposed upon local populations as Aztec elites spread their influence across the Basin of Mexico. With the above discussion in mind, one step that can be immediately taken is to modify D’Altroy’s (1992) territorial/hegemonic continuum to reflect these more specific pathways of power. Furthermore, if we measure each pathway independently, we might bring ourselves closer to understanding how imperial control was achieved. Figure 9.2 attempts to illustrate this modification by dividing the single line in D’Atroy’s original model that was meant to represent the degree of control an empire held over its subject territories into four lines that denote the degree of political control, the degree of ideological control, the degree of social control, and the degree of economic control an empire might hold over its subject territories. The intention here is, of course, to begin to tease apart terms, ideas, and even whole models that, although instrumental in past analyses, have since constrained the ways in which we conceptualize ancient empires. The main step forward offered by this relatively simple modification is that it defines what was an elusive concept—the degree of control—by breaking it into four pathways that are potentially measurable. That is to say, it is much easier to envision if, how, and to what degree an empire influenced the political, ideological, social, or economic order of a specific region than it is to simply ask how much “control” an empire held over an area. Furthermore, when these categories are considered separate and independent avenues of investigation, they can be used to highlight the variability and uniqueness of specific imperial encounters. One might, for example, find textual data to indicate that political control was achieved by militarily deposing local authorities and replacing them with a provincial administration (see also Parker 2001, 206–12). By utilizing political pathways, this gives imperial administrators a high degree of political control and may also give them more direct access to economic pathways (Figure 9.3a).

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Figure 9.2. Modified version of the territorial-hegemonic continuum. Produced by Bradley J. Parker and R. Jensen.

At the same time, however, archaeological data might indicate that at least initially, the empire held very little influence over Indigenous society and religious practice. In other words, imperial authorities had yet to exploit social and ideological pathways. If similar data from subsequent phases were available, one might be able to show an increase or decrease in ideological, economic, or social integration through time (e.g., Parker 2001, 212–22). Such a situation might be contrasted, for example, with a different area where an Indigenous governmental organization was co-opted by imperial authorities via political pathways (e.g., Parker 2001, 89–97; see Figure 9.3b). In such a scenario, the level of political control that imperial authorities wielded may be indirectly relying on diplomacy and the threat of force rather than the use of force. Imperial control may therefore be less invasive than in an area under the direct administration

Figure 9.3. The modified territorial-hegemonic continuum applied. Produced by Bradley J. Parker and R. Jensen.

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of provincial authorities. Furthermore, ideological and social control in such a scenario is likely to be completely ceded to local authorities, since ideological and social pathways would likely be channeled through local elites (e.g., Parker 2001, 93). At the same time however, archaeological and textual data may show that imperial authorities place emphasis on economic pathways and thus retain a relatively high degree of economic control over, for example, local resources and interregional commerce (e.g., Parker 2001, 93–94). Re-modeling Empire I have already outlined some of the drawbacks of the standard models of ancient empires. Despite this, most scholars acknowledge that the territorial/­ hegemonic, mosaic, and network models all have very compelling components. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, these models are not mutually exclusive. This brings us to the goal of this chapter. Considering the three approaches to studying the implementation of empire outlined above—evaluating modes of governance, modeling the applications of imperial power, and investigating the pathways of power—let us now consider re-modeling the theory of ancient empires. I will begin this process by refining the stages of imperial development. Sinopoli (1994) envisioned imperial development as occurring in three broad stages—expansion, consolidation, and collapse. For many years, this paradigm has been the standard temporal lens through which scholars view imperial polities and has thus served as a useful starting point for considering how ancient empires changed through time. However, as I argued above, this rubric tends to conflate imperial encounters by grouping what are surely extremely complex situations in very broad developmental categories (cf. Overholtzer this volume; S. T. Smith this volume). Looking at episodes of imperial expansion, for example, we can distinguish a number of subphases, including, at the very least, a phase of initial, or primary, expansion and a phase of secondary expansion. 10 Primary expansion can be defined as initial annexation or conquest and was often characterized by asymmetrical alliances underwritten by the threat of force and/or ideologically charged military campaigns. Secondary expansion can be defined as smaller-scale local operations meant to capitalize on primary expansion by solidifying political control over Indigenous centers and their hinterlands. It is clear from all cases examined as part of this study that primary expansion

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Figure 9.4. Schematic model of primary and secondary imperial expansion. Produced by Bradley J. Parker and R. Jensen.

took place along existing regional corridors (Parker 2001; M. L. Smith 2005; Covey 2006c; Yao this volume) and thus, the network model appears to be integral to this stage of imperial development. In the case of the Assyrian Empire, for example, existing regional corridors facilitated the movement of military forces and became avenues for royal campaigns (Liverani 1992; Kessler 1997). In the case of the Wari and Inka empires, routes that were probably only trails connecting various ecozones or river valleys became critical links between imperial centers and for this reason served as corridors for further expansion (Schreiber 1987; Hyslop 1990, 1991; Williams, Nash, and Chacaltana this volume). Figure 9.4 attempts to illustrate a similar hypothetical scenario. As an expanding empire advances along an established regional corridor (Figure 9.4a), it encounters a local center or hard point, which it overwhelms (via political pathways such as coercion or military means) and occupies (Figure 9.4b). Regional corridors are distinguished by the fact that they link distinct areas, environmental zones, or polities. Regional corridors thus cross and interconnect what might

