Three - On Archaeopolitics

Summary

Perhaps no other part of the ancient world has seen such a lengthy discourse about the fundamental nature of its political organisation, nor seen judgements vary so widely. Practical considerations offer some explanation for the lack of agreement, since both material and textual avenues have suffered from slow and uneven accumulations of reliable data. The difficulty of fieldwork in what are often remote and densely forested regions – where elementary archaeological procedures have long been arduous, time-consuming, and expensive – means that it has taken a good while to fully grasp the physical parameters of the problem. Equally, deciphering the script has proved to be a project of daunting complexity, in which the partial data teased out in one generation have often cast into a different light when a fuller picture emerged in the next. As a result, injections of fresh information, from either domain, have frequently not so much modified existing understandings as sent them careening in new directions.