The Regeneration of Complex Societies
Publication Year: 2010
Bennet Bronson, Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase, Christina A. Conlee, Lisa Cooper, Timothy S. Hare, Alan L. Kolata, Marilyn A. Masson, Gordon F. McEwan, Ellen Morris, Ian Morris, Carlos Peraza Lope, Kenny Sims, Miriam T. Stark, Jill A. Weber, Norman Yoffee
Published by: University of Arizona Press
Title Page, Copyright
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1. From Collapse to Regeneration
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In the 1960s and 1970s, comparative studies of early complex societies in anthropological archaeology focused overwhelmingly on the emergence of the first states and urban societies.1 Prime movers, primary states, and the earliest urban systems...
2. The Demise and Regeneration of Bronze Age Urban Centers in the Euphrates Valley of Syria
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In the Near East, the end of the third millennium BC was a tumultuous time characterized in many regions by the demise of state society or, at the very least, the increased fragmentation of urban polities that had once controlled large tracts of land...
3. Amorites, Onagers, and Social Reorganization in Middle Bronze Age Syria
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If societal collapse and regeneration occur as a result of the failure and reorganization of regional systems that structure networks of people and places, how are these processes manifested at individual communities within those systems...
4. “Lo, Nobles Lament, the Poor Rejoice”: State Formation in the Wake of Social Flux
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Within a comparative framework of early state societies, pharaonic Egypt stands out as one of the most stable, integrated, and long-lasting political entities of which we have record. Indeed, in the two millennia or so that constituted...
5. The Collapse and Regeneration of Complex Society in Greece, 1500–500 BC
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Greece between 1500 and 500 BC is one of the best-known cases of the collapse and regeneration of complex society. In the 1870s, Heinrich Schliemann showed that a Mycenaean (Late Bronze Age; see table 5.1) culture had preceded Greece’s Classical civilization...
6. Inca State Origins: Collapse and Regeneration in the Southern Peruvian Andes
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As a result of archaeological fieldwork of the past two decades in Cuzco, Peru, Inca origins can now be viewed from a perspective significantly different from the traditional ethnohistoric analyses of the postconquest Spanish chronicles...
7. Regeneration as Transformation: Postcollapse Society in Nasca, Peru
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The Wari empire was probably the first true imperial power in the Andes, and its expansion, consolidation, and ultimate collapse profoundly changed the nature of power and political organization in many areas that were part of its dominion...
8. After State Collapse: How Tumilaca Communities Developed in the Upper Moquegua Valley, Peru
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The peak of centralization and political power in the Moquegua Valley occurred circa AD 800, when the Wari state controlled the upper valley and the Tiwanaku state, the middle valley. Following the withdrawal of Tiwanaku (ca. ad 950) and...
9. Patterns of Political Regeneration in Southeast and East Asia
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In the archaeologically visible history of Asia, there are numerous declines, apparent and real, and several patterns of regeneration. These may be divided into patterns of the false, stimulus, and template type. There would seem to be two kinds of false regeneration...
10. From Funan to Angkor: Collapse and Regeneration in Ancient Cambodia
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The cyclical quality of ancient states (Adams 1988; Feinman 1998; Marcus 1998; Yoffee 1988b) is abundantly evident in mainland Southeast Asia, where multiple and overlapping histories of collapse and regeneration characterized the region from the first millennium...
11. Framing the Maya Collapse: Continuity, Discontinuity, Method, and Practice in the Classic to Postclassic Southern Maya Lowlands
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Despite substantial new research on both the Classic (AD 250–900) and the Postclassic (AD 900–1542 ) period Maya, views of the Classic Maya collapse and of the changes that took place in the subsequent Postclassic period are very little changed...
12. Postclassic Maya Society Regenerated at Mayapán
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Most prior studies of collapse in the Maya area focus on the abandonment, decline, and transformation of Late or Terminal Classic period polities, which suffered far more permanent and damaging regional-scale demographic consequences...
13. Before and After Collapse: Reflections on the Regeneration of Social Complexity
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This book addresses an extraordinarily complicated sociohistorical phenomenon: the regeneration of cultural complexity in the aftermath of state collapse. The case studies presented here graphically demonstrate the highly variable nature of this process...
14. Notes on Regeneration
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It’s been eighteen years since the anno mirabile of 1988, when Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies and George Cowgill’s and my edited volume, The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, appeared. These studies have resonated in archaeological theory...
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About the Editors
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About the Contributors
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Page Count: 336
Publication Year: 2010