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otherwise be considered distinct zones or territories. Indigenous hard points can be envisioned as centers that exhibit some degree of political complexity and for this reason hold dominion over a local population and its means of production (Schreiber 1987, 1992). From a conquered local hard point, an empire can impose some degree of territorial control over the immediate hinterland of the center while at the same time using it as a station from which to protect and monitor traffic on the regional corridor that links that center to the imperial core. The presence of imperial forces and administrators, the construction of imperial infrastructure, rituals and propaganda venerating the empire or synchronizing local belief systems with imperial ones, and expeditions into the local environs aid in the spread of hegemonic control over the site’s hinterland (Figure 9.4c). The imperial forces then continue along established corridors further into the periphery, leaving the conquered hard point in the rear of the imperial advance (Figure 9.4d). However, the initial political expansion that is illustrated in the annals of the Assyrian kings or in colonial chronicles about the Inka, for example, does not make an empire (Liverani 1992; Covey 2006c; Parker 2015). And it is here that we can perhaps distinguish between a predatory state and an emerging empire. My point is that once the military apparatus responsible for initial annexation or conquest moves on, without effort put into lower intensity local expansion, direct and indirect power wane. Beyond the celebrated royal campaigns there are a myriad of political, social, and economic intrigues that are carried out by lesser officers and bureaucrats in the name of the empire (Parker 2009; Alconini, Düring, and Boozer, this volume). This, of course, includes military action, diplomatic intrigue, threats, pressure, negotiations, and accommodations, most of which are opaque to archaeologists and historians. 11 Figure 9.4e attempts to illustrate this phase of expansion, what I call “secondary expansion.” As an empire moves into a secondary expansion phase, what was formerly an Indigenous hard point is converted into a network hub. A network hub is defined by the fact that it links regional networks to local networks and is thus the gateway for the local exploitation of subject territories by an imperial core (see Yao this volume). From network hubs, local networks consisting of roads and trails linking subcenters, villages, and hamlets to local centers are usurped and converted into secondary corridors (Hyslop 1990; S. T. Smith 2005). Secondary corridors are utilized by imperial authorities to access local labor and resources. Local subcenters and their dependent settlements can be taken by force, or they can be coerced to enter into a treaty or alliance with the empire (Figure 9.4f). Political,

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ideological, social, and economic pathways are used to access and exploit local wealth, labor, and resources and integrate them into the regional imperial network. This process strengthens the empire’s grip on these domains, intensifying imperial intervention and spreading both territorial and hegemonic rule. At the same time, local groups or individuals may manipulate political, ideological, social, and economic pathways to influence the outcome of the imperial encounter (Doyle 1986; Aron 2005; Tyson 2014; Boozer, this volume). Network hubs therefore act both as nodes from which imperial authorities access local labor and resources and as centers for the dissemination of imperial ideology (Liverani 1979, 2017). In addition, network hubs also serve as valves through which Indigenous actors may find opportunities to participate in, and in some cases shape, the local implementation of imperialism (Scott 1985; Covey 2006c; Tyson 2014; S. T. Smith, this volume). In expansionist phases, infrastructure investment usually focuses on network hubs—provincial capitals, fortified towns, and road stations—along transportation and communication corridors. In many cases, what had been local centers (hard points) are either destroyed or colonized. One way in which Inka colonization is exhibited archaeologically, for example, is by the construction of administrative or religious buildings in the imperial style at the heart of Indigenous centers (Quave and Covey 2015). The initial stage of empire—the expansion stage—thus creates a polity that consists of a territorially controlled imperial core at the center of a network of regional transportation and communication corridors connecting that core to network hubs that act as gateways to local political, ideological, social, and economic geographies that are subject to various levels of hegemonic influence (Hyslop 1990; S. T. Smith 2005).12 In geographic terms, then, the nascent empire combines the network and the mosaic models.13 However, one thing to keep in mind here is that although the mosaic model is apt, using this metaphor can be deceptive. 14 Since patterns in a mosaic are created by aligning tiles of various shapes and/or colors in a tight pattern, the mosaic model implies that all territory within an empire is subject to some sort of imperial dominion, even if the type and intensity of that dominion varies. Although such a model may hold true for some parts of an empire during particular phases of its lifecycle, the model coming into focus in the current discussion is one in which the various tiles of the mosaic are distributed along regional and local networks and thus resemble beads on strings more than tiles in a mosaic (Figure 9.5a).15 Further phases of expansion both continue along primary network corridors

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Figure 9.5. The composite model of imperial expansion. Produced by Bradley J. Parker and R. Jensen.

and engage Indigenous hard points by converting them into network hubs. From these network hubs, secondary corridors radiating into the local periphery are exploited to access secondary centers and the local resources they control, while network fortifications serve to solidify the empires hold over primary and secondary network corridors (Figure 9.5b). Sinopoli (1994, 2001) recognizes that imperial conquest is in most cases followed by a period of consolidation. Following the pattern introduced above that attempts to find greater resolution in Sinopoli’s phases, I would suggest that consolidation is only part of the picture. In essence, imperial consolidation entails the conversion of what is essentially a military occupation to a provincial or vassal administration (Schreiber 1987). Consolidation is followed by what might be termed punctuated equilibrium. Most of the infrastructure construction, which may include renovations to imperial capitals, frontier fortifications, roads, bridges, aqueducts, and terraced

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fields (among other things (Williams, Nash, and Chacaltana, this volume), are likely to be undertaken as part of the imperial consolidation phase (Figure 9.5c). Consolidation can therefore be characterized by an effort to establish or increase the productive capacity of a conquered region (Düring, this volume). Within incorporated territories, a tense equilibrium takes hold in which the political, ideological, social, and economic mechanisms set up by an empire are made operational. Such systems are disrupted, or “punctuated,” by disturbances that can include natural or human phenomena such as drought or various forms of resistance or rebellion (Scott 1985; Collins and Manning 2016). Covey for example, has argued that the loss of local autonomy that resulted from alliances brokered by the Inka often led to rebellion that precipitated the invasion and eventual annexation of subject territories. In many cases, Inka hegemonic rule was therefore only the first phase in a process that ultimately led to direct territorial rule (Covey 2006c, 183; see also Radner 2016 for the Assyrian Empire and Waters 2016 for the Persian Empire). Empires that have passed through these phases should exhibit widespread manipulation of local and regional geographies (Schreiber 1987; Wilkinson et al. 2005; Covey 2006c; Düring 2015b). Deportation and resettlement (social pathways) may drastically alter local and regional settlement patterns (Düring, this volume), while investment in vulnerable infrastructure such as irrigation and agricultural systems (economic pathways) may alter local and regional landscapes (Wilkinson and Barbanes 2000; Wilkinson et al. 2005; Ur 2005; Ur and Osborne 2015). Furthermore, intensification of the production of particular products or staples and the monopolization of some modes of production may cause heightened specialization among imperial subjects (Brumfiel 1991b; Overholzer, this volume; Parker 2003). That this equilibrium is punctuated by resistance, rebellions, drought, flood, and myriad other disruptions is amply documented in the historical, ethnohistorical, and archaeological records. Liverani (1988, 86) characterized the spread of empire as the “thickening” of the imperial network. Interestingly, the data considered in preparation for this study tend both to support this general hypothesis and to carry it much further than originally described. Timothy Earle has argued that an iterative relationship exists between investment in travel and transportation infrastructure and regional sociopolitical integration (Earle 2009). The existence of a road system that links sites that exhibit imperial attributes and an imperial core shows not only that a geographically expansive system of interregional interaction

