Abstract
Almost a century of systematic anthropological research on pastoral nomads has produced significant data and theory for understanding these mobile societies. Substantially less attention has been devoted to complex sociopolitical organization among pastoral nomadic groups and, in particular, to the large-scale polities referred to as nomadic confederations, states, or sometimes empires. This article reviews established ideas for how and why complex organization emerged among nomadic groups and then considers these ideas in the context of recent archaeological theory on statehood and new material evidence for pastoral nomadic prehistory. Revised conceptions of both the state and the nomad suggest that pastoral nomadic polities represent alternative forms of complex organization that were different from classic Old World states but still quite complex in unexpected ways. These organizational differences resulted from the mobile and flexible politics practiced among herding peoples and gave rise to regional polities based on spatial networking, distributed authority, and innovations in transport and exchange.
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Acknowledgments
I am greatly indebted to a number of colleagues who assisted with this article through conversations, comments, and guidance, and by sharing their own substantial knowledge of regional prehistory. Thanks are due to Maria Gatto, Daniel Rogers, Douglas Park, Claudia Chang, Chunag Amartuvshin, Holly Pittman, Chris Thorton, Cherie Woodworth, Jargalan Burentogtokh, William Gardner, Emma Hite, and Joyce Honeychurch. I also wish to thank Professor D. Tseveendorj, Director of the Institute of Archaeology, Mongolian Academy of Sciences, whose generous assistance has made my own research in Mongolia possible. Finally, comments by the seven anonymous reviewers were extremely insightful, and I appreciate their help in improving this study substantially.
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Honeychurch, W. Alternative Complexities: The Archaeology of Pastoral Nomadic States. J Archaeol Res 22, 277–326 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-014-9073-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-014-9073-9