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Political Economy in the Archaeology of Emergent Complexity: a Synthesis of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches

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Abstract

Political economy approaches have been criticized for their focus on top-down processes with insufficient attention to non-elite agency. Here, we expand archaeological applications of political economy by integrating a bottom-up perspective on the construction of social power, drawing mainly from collective action theory and anarchist theory. An array of interacting agents, diverse interests, and decentralized powers exists in non-state societies. Social segments with countervailing interests and strategies confront, limit, and co-opt elite power. These countervailing forces are fundamental to political economies in these societies, and focusing on them illustrates the ways in which social power and cooperation actually work as differing interests and objectives exist in perpetual tension. The significance of these bottom-up forces is illustrated with synthetic summaries of three historically independent, long-term archaeological sequences—Northwest Coast hunter-gatherer-fisher societies (case 1), Early Neolithic expansions into Europe (case 2), and the Island Southeast Asia and Pacific region (case 3). We draw together relevant theoretical threads to conceptualize how dialectical relationships exist among a diversity of social interests that stem from the material conditions that structure labor and resource flows.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology ‘Dialogues with the Past’ for giving us the opportunity to bring together and discuss our different, yet compatible perspectives on Political Economy at a workshop in Athens, in April 2017, where the idea to this article was born. There we profited from the interaction with David Wengrow, the engaged group of Graduate Students and the perfect organisation by the staff of the Norwegian Institute at Athens. We also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of JoAMT for their thoughtful guidance, which helped us improve our paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, P.O Box 1019, Blindern, N-0315, Oslo, Norway

    Martin Furholt

  2. Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA

    Colin Grier

  3. CBAP, School of Archaeology and Anthropology College of Arts and Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Sir Roland Wilson Building, Bldg 120, Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia

    Matthew Spriggs

  4. Vanuatu Cultural Centre, PO Box 184, Port Vila, Vanuatu

    Matthew Spriggs

  5. Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, 1810 Hinman Avenue, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA

    Timothy Earle

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Correspondence to Martin Furholt.

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Furholt, M., Grier, C., Spriggs, M. et al. Political Economy in the Archaeology of Emergent Complexity: a Synthesis of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches. J Archaeol Method Theory 27, 157–191 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-019-09422-0

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