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emanated from an imperial core, but also that the region covered by such a system was, at some level, integrated into a coherent whole. Considering the above discussion, several things become clear. To begin with, imperial expansion and consolidation are shaped by existing and/or newly established or newly connected network corridors (Figure 9.5a). As predicted by Liverani, the network system does become denser as imperial authorities come to control or create primary network corridors and connect them with secondary network corridors (Figure 9.5b). However, the corridors themselves comprise only narrow bands of roadways or trails. Although both traffic passing along roads and the garrisons meant to protect them aid in the spread of territorial and hegemonic control (through political, ideological, social, and economic pathways) in the immediate environs of network corridors, what is important to the spread of empire is what the network connects. First and foremost, the network connects the imperial core to the network hubs, network fortifications, and secondary centers over which it holds dominion. Varying degrees of political, ideological, social, and economic control emanate not from the network corridors but from the network hubs, network fortifications, and secondary centers (Figure 9.5c). Thus, the supposition that imperial expansion is “not an extension of territory but a thickening of the network” (Liverani 1988, 87) is not entirely accurate. Indeed, the composite model illustrated in Figure 9.5 suggests that imperial hubs, fortifications, and secondary centers are literally strung together—and held together—by network corridors. But the “extension of territory,” that is, the increase of the amount of space over which an empire holds some form of dominion, radiates out from the network nodes, not from the network itself. Furthermore, in some areas, especially the areas within and directly around network nodes, imperial control may deeply penetrate local society. In other areas, such as those whose relationship to the empire is mediated through local elites, imperial control may be far less pervasive and may only follow specific pathways. Conclusion Identifying the archaeological reflections of social transformations that are precipitated by imperial encounters is one of the most enduring problems facing those studying ancient empires. The above discussion highlights several basic characteristics that help to explain this situation. First, empires are organizations that superimpose varied political, ideological, social, and/or economic

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patterns upon the myriad sociopolitical, cultural, and geographic landscapes they attempt to integrate. Second, imperial intervention may vary in method and intensity. And third, patterns of imperial integration are crafted for and conditioned by local circumstances. The archaeological signature of empire is therefore a palimpsest of local circumstances, imperial action, and Indigenous reaction. In this chapter I attempt to deal with the complexity of the imperial palimpsest not through theory only, but by merging theory and data to model—or in this case, to re-model—ancient empires. The downside of this or any type of theorizing that attempts to generalize about entities as intricate as ancient empires is, of course, the likelihood that such generalizations overlook specific details and local idiosyncrasies that give texture and nuance to the very histories we attempt to study. However, models are made to be tested, and like any construction, as more data and theory accumulate, even the best models have to be remodeled. Notes 1. It should also be noted that Alconini (this volume) asserts that “the success of the imperial program depended on how effective [the empire] was in articulating the aspirations and goals of disparate population segments” (p. 92). 2. Sinopoli (2001, 450) sums up this situation eloquently saying, “We must be wary of fixing our discussions of any empire at a specific point in time and taking that understanding as representative of the polity throughout its history.” 3. On the Inka, see Bauer and Covey 2002; D’Altroy 2002; Alconini 2004, 2005, 2008; Jennings and Alverez 2008; Earle and Jennings 2012; and Kolata 2013. On the Wari, see Schreiber 1987, 1992, 2001; Williams and Nash 2002; Schreiber 2005a; M. E. Smith and Schreiber 2006; Williams 2009; and Edwards and Schreiber 2014. On the Vigayanagara, see Sinopoli and Morrison 1995. On the Aztec, see Berdan et al. 1996; Smith 1996b, 2001; Smith and Montiel 2001; and Smith and Schreiber 2006. On the Assyrian, see Parker 2001, 2003; Matthews 2003; Wilkinson et al. 2005; Postgate 2010; Hermann 2011; Kühne 2015; and Thareani 2016. On the Persian empires, see Khatchadourian 2016. 4. Liverani recently utilized this term when he said, “An empire is organized as a mosaic of provinces” (Liverani 2017, 179). Interestingly, Liverani neither references Schreiber nor, like Schreiber, explains what he intends this metaphor to represent. 5. Earle and Jennings (2012, 210) defined the imperial mosaic as “a crazy quilt draped across ethnic divides, resource zones, and geographic barriers.”

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6. Pericentric views are intriguing for several reasons, but especially because they force us to think about empire in a different way. However, one can also understand why pericentric histories are not easy to find, since such an orientation might completely alter what have become codified views of an imperial polity. Imagine, for example, what an uproar a pericentric rewrite of Grayson’s famous chapters about the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Cambridge Ancient History (Grayson 1991a, 1991b, 1991c) might cause among Assyriologists! 7. In discussing interaction between intersecting cultural groups, Tomlinson (1999, 84) emphasizes the “interpretation, translation, mutation, adaptation and ‘indigenization’ as the receiving culture brings its own cultural resources to bear, in dialectical fashion, upon ‘cultural imports.’” 8. I later followed D’Altroy’s reasoning in The Mechanics of Empire (Parker 2001). 9. See especially Postgate (1974, 1979, 1989) for Assyria; D’Altroy and Earle (1985) and the studies in LeVine (1992) for the Inka; and Hassig (1985) and the studies in Hodge and Smith (1994) for the Aztecs. 10. It should also be noted that Covey (2006c) has convincingly argued that the formation of a consolidated imperial heartland is prerequisite to imperial expansion, and thus Sinopoli’s broad categories might be expanded to include heartland consolidation. 11. For a historical discussion of imperial accommodations, see especially White (1991); and see also Aron (2005) and Giersch (2001). 12. In discussing Inka expansion, Alan Covey (2006c, 194) remarks on this phenomenon by saying, “One result of these campaigns [of expansion] was the construction of a network of administrative sites along the imperial road system.” 13. In reference to the Egyptian occupation of Nubia, S. T. Smith (this volume) puts it this way: “The on-the-ground imperial reality . . . resulted in the kind of mosaic of control driven by administrative efficiencies and adaptation to local conditions seen in other imperial contexts where economic or geopolitical concerns were at the forefront” (p. 36). 14. This is further complicated by the fact that Schreiber (1992) did not go into any depth explaining this model. 15. In describing the Inka Empire, Monica Smith (2005, 839) put it like this: “When viewed as a series of network links, the Inka road system encompasses a large amount of empty space in the Andean region in which there were few resources or inhabitants. Rather than being uniform or homogenous, these links show that Inka state control was concentrated on nodes of population and economic activity as well as on the means of moving between them.” For further comparison, see S. T. Smith, this volume.

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Chapter Ten

Conclusions Anna L. Boozer and Bleda S. Düring

Introduction In this brief chapter, we integrate perspectives from our case studies, reflect on the relevance of a comparative agent-centered approach to ancient empires, and argue that our results contribute to the study of empires from all periods. We suggest that archaeologists have a key dataset for understanding empires, both ancient and modern, and that we need to start engaging in broader debates on imperialism. The contributions to this volume represent an initial step toward this eventual goal. In our introduction, we identified significant issues with past studies of ancient empires. In particular, we suggested that the enduring focus on elites, courts, and imperial institutions has often excluded the more complex and dynamic aspects of imperialism that occur on the ground and involve agents of diverse cultural backgrounds and social statuses. The study of ancient empires, particularly of those in the old world, has maintained its predominant focus on the macro scale, portraying them as homogeneous and static systems of domination. In an effort to conform to these established models of imperialism, scholars have often flattened their datasets and ignored the increasingly rich data obtained in recent archaeological and historical research in which regional heterogeneity and dynamic changes are paramount. Instead, this volume embraces a dynamic, bottom-up approach to the study of empires. While various scholars have used the bottom-up approach before (e.g., Schreiber 1987; Brumfield 1991; S. T. Smith 1995; Alconini 2004; Glatz 2009), this volume gathers global case studies together comparatively in order to take this approach in new directions. By bringing together these case studies into a single volume, it is possible to highlight how imperial on-the-ground realities 255

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differ regionally and change dynamically over time. Moreover, our commitment to examining the complex bottom-up/top-down processes, trajectories, strategies, and responses to empires opens new directions to scholarship. Rather than ignoring such data on ancient empires as epiphenomenal, we argue that it is only by analyzing the incongruous and dynamic processes and instantiations of imperialism that we can start to understand how empires were realized and reproduced. Further, we argue that our bottom-up, multiscalar, diachronic approach to empires has potential for also revealing new insights into modern empires. Our advocacy for a united study of imperial formations is new. Although the study of empires has become increasingly interdisciplinary in recent decades, among scholars of both ancient and recent empires the temporal divide has not been breached. The result is that ancient and modern empires have been explored in relative isolation from one another. We argue that we must draw ancient, colonial, and contemporary imperial formations together for a comprehensive understanding of empire. By combining advances across these temporal arenas, we escape the conceptual limits that we have placed upon ourselves by working in isolation. Archaeology is particularly well positioned to unite these disciplines because of its focus on diachronic change, its ability to recover developments ignored by textual sources, and its embrace of an inherently global perspective. This concluding chapter thus recounts the current strengths and weaknesses in the study of ancient and recent imperial formations, delineating what we might gain from uniting these two perspectives. It further argues how archaeology, and the contributions in this volume in particular, can contribute to future dialogues on imperial states. Finally, we suggest a way forward for a future dialogue about empires that embraces all eras of imperial existence. Agents and Empires We advocate for a bottom-up, agent-centered approach to ancient empires. In doing so, we follow in the footsteps of scholars working on colonial and postmedieval empires. In particular, scholars working in what has been labeled “the new imperial history” have embraced this approach for several decades. Likewise, various excellent archaeological studies in which empires are grounded in the agency and material realities of specific sites have been produced by scholars such as Stuart Tyson Smith, Claudia Glatz, and Sonia Alconini. What has been lacking so far, however, is a programmatic approach to empires both

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ancient and modern. Instead, most studies have been inspired by postmodern ideas, and they therefore lack theoretical coherence. Here we argue for an agent-centered approach in which imperial repertoires (e.g., agricultural intensification, export-oriented specialization, migration to a boom region) and imperial institutions (e.g., tax regimes, the army, temples) are (re)produced by people going about their daily activities. We regard imperial repertoires as technologies and institutions that facilitate, inform, and constrain the formulation and expression of imperial programs. The claim that empires are (re)produced through ordinary chores is not intended to downplay the brutal nature of empires, which is evident in imperial histories of all periods, but to argue that we need a holistic perspective on other types of imperial encounters in order to understand empires fully. Studies of violence in antiquity have taken on a life of their own in recent decades (e.g., Bryen 2013; Campbell 2014). Our approach provides a counterbalance to the perspectives that explore empires mainly through the lens of violence and oppression. The best illustration of how the actions of ordinary people may impact empires is provided in the work of James C. Scott (1985, 1998). Scott demonstrates that relatively minor subversive behavior—feet dragging, for example— can result in the collapse of mighty empires. From such examples, one can argue that the distinction between agency and micro histories on the one hand, and empires, on the other, is more superficial than real. Recent studies of colonial empires have generated increasingly nuanced and dynamic studies of empires through studies that include gender (Wilson 2011), race (Ballantyne 2010), sexuality (Levine 2003), and sovereignty (Dirks 2007), among other topics. These studies have demonstrated that as imperialism intertwines with everyday life, it is “simultaneously diffuse and tangible” (Stoler and McGranahan 2007, 26). Therefore, how empires are produced and reproduced through daily activities is of key relevance, and we need to investigate our case studies accordingly. Scholars of the new imperial history have achieved their innovative results by focusing on archival records rather than historical texts (Wilson 2006). The recent influx of archival material into the study of colonial and postcolonial empires has generated a bottom-up approach that is analogous to the contribution of recent archaeological data to the study of ancient empires. These new archival sources “catch historical actors off guard” (Cañizares-Esguerra 2001, 1) and enable historians to undermine the predominant imperial narrative, which is often mired in the rhetoric of imperial self-representation. While these new imperial history studies have opened research avenues of

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monumental importance, there are three major caveats to this type of scholarship. First, it relies heavily on the availability of detailed archival datasets. Such data are, of course, only available for some empires. Many empires—ancient and modern—cannot be investigated through archival data. Second, as a result of the incredibly rich data contained in archival sources, studies of modern imperialism have become increasingly compartmentalized. The constricted focus on highly specific topics such as gender, race, honor, etc. has detracted from comprehensive synchronic studies of empires on the one hand and the investigation of enduring imperial histories on the other. This has created a “forest for the trees” situation, in which we are sometimes at loss about the very nature of empires, including how they came to be, how they sustain themselves, and how they transform into subsequent formations. This brings us to the third caveat for new imperial history studies. The focus has been on recent colonial empires, which has further strengthened false dichotomies found in scholarship on empires, such as between “the west and the rest” and “ancient and modern.” The exclusive focus on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European colonial empires became such a profound issue that a recent SAR volume, Imperial Formations, critiqued the limiting assumption that European colonial empires could be viewed as representative forms of imperialism (Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue 2007). In order to embrace “the rest,” contributions to Imperial Formations included the Ottoman, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and other often-ignored recent imperial formations (see also Burbank and Cooper 2010; Bang and Bayly 2011, 5–8). What Imperial Formations ignored, however, was the longue durée of imperialism. Ancient empires were the precursors to subsequent forms of empire, including all the imperial formations included in the 2007 SAR volume. Modern empires learned and adapted former imperial repertoires in a form of bricolage to create new imperial formations, some of which became empires (e.g., Britain, Spain) while others retained only a partial suite of the repertoires required to fit the definition (e.g., Russia). In other words, both “the west and the rest” dichotomy and the ancient/modern dichotomy could be resolved by simply exploring the longue durée of imperial development, a task that archaeology is particularly well-suited to tackle. Structures and Empires The study of ancient empires has followed a remarkably different trajectory from that of modern colonial empires, in part because of the (perceived) lack

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of similarly detailed data sources. For ancient empires, the focus has been very much on imperial structures and elites. The development of taxonomies, in which different types of imperial power were presented as coherent packages with clearly distinct profiles, has been prominent. Complementary to such totalizing perspectives has been an investigation of how elites and courts created imperial cultures that were perceived largely as an overlay upon preexisting societies. In recent years, these foci in the study of ancient empires have become increasingly problematic, but there have been some recent positive developments in the study of ancient empires. Scholars of ancient empires have not shied away from investigating empires in their totality and from investigating imperial histories or even imperial trajectories in which one empire took over elements from another. In this volume, Williams et al. and Overholtzer explore these trajectories most explicitly, but all our contributors address them to some extent. We maintain that imperial origins, genealogies, and transformations are crucial for the investigation of empires both ancient and modern. Indeed, many empires that have shaped the world in recent centuries have appropriated and reworked imperial repertoires that in some cases have roots that reach back through millennia of history. Perhaps the clearest example of this endurance is China, in which imperial formations have characterized a significant part of history over the past two millennia and in which earlier imperial repertoires and infrastructure are constantly being reworked and appropriated. Thus we argue that imperial structures and long-term histories are just as important as the reconstruction of how empires are grounded in daily activities, gender, race, and sex. Indeed, they are complementary. In sum, we suggest that studies of ancient empires can contribute their holistic and diachronic take on empires. We contend that empire scholarship has become overly focused on one part of the spectrum—the elite—and this no doubt explains why the study of ancient empires has contributed little to the overarching study of empire. A good illustration of archaeology’s absence from empire studies is that the most successful book on ancient empires, a collection of historical and archaeological studies of empires across the globe (Alcock et al. 2001), is not even mentioned in an important recent synthesis of empires across time and space by Burbank and Cooper (2010). We argue that archaeology can best serve the study of empire by addressing the structural and long-term dimensions of empires and investigate imperial production and reproduction through daily activities.

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The Archaeology of Empires The game changer for empire studies more broadly, we argue, is archaeology. While they have not been regarded as such, archaeological datasets have the potential to inform us on the same types of issues that scholars working on the archival evidence of colonial empires have been investigating. Through archaeological data, we can address imperial impacts on themes such as gender, agency, ethnic identification, and labor commoditization, among other matters. Moreover, the material remains of the past provide access to people who are often missing in text-based accounts, including archival records. This ability to access “the people without history” is a unique strength of archaeological research. For example, in recent years, archaeologists have begun to close this gap between historical and ancient empires by focusing upon themes such as materiality (Khatchadourian 2016), performance (Coben 2006), ethnicity (S. T. Smith 2003), and entanglement (S. T. Smith 2014). Indeed, innovative archaeological studies dealing with agency in ancient empires and deconstructing the idea that these were homogeneous systems best understood from the elite and court perspective have been produced for some decades (Schreiber 1987; Parker 2001; S. T. Smith 2003; Alconini 2008; Glatz 2009). However, such studies were presented as isolated case studies and were published and read mainly by archaeological audiences. Only recently have comparative studies of empires from an archaeological perspective started to appear (Areshian 2013; Düring and Stek 2018). To date, none of these studies has explicitly sought to connect to the burgeoning field of studies on modern empires. A New Path Our advocacy for a united study of imperial formations is surprisingly novel. Although the study of empires has become increasingly interdisciplinary in recent decades, the temporal divide between ancient and more recent imperial formations has not been breached. The result is that ancient and modern empires have been explored in relative isolation from one another. We argue that we must draw ancient, colonial, and modern imperial formations together for a comprehensive understanding of empire. This volume takes a first step toward intertwining ancient and modern empires by demonstrating that ancient imperial formations, like modern ones, are variable and messy. The

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contributors to this volume demonstrate that it is important to examine agency among all imperial agents: top, bottom, and in-between (Alconini, Boozer, Düring, Smith, Yao, this volume). We further argue that empires have deep and complex histories that scholars must pay attention to in order to understand them (Williams et al., Overholtzer, this volume). What remains to be done is to unify ancient and modern imperial studies. We believe that by combining advances in both ancient and modern formations, we escape the conceptual limits that we have placed upon ourselves by working in isolation. Archaeology is particularly well positioned to breach the temporal divide because of its focus on diachronic change, its ability to recover developments and peoples ignored by textual sources, and its embrace of an inherently global perspective. We thus propose that the study of empires, ancient and modern, needs to be integrated in future scholarship. The new imperial history has undoubtedly paved the way for investigating how ordinary people were affected by and constituted empire. Archaeological data of empires both ancient and modern can substantially augment our access to people who are not represented or only marginally included in written sources but who are clearly crucial to empire. Here, for example, one can think about the considerable success archaeologists have had reconstructing recent conditions of slavery in the Americas (e.g., Orser 2004). We also suggest that it is time to resurrect big questions about empires. What are they? How do they originate? Why are they so pervasive in history? How do they use repertoires to control territories and people? In what ways are people induced to uphold imperial interests through their labor? The contributors to this volume further these agendas by suggesting that archaeologists draw out more complex narratives from their data and remain attentive of the various agents involved in imperialism. They also demonstrate how imperial aims are achieved in daily encounters over a long period of time. This approach has been influenced to some extent by scholarship upon recent empires, but the contributions in this volume go even further. For example, recent scholarship usually casts imperial agents as disruptive and aggressive, with conquered peoples portrayed as hapless victims. By contrast, our analyses suggest that empires can only succeed if they manage to incentivize a sufficient proportion of people to participate in the imperial project. Yao, along with other contributors to this volume (e.g., Düring, Boozer), argues that marginal people with poor prospects in life are offered the chance

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to better their economic and social standing in society by partaking in imperial programs, such as the agricultural colonization of new frontiers. Beyond manipulating self-interests, empires typically rely on new types of subjects, who embrace the imperial project and identify with it. Confusingly, these mutually beneficial practices usually coincide with brutal policies of plunder and even the genocide of other people often living nearby. Thus, while we do not romanticize imperialism, we do suggest that it is important to further explore participation as a key ingredient to imperial creation and reproduction. Conquered people should also be understood as fully actualized agents who are capable of forging their own pathways to success within imperial formations and contributing to the imperial project. Outlook We conclude by suggesting a new path forward for the study of empire. This path includes ancient and modern empires and colonial and tributary formations by historians and archaeologists, and it should address the following three goals. First, we need to map out the intricate relationships between the “people without history” and the empire as a whole. While studies on modern empires have demonstrated how empires have impacted people in myriad ways, reshaping their corporalities, sexualities, and ethnicities, the reverse—how these people in turn shape or undo imperial economies and power—has been less researched. The papers in this volume demonstrate that empires look very different on the ground than when analyzed at the macro scale. In imperial provinces and peripheries, realities are highly varied and imperial predominance is often precarious. In order to explain these seemingly incongruous and dynamic imperial realities, we need to map out the various categories of agents and how they operate in particular historical, cultural, and geographical contexts, and how sufficient people were incentivized to align their activities with the interests of the empire. Boozer, Düring, Smith, and Yao, among other contributors, provide examples of the type of research that furthers our understanding of the various agents involved in the imperial project. Second, we suggest that imperial repertoires have great longevity and are constantly appropriated and reworked over centuries or even millennia. As we explained in the introduction, we define imperial repertoires as the building blocks of imperialism, borrowing from foundational theories on the “sources of

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social power” (Mann 1986) and the “repertoires of rule” (Burbank and Cooper 2010). Pre-imperial, imperial, and post-imperial states develop various repertoires that may or may not belong to an empire per se but can be adopted in an imperial project, and they may end up in post-imperial contexts that continue to be shaped by imperial antecedents. Imperial repertoires are constantly transformed and recombined in new arrangements, sometimes after long periods of political fragmentation, in order to suit the needs of changing circumstances. To map out such transformations and genealogies, we need a longue durée investigation of imperial developments. An added advantage of this longue durée approach to empires is that it draws modern studies of colonial empires out of a predominantly Eurocentric view of empires. Europeans developed their own imperial repertoires and agendas using a bricolage of past imperial formations that were based, at their deepest origins, upon non-­European empires. Williams and Overholtzer, among other contributors, explore this long durée process of imperial formations, providing a blueprint of how it can be done for other empires. Third, we suggest that a dialogue needs to take place between those studying ancient empires and those studying modern ones. To date, scholars from both sides of the imperial divide have been unduly fixated on concepts of imperial exceptionalism, to the detriment of a thorough understanding of imperialism. Edward Said once argued that each empire claims to be unlike all others and that this discourse of exceptionalism is part of their discursive apparatus (Said 1979, xxi). We as scholars have fallen into the trap that these empires have set for us, carrying the banner of exceptionalism into our own scholarship to the detriment of empire studies more broadly. Recent empires are not an entirely different creation than ancient ones, although industrialism and capitalism have profoundly transformed the reach and nature of modern imperial repertoires. Instead of continuing to assert that ancient and recent empires are exceptional and distinct from one another, we should come to accept that imperial formations carry broad similarities across time and space. As the studies in this volume demonstrate, not only do subsequent imperial formations learn from former ones, they also appropriate and reconfigure past imperial formations and infrastructures. The studies in this volume ask more from scholars of recent empires while also drawing from advances in recent studies. In sum, we argue that archaeology is crucial for understanding how empires could arise in the first place, why some empires were more successful than others, and, as this volume demonstrates, how empires were constituted

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through the daily activities of people living across their dominions. That is not to say that historical and political approaches are irrelevant; we also require those perspectives to tell the full story of empire. But we argue that we must break apart the idea of monolithic empires spreading across territories. Instead, we must understand that empires are heterogenous and dynamic patchworks of imperial configurations resulting from synergies between the empire and local agents that enabled empires to come into existence, thrive, falter, and transform into something new. We end this volume with a call to unite studies of ancient and modern imperial formations in future studies so that we can more fully trace out these imperial lives and afterlives.

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Contributors Sonia Alconini Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia Anna L. Boozer Department of History, Baruch College, and the Anthropology Program, the Graduate Center, City University of New York Sofia Chacaltana Faculty of Humanities, Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Lima, and Department of Anthropology, Field Museum Bleda S. Düring Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University Donna Nash Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Greensboro Lisa Overholtzer Department of Anthropology, McGill University Bradley J. Parker Department of History, University of Utah Stuart Tyson Smith Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara Patrick Ryan Williams Department of Anthropology, Field Museum Alice Yao Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago

317

Index aqllakuna, 96–7 agency, 3, 6, 10–11, 12, 14, 17, 25, 28–29, 90–92, 114, 236, 256–57, 260–61 agrarian infrastructure, 208–10, 105, 111 agriculture, 66, 96, 105, 123–24, 139, 150, 152–53, 156, 210, 212, 222–23 Alconini, Sonia, 9, 14, 231, 240, 256 Amara West, 31, 37, 39, 44, 49–50 Amarna Age, 163 Amheida (Roman Trimithis). See Trimithis assimilation, 23, 26, 28, 34–36, 48, 52, 143, 218, 220–21, 226 Askut, 30, 44–47, 52 Assur, 145, 148, 151–52 Augustan Threshold, 5, 32, 146 Aztec Empire, 8, 18, 95, 102, 167–70, 171–72, 180–81, 186, 190, 195–96, 242

chronology, 131, 168, 184, 190–91, 193, 195 colonialism, 23, 62, 65, 186–87, 194 colonization, 5, 15, 21, 24, 29, 32, 38, 113, 161–62, 220, 225, 248, 262 control, 2, 8, 14, 16–17, 21, 23, 25–29, 33–38, 44, 47, 63–69, 72, 75, 81, 85, 90–93, 95, 99, 109, 112–13, 115, 119, 121–22, 129, 132, 137, 140, 142–43, 145, 148–49, 150–52, 155–58, 160, 168, 172, 175–76, 199, 219, 231, 233–35, 237–39, 240, 242–43, 247–49, 251, 261 community, 7, 14, 39, 48, 72, 82–3, 218–19, 226 composite model, 249, 251 craft production, 96, 101, 179 Dakhleh Oasis, 124, 126–27 D’Altroy, Terrence, 2, 8, 10, 32–33, 34, 39, 90, 91, 93, 95, 96, 102, 103, 116, 118, 124, 149, 158, 190, 230, 231, 232, 235, 237, 242 Deir el-Haggar, 128 deportees, 151–52, 160–61 “disembedded” imperial centers, 92 direct control, 21, 37–8, 91, 233–34 domestic, 13, 44–47, 52, 65, 70, 73, 76, 80, 82, 84, 127, 135, 184, 195, 202, 207, 213–14, 216, 220 Doyle, Michael, 5, 89–90, 146, 167, 230, 237, 248 Dunnu estates, 152–53 Dur-Katlimmu, 153, 155–56, 159 dwelling, 58–59

beads on strings, 248 Beichuan River, 75–76, 78 Bernbeck, Reinhard, 147–48, 234 Bible, 147 Blemmyes, 128–29, 134, 141 borderlands, 23, 27–28, 115–17, 122, 132, 142–43, 203, 205 border work, 58–59, 61–62, 65, 68, 72, 75, 82–83, 84, 86 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 29, 53, 91 bricolage, 258, 263 burials, 13, 23, 39–44, 46–52, 79, 83–85, 101, 135, 163, 184–86; husband-wife, 81–84 burukh, 70, 72–73, 75, 86

Eastern Desert (of Egypt), 16, 130–36, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141 Egyptianization, 13, 21, 25–26, 36, 38–39, 52–53, 113, 119 elites, 2, 4, 7, 15, 41, 60, 91–92, 97–8, 104, 110–12, 122–23, 125, 132, 138, 142,

canal, 67, 70, 103, 105, 108, 110, 152–53, 204, 208, 210, 219, 222 ceramic production, 213–14, 224 Chao Cuo, 60–62, 83, 85–86 319

320Index

147, 153, 158–64, 168–70, 174–75, 178, 193–94, 197, 203, 207–8, 216, 219, 221–22, 224, 234, 236, 239–42, 245, 251, 255, 259 empire(s): as elite affairs, 2; chains of, 6, 8, 17; conquest empires, 5; culture of, 162, 182; definitions of, 89, 115, 145, 218, 230; elusive, 17–18, 176, 179, 197; history of, 117, 168, 170, 180–81, 195, 232; lives and afterlives, 17–18, 227, 264; network, xvi, 9, 38, 68, 78, 90, 98, 147–48, 150, 164, 210, 223, 235–36, 237, 245–51; primary, 90; successor, 6, 20, 57, 59, 145; trajectories of, 4, 6, 10–11, 15, 17, 256, 259 emplacement, 63, 87 entanglement, 2–3, 24–25, 27–28, 39, 47, 50, 53, 119, 126, 142, 260 ethnicity, 47, 50, 217, 231, 260 Fadrus, 41, 48, 52 Fales, Mario, 147–48, 154, 158 farmer-colonists, 159, 219 finance (staple/wealth), 15, 32–34, 98, 103, 111, 123–24, 138–39, 158 fortress , 29, 33, 39, 46, 69, 138, 140 funerary, 14, 39–40, 42–44, 48, 53, 61, 65, 79–81, 84–85, 127, 141, 159, 226 Gansu Province, 66–67 Gender, 1, 14, 50, 65, 81–83, 126, 141, 257–60 Giddens, Anthony, 10 Giricano, 150 Glatz, Claudia, 2, 8–9, 235, 255–56, 60 grand strategy, 118–22, 157 Han, 14, 57–87, 241; Western and Eastern Han Dynasty, 60, 66–67, 75, 77, 79–81, 83–84 Hanshu (Book of Han), 67 Hexi corridor, 66–67, 75 Hillat el-Arab, 25, 47–48, 52

historiography, 168, 170–71, 194 houguan, bu, and sui (system of companies, platoons, stations), 63 Hurrian, 161 hybridity, 25, 29, 48, 52–54, 142 ideal types, 229 ideology, 9, 24, 26, 34, 47–48, 54, 63, 118, 122, 150, 203, 206–7, 231, 248 IEMP model, 9, 90, 234, 238, 263 Ikhen Gol, 69 imperial: agents, 5, 11, 15–16, 52, 86, 115, 117, 119, 121–22, 124, 129, 132, 134–35, 137–38, 140, 141–43, 157–61, 169–70, 179, 231, 261; architecture, 111, 113, 174; complexity, 230–32; diversity, 143, 231; formation, 6, 117, 167–73, 180–83, 187–8, 190, 194, 196–98; incentives, 5, 12, 14, 16, 61, 153, 156, 161–3, 164–5; integration, 117, 186, 220, 239, 252; mosaic, 10, 235, 237, 252; origins, 167–70, 173, 182, 186, 188, 194–96, 259; pottery/ceramics, 107, 111, 113, 163, 201, 214, 223–24; power, xvi, 1, 4, 9, 90–92, 95, 102, 147, 188, 195, 233–36, 245; repertoires, 4–6, 9, 11, 15, 17, 19–20, 115–17, 122–23, 137, 142–43, 145–46, 151, 168, 175, 202, 213, 234, 241; taxonomies, 8–10, 259; threshold, 5, 17, 32, 146, 150, 164, 197 Inka: provinces, 226; “Seven Cuzcos,” 92; split-inheritance-system, 95; Tawantinsuyu, 93 Inkanization, 13, 95, 112–13, 119 Inkas-by-privilege, 95 Jakob, Stefan, 152, 154–56, 159–60, 163 Jincheng (commandery), 67–68 Juyan (district of), 59, 64, 67–71, 75–78, 82–83, 85, 87 Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, 156 Kallawaya ethnicity, 105–6

Index

Kayue culture, 67, 76, 79–80 Kerma, 23, 25–26, 29–31, 33, 38, 42, 46, 48, 50 Khara-koto fortress, 67, 69, 87 Kharga Oasis, 124 kings lists, 189 Land of Mari, 159 landscape, 5, 18, 29, 38, 53, 59, 66, 70–71, 85, 87, 91, 108, 111, 132, 134, 137–39, 155, 202–3, 206–10, 212–13, 220–23, 226, 230, 232, 241 Liverani, Mario, 9, 34–36, 90, 92, 115–16, 122, 124, 132, 142, 1447, 149, 158, 161, 230, 235–37, 241–42, 246–8, 250–22 locality, 62–64, 83, 85–86, 87 longue durée, 84, 117, 122, 137, 140, 258, 263 Longxi (Commandery), 59, 66–69, 75, 78, 84 Luttwak, Edward, 8, 91, 118, 120, 122, 149, 233, 235 Mann, Michael, 5, 9, 90, 234, 238, 263 market consumption, 96, 130, 176–79, 187 Matney, Timothy, xvi, 151 memory, 53, 168, 172, 194 migrants, 12–13, 15–16, 57, 59, 65–66, 68, 77, 83, 85–86, 153, 160–61, 164 mining, 14, 30–31, 37, 96, 132–33, 137, 139, 208, 212. See also quarrying mitmaqkuna, 15, 96, 99, 105; colonies, 15, 96 Mittani, 145, 148 mobility, 64–65, 83, 85–86, 207, 239 modeling, xvi–ii, 229–30, 245 modes of governance, xvi, 8, 233–4, 245 Muderbeljin ruin, 71 Münkler, Wilfried, 146 new imperial history, 1–2, 16, 57, 61, 96, 218, 256–58, 261

321

network, xvi, 9, 38, 68, 78, 90, 129, 147–48, 150, 164, 235–37, 245–46, 248–51, 253; hub, 236, 247–49, 251; links, 237, 251 nodes, 237, 251 othostats, 147, 153 Pachacuti ruler, 93 Parker, Bradley, v, xiv-xvii, 1–2, 5, 7–10, 12, 19, 23, 28, 36, 38, 58–59, 90–91, 117–18, 122, 147–51, 154–56, 158–60, 162, 218, 229–32, 234–36, 238, 240, 242–47, 249–50, 252–53, 260 participant, 14, 53, 115, 153, 164 pathways, 5, 18, 238–39, 240–43, 245, 251, 262; economic, 5, 234, 241–43, 250–51; ideological, 5, 234, 240–42, 251; political, 5, 234, 238–39, 242–43, 246, 251; to power, 18, 239; social, 5, 234, 241–42, 251 pericentric, 90, 114, 237, 253 Petosiris, tomb of, 126–27 political economy, 34, 110, 202, 208, 213, 224–25 Postgate, Nicholas, 145, 148–49, 151, 157–62, 230, 252–53 power: economic, 193, 202, 208, 227; hegemonic, 8, 52, 91; ideological, 9, 202, 206, 221, 227; territorial, 8 practice theory, 28–29 prestige goods, 212–13, 218–19, 221, 223 Qiang tribe, 66–68 Qijia culture, 76 quarrying, 30, 132, 134, 212–13. See also mining religious architecture, 206–7, 221–22 roads, 18, 95, 98, 104–5, 109–10, 132, 134–35, 140, 153, 208–9, 222, 226, 236, 248, 250, 253

322Index

Roman: Egypt, 116, 119, 126; Empire, 6, 8, 117–18, 120–21, 125, 129–30, 142, 146, 233 Romanization, 13, 113, 118–20, 127, 136, 143 royal panaca families, 93, 95 Saiming (frontier citizen), 13, 85 Sancisi-Weerdenburg, Helen, 17 Schreiber, Katarina, 2, 10, 23, 36, 89–90, 199, 205, 207, 209, 212, 219, 230–32, 235, 237, 246–47, 249–50, 252–53, 255, 260 Scott, James C., 6, 248, 250, 257 settlement patterns, 75, 98–100, 211, 218–19, 225–26, 250 Shangsunjia site, 78–85 siluhlu, 161 Sinopoli, Carla, 146, 168, 230–33, 238, 245, 249, 252 Smith, Stuart Tyson, 2, 5, 7, 9–10, 12–4, 21–34, 36–52, 54, 62, 102, 111, 19, 124, 126, 132, 142, 163, 173, 202, 213, 231, 239, 245, 247–48, 253, 255–26, 260–62 social engineering, 4, 11–12, 14–15, 155, 241 Soleb, 31, 37, 41, 49 Southeastern Inka Frontier, 98, 101 subaltern, 1, 5, 16, 146, 164 Suteans, 160 Taojia site, 79, 81–82, 84–85 Tati, 71, 73, 75 taxation, 16, 18, 102, 124, 129, 146, 149, 161, 175, 239 Tell Chuera, 154–55, 159–60, 162

Tenochtitlan, 170, 172, 174, 176–78, 184, 188–96, 198 Tepanecs, 172–73, 183, 186, 188, 193–97 Terrenato, Nicola, 3, 119, 159 territorial-hegemonic continuum, 10, 90, 235, 242–43 theatres of power, 92 Tiglath-Pileser III, 145 Tiwanaku, 6, 18–19, 96, 109, 199–227, 240–41 Tombos (Taroy), 25, 31, 33, 37, 39–52 transportation, 89–90, 96, 115, 129, 134, 140–41, 156–58, 223, 235–36, 248, 250 Trimithis, 125. See also Amheida Tupac Inca Yupanqui, 93, 105–6 tyranny of the text, 3 Wari, xvii, 6, 10, 18–19, 23, 27, 96–97, 199–227, 233, 235, 237, 240–41, 246, 252 Western Desert (of Egypt), 16, 123–24, 130, 132, 135, 137–41 Xaltocan, 173, 177, 182–83, 186, 188, 191, 193, 196, 198 Xiongnu tribe, 60, 66–68, 79 Yampara ethnicity, 98–99, 101, 112 yanakuna, 96–97 Zhangye (Commandery), 66–67, 79 Zimansky, Paul, 162, 237 Ziyaret Tepe, 150